Getting There The Hard Way

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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.