February 26, 2009 |
Carl Hoover, Tribune-Herald entertainment editor
Life doesn’t fit into neat boxes for singer-songwriter Carrie Newcomer, and neither does her music.
Newcomer, who performs in Waco tonight for a Meals on Wheels benefit, writes songs about the magic contained in everyday life, the extraordinary in the ordinary, and her pop-folk-rock tunes find equal acceptance among the secular and the spiritual in her audiences.
“I play in churches and I play in bars and I kinda don’t change my shows,” she said, speaking by phone during a recent layover at the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. “I don’t want to put the sacred in such a small container.”
Newcomer, 50, is in Waco this week to speak to Baylor University students about faith and vocation, and her career shows how small decisions and moments can add up to a life’s direction.
Public school music programs in her hometown of Elkhart, Ind., planted the seed of music, she remembered. “You try that one thing and your heart goes, ‘Yes,’ ” she said.
It wasn’t until after her college days at Goshen College and Purdue University in the late 1970s, where she majored in Arts and Education, that she began to think about writing and performing. Years of performing at coffeehouses, restaurants and bars in the Midwest followed before she joined the folk group Stone Soup, with whom she performed from 1982 to 1988.
Newcomer left to go solo in 1990 and began to win national attention, particularly after touring Europe with contemporary bluegrass band Alison Krauss and Union Station in the early 1990s. She has written and recorded 11 CDs since then on her current label, Rounder Records, and her song “I Should Have Known Better” appears on Nickel Creek’s CD This Side. Folkwax magazine named her latest CD, The Geography of Light, the best album of 2008.
Her observation of life’s meaningful details in a noisy, hectic world as well as her writing collaborations with fellow Quaker authors Parker Palmer and Scott Russell Sanders have made her an increasingly popular choice for colleges and organizations fielding workshops on vocation, spirituality, service and activism.
Radio and television may not have much room for her thoughtful music, but that doesn’t mean Newcomer lacks for audiences. “There is a rumbling out there. People are looking for music with meaning and I encounter that wherever I go,” she said.
Newcomer freely admits she doesn’t preach an answer, but prods listeners to think more about what’s around them.
“Where do you find meaning and good news in our daily lives? There aren’t a lot of answers out there, but there are some very good questions,” she said. “The glass is not half-empty and it’s not half-full, but it’s a really big glass.”