She doesn't wear a cowboy hat. She doesn't live in Nashville. She doesn't sing songs about truck-drivin' men and cheatin' hearts. No rhinestones, either.
So how come Mary-Chapin Carpenter is one of the hottest songwriters in country music today?"I'd like to think it's because I'm at the edge of country music," Carpenter said. "If country music weren't expanding, I wouldn't want any part of it."
For that matter, Carpenter doesn't like the "country" label, nor any of the stereotypes that go with it. To her, "Country music is a big umbrella with a lot underneath it, from Roseanne Cash to George Jones. I don't want to be tucked into any one category. I have to be looking for new things to write about, pushing my music in new directions."
One obvious example of that was her use of the Cajun band Beausoleil on her last album, "Shooting Straight in the Dark." The new directions also include non-traditional, some would say realistic, lyrical approaches to life, love and relationships.
Country purists shudder, labeling her too much rock 'n' roll and too little Nashville.
In fact, Carpenter seems the complete antithesis of a country singer-songwriter. She was born in Princeton, N.J., raised in a comfortable upper-middle class, two-parent home in Washington, D.C., and later educated at Brown University.
She lives and works in Virginia, and somewhere along the road found her way into Washington, D.C., folk clubs.
"It would be easy to say my greatest musical influence was Bob Dylan," she laughs. "But really it was my parents. They gave me the courage to get up and just try it."
Carpenter's first album, "Hometown Girl," was a typical first release by a folk musician wanting to spread her wings: Spare acoustic sounds, minimal production and a raw lyrical flavor that had "potential" written all over it.
Critics were encouraged, but none predicted the phenomenal success of "State of the Heart," the follow-up album, that logged four singles on the country charts and in 1989 earned her the Top New Female Artist award from the Academy of Country Music.
Her third album, "Shooting Straight in the Dark" (released late last year), was not the commercial success of "Heart," but it was the kind of album, lyrically and musically, that had critics falling all over themselves, comparing her with the likes of Tom Waits, John Hiatt and Nanci Griffith.
Carpenter downplays the comparisons, saying she is still cutting her musical teeth. "I recently played a show with Nanci Griffith and Roseanne Cash. I was so nervous I wanted to puke. They are icons to me. I was asking myself the whole time what I was doing there. It was incredible."
What makes Carpenter's music so different and so remarkable is her ability to write songs that people of virtually every musical taste can relate to. And she can address traditional "country" topics like heartbreak without resorting to cliches.
Most of her songs are intensely emotional and often personal. She once joked her songs are "autobiographical, but not about me." Yet she admits her own experiences are the catalyst for her music. And wearing her emotions on her musical sleeve is not an easy task.
But in the end, she writes music for herself. "I am saying something that means something to me, and hopefully it will mean something to someone else."
With some notable exceptions, she tends to write dark songs. When you're in love, she explains, "You're having too much fun to sit down and write about it." But when a relationship ends, the songs flow.
"Writing songs is really an ability within one's self," she said. "For some it is easy. For me it's not. Sometimes it's a horrible experience."
"Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes I am emotionally dyslexic. The hardest part is when it's not working and you force yourself to leave it alone and go wash the car and clear the cobwebs."
And along with the car wash, maybe she'll come up with another tune. "Sometimes writing music is like that."