A Woman's Wit and Heart

By RICHARD CORLISS

Chapin country is a pretty, melancholy place; sadness hides behind the lace curtains. It's on the borderline between love and loss, where a lover's rancor is so delicately phrased that it sounds like sisterly advice. Everyone is tyrannized by memories -- of a lonely childhood, of words said and chances missed, of a first love whose sweetness makes everything that follows seem both tame and tawdry. Around here, folks smile to keep from screaming.

The setting created by the songs of Mary Chapin Carpenter is more haunting than your typical country-singer territory. Yet that's her landscape, and Carpenter looks fetching in it. Three years running, she has won a Grammy for wrapping her dusky alto around, respectively, Down at the Twist and Shout, I Feel Lucky and Passionate Kisses. She could easily make it four with her current single, the slow-rockin', Bonnie Raitt-ish Shut Up and Kiss Me, in which a take-charge woman whispers those five magic words to a too-well- behaved beau.

There are other impish moments on Carpenter's new album, Stones in the Road, but this is a seductively pensive set. It works the dark corners, where troubled souls spend lonely evenings. Because Carpenter enunciates clearly and even uses whence properly, she seems an English teacher's dream student; at school she'd be the quiet girl, scribbling in her diary, who wins the Sylvia Plath Prize for the most achingly sensitive poem. Even her anthems (the up- tempo House of Cards and Jubilee) have the feel of requiems. The title song chides the middle class for its double-entry morality: "We pencil in, we cancel out, we crave the corner suite,/ We kiss your ass, we make you hold, we doctor the receipt." John Doe No. 24 is the poignant testament of a blind, deaf boy found on an Illinois street in 1945. And he's not the only lonely one. In Chapin Country, we're all displaced persons.

The new CD has few tunes that will grab an AM-dial twirler by the ear. But there's music aplenty in Carpenter's voice, in the emotional precision of her words, in the world she weaves. Take Where Time Stands Still, which will get no radio play but sounds like a piano-bar classic about the haven of love. Years from now, some chanteuse with wise eyes and a whiskey voice will be singing that "Memory plays tricks on us,/ The more we cling, the less we trust,/ And the less we trust the more we hurt,/ And as time goes by it just gets worse." Then the guy at the end of the bar will nod in assent and wonder why they don't write feelings like that any more.

In a music business that relentlessly merchandises machismo, there has to be room for a woman's wit and heart. It's our good luck that Mary Chapin Carpenter has made that place a room of her own.