Skip to Navigation Skip to Content

Endless Possibilities Ahead 

Help us create more transformative, artful experiences in your community!

Loading Events

About the Event

With hits like “Passionate Kisses,” “I Feel Lucky,” and “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her,” Mary Chapin Carpenter has won five Grammys® (with 16 nominations), two Country Music Association Awards, and two Academy of Country Music Awards. She is one of only 15 female members of the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. Over the course of her acclaimed career, Carpenter has sold more than 16 million records. In 2020, she recorded two albums: The Dirt And The Stars, released in August 2020, and One Night Lonely, recorded live without an audience at the legendary Filene Center at Wolf Trap in Virginia during the COVID-19 shutdown and nominated for the 2022 Grammy for Best Folk Album. 

Pitchfork has called Carpenter “one of country music’s most reliable and empathetic songwriters,” but early in her career, Rolling Stone noted that she was an “unlikely country star,” saying, “An Ivy League graduate (of Brown University) who counts Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell among her chief musical influences, Carpenter played coffeehouses in the Washington, D.C., area, and has always emphasized lyrical substance over image.” The New York Times describes her music as “an unclassifiable hybrid of pop, folk and country that she performs in the low, steady voice of someone confiding her thoughts in a journal,” adding, “Carpenter’s near-contralto is a calm, womanly voice that conveys a very grown-up mixture of resignation and perseverance. It is a voice made to engage in hushed heart-to-heart all-night conversations about things that really matter.” 

Of The Dirt And The Stars—produced by Ethan Johns (Ray LaMontagne, Paul McCartney, Kings of Leon) and recorded entirely live at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios in Bath, England—Carpenter quotes the writer Margaret Renkl. “‘We are all in the process of becoming.’ That doesn’t stop at a certain age,” Carpenter says. “To be always a student of art and music and life, as she says, that, to me, is what makes life worth living. The songs are very personal and they’re difficult in some ways—and definitely come from places of pain and self-illumination, but also places of joy, discovery, and the rewards of self- knowledge. They arrived from looking outward as much as inward, speaking to life changes, growing older, politics, compassion, #MeToo, heartbreak, empathy, the power of memory, time and place. There are many themes, but they all come back to that initial truth that we are all constantly ‘becoming’ through art and expression.” 

Leyla McCalla 

Leyla McCalla is a New York-born Haitian American living in New Orleans, who sings in French, Haitian Creole, and English and plays cello, tenor banjo, and guitar. Deeply influenced by traditional Creole, Cajun, and Haitian music, as well as by American jazz and folk, her music is at once fresh and soulful, while resonating across three centuries of history. In addition to her solo work, McCalla is a co-founder of Our Native Daughters (with Rhiannon Giddens, Allison Russell and Amythyst Kiah) and was formerly the cellist for the Carolina Chocolate Drops. McCalla’s current project, Breaking the Thermometer to Hide the Fever, is a multidisciplinary music, dance, and theatre work—commissioned by Duke Performances—exploring the legacy of Radio Haiti-Inter, Haiti’s first independent radio station to broadcast news in Haitian Kreyol, the voice of the people, until the assassination of the station’s founder, Jean Dominque. Her new album based on this theatre work and the stories she uncovered during its creation is available via ANTI Records. 

Masks Required

The tour rider for this artist requires that all audience members wear face masks for the duration of the performance.

Performing artists rely on touring for their livelihood, and it is important for them to do so safely. Thank you for supporting this request.

location

Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts | Virginia G. Piper Theater
7380 E 2nd St
Scottsdale, AZ 85251

View Map

masks required

The tour rider for this artist requires that all audience members wear face masks for the duration of the performance.

Performing artists rely on touring for their livelihood, and it is important for them to do so safely. Thank you for supporting this request.

media