Getting There The Hard Way

By RICHARD CORLISS

PERFORMER: MARY-CHAPIN CARPENTER

ALBUM: COME ON COME ON

LABEL: COLUMBIA

THE BOTTOM LINE: Her new set is like a house by a cool Southern stream: a grand place to spend the summer.

Country music, in case you city folk haven't noticed, is where pop music went to live. When rock 'n' roll settled into the bustling ghettos of white metal and black funk, country claimed the ears of the pop-music homeless -- those who like songs to mix catchy melodies with prickly home truths. By reaching people raised on '60s folk music and Beatles rock, country has become suburbanized. It's as much at home in malls and vans as it used to be in grange halls and pickups.

If she weren't writing and singing terrific songs that help define the new breadth of country music, Mary-Chapin Carpenter would be a member of its target market. An Ivy Leaguer (Brown) who grew up in exotic climes (Tokyo, Princeton) as the daughter of a publishing executive (Chapin Carpenter, a Life sachem), she played for tips in Washington clubs and made her first album, Hometown Girl, in 1987. The sound was clean and folky; the voice suggested Judy Collins after a long bus trip from Richmond to Baton Rouge. The album got airplay on college stations and public radio, but it wasn't until her record company began promoting her to country radio that Carpenter found a large audience for her pensive postlove songs. She didn't go country; country went her.

Carpenter, 34, is now a member of the country club; last week she was nominated for three Country Music Association awards. With her fourth album, Come On Come On, she displays a fully matured talent, her sure alto caressing a wide variety of musical settings (rock, blues, art song) for her lyrics. Carpenter's literary allusions have run from Eudora Welty to old Geritol commercials, but the usual subject of her songs is love -- old love, careless love. So what else is new? The range of feelings she mines. At its best, love is hard work, like a decent blue-collar job ("Everything we got, we got the hard way"). At its worst, it's the rest of our lives.

For Carpenter, love songs aren't mainly about passion, and love isn't only what you felt for the person you slept with until the night before last. It can be the memory of an elder sibling whose departure from home left the first big hole in a child's heart (Only a Dream), or the appeal of North Carolina's rural landscape seen as "a blur from the driver's side" (I Am a Town). Even her least typical hit -- Down at the Twist and Shout, the Cajun-ragin' Grammy winner from her 1990 album, Shooting Straight in the Dark -- is a tribute to a place that no longer exists (a dance hall in Bethesda, Maryland). The new album's title tune sounds like a come-on to a quick affair until you listen to the verse: a poignant flashback of first love, first loss. Carpenter writes elegies for lives gone sour and places sorely missed. In these songs, love is - what we used to be in.

It's also where we hope to go next. The nice girls adrift in Carpenter's earlier ballads (When She's Gone, Middle Ground) often have the single-white- female blues, and there's a fine one here: He Thinks He'll Keep Her, a sarcastic soft rocker about a perfect wife ("Everything runs right on time, years of practice and design/ Spit and polish 'til it shines") who walks out on her husband only to find herself ignored and abused in a menial job. But Carpenter surely knows that thirtysomething angst is just half the story; a woman is not only a victim. So she has peppered her new album with anthems to emotional resilience. In I Feel Lucky, reckless living ("I bought a pack of Camels, a burrito and a Barq's") pays off with quick millions and a dream night in a bar: "Lyle Lovett's right beside me with his hand upon my thigh."

Now that's country paradise. Carpenter lives there, and the rest of us should get a ticket and start packing.