Mary Chapin Carpenter offers a snapshot of her life on her latest release, the critically acclaimed The Age of Miracles, which she calls a personal exploration of regret and resilience. Written during and after her recovery from a life-threatening pulmonary embolism, Carpenter looked inward to try to answer the unavoidable question of “What Now?” The outcome is a collection of songs that blends personal tales of discovery and experience with more distant and imagined stories of one’s purpose and relationship to the universe.
 
The Age of Miracles is the twelfth studio album from five-time Grammy award-winning Carpenter, including one Grammy-winning and two Grammy-nominated albums. By combining folk, country, acoustic, rock and blues, Carpenter has proven herself to be an artist for whom the conventional boundaries of the music business disappear; she has always professed a love for all kinds of music, and those influences come together in songs that speak to the most personal of life’s details as well as to the most universal.
 
Carpenter was born in Princeton, N.J. in 1958 and lived in Japan from 1969 to 1971 before moving to Washington, D.C. Carpenter’s early musical loves included The Mamas & the Papas, Woody Guthrie, The Beatles and Judy Collins. Carpenter grew up playing the guitar and between college years at Brown University she would play local bars and clubs in the Washington, DC area.
 
After graduating from Brown in 1981, Carpenter continued playing and being a part of Washington’s music scene, where she met guitarist John Jennings, who would become her co- producer and long-time collaborator. Within a few years, she recorded a demo tape that led to a deal with Columbia Records where she spent nearly 20 years and sold over 13 million albums.
 
In 2006, Carpenter signed with Rounder Records and released her first album “The Calling” in 2007. It garnered her her 15th Grammy nomination. She also released a holiday album for Rounder in 2008, “Come Darkness, Come Light”.

Recently, Carpenter was honored with The Americana Association’s esteemed “Spirit of Americana Free Speech in Music Award”, which recognizes artists who have used their work to raise awareness and promote free speech. Past recipients include Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Judy Collins and Joan Baez, among others.

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