A Quote by Mary Chapin Carpenter

So I came home and I had a resume and everything, but the only job experience I had was just playing in bars and clubs on my summers off. So, I was temping and stuff during the day and playing music at night.
I didn't start really playing the guitar till I was about seventeen, and I never really had those formative years are where like I was in my room, figuring all that stuff out before I hit the stage. I just did all that on the road all at once, so all those years of playing roadhouses in bars and clubs, I was really figuring it out.
There was a piano in my house, and my brother had taken lessons when I was a kid. I don't remember this, but my mom told me she came home one day and I had learned everything he had studied for a year, and I was playing it on the piano.
I wasn't playing the music, the music was playing me... and once that went away, and I had the feeling I was playing music, I had to stop. The need to go onstage and get my brain flattened every night left me, and what I didn't wanna do is go onstage and perpetrate a fraud... You cannot fool an audience.
Playing music for as long as I had been playing music and then getting a shot at making a record and at having an audience and stuff, it's just like an untamed force... a different kind of energy.
I didn't want to go out at night and spend my money in bars and stuff like that, so when I came home at night, I just wanted to entertain myself.
I had an affinity for music and could play anything I heard on the piano, but I wasn't scholastically advanced in any way. It was more of a habitual tendency. I would work on weekends at piano bars playing jazz when I was an art student, but the music wasn't mine - it was covers: everything from Radiohead to really old jazz. But other than that, the only training I had was piano lessons from when I was nine until I was eleven.
There is... a greater sense of divine purpose when we're playing at all-Christian rock shows. In clubs or bars, we know that the audience primarily came to see a show, so we try not to get preachy and instead let the music do most of the talking.
My father was an aspiring country singer and songwriter. He just didn't get that off that ground. I was afraid, very tentative to do anything with music for years. I didn't tell him I was playing in bands when I was away from home, because it had been such an unpleasant experience and a letdown for him.
Everything I do, I'm always playing music. When I wake up in the morning, I'm playing music. When I'm showering, I've got music playing. When I go to the field, music is playing.
I was trying to become a legitimate trumpet player, and I had a scholarship to Eastman School of Music. I was really on my way. But I didn't take the scholarship. I got sidetracked, because when summers came around, I started playing with a rock-and-roll band.
We have music playing at home, day and night.
I'm definitely an athlete who has a hobby playing music. I've been doing baseball since I was 5 or 6. It's the only thing I've ever thought of really my whole life, and music came into my life actually in '99, playing and singing. It's definitely been the only hobby I've had that I can't put down.
As much as only playing clubs can become tedious, performing in huge venues can also become off-putting. To go from one to the other feels great. And sometimes playing clubs can be even more stressful, because you really have to think about what you're going to tell the audience between songs.
I like to think that if it hadn't gone as well as it has, if I wasn't able to make a living off of playing music, I would still be playing the music. But, of course, I wouldn't likely have had the opportunity to travel, and a lot of the places have inspired songs.
I write a lot of more instrumental music than I do vocal music. It's because I come out of a background of playing piano and then playing sax for a number of years. I kind of got into rock backwards. A lot of guys go into rock and then get sick of it and then go into something else. I came the other way, so I've always just had a lot more stuff lying around.
I was actually the head of the violin after-school club. And then I was also the head of the dance club, the popping club. So one day, just by coincidence, we had to hold the two clubs at the same time. I had to go back and forth. And that's when the idea came up for dancing and playing violin at the same time.
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