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Music With Many Currents
March 24th, 2008
by By Celeste Kennel-Shank Mennonite Weekly Review
CHICAGO — Carrie Newcomer sometimes takes well-known stories and tells them in the perspective of a character whose voice is not usually heard, or puts them in the current context.
In the song “Lazarus,” on her album Geography of Light, released in February, she imagines Lazarus’ experience after being resurrected by Christ in the story from the Gospel of John often told before Easter.
“The story of Lazarus has always kind of fascinated me,” Newcomer said before going on stage March 8 at the Old Town School of Folk Music. “It’s really kind of a crisis of faith in some ways.
“Here’s someone who doesn’t feel like he belongs anywhere.”
The Lazarus of Newcomer’s song is in transition between “the peace of the grave,” the lyrics say, and a return to earthly life.
“A lot of us have been in a time period where we didn’t feel comfortable with this world.”
With songs such as “Lazarus,” Newcomer’s music doesn’t fit easily into categories.
“You wouldn’t find my music in the Contemporary Christian bin,” she said. “It also has a more spiritual component than a lot of the albums in the secular bin.
“I play [concert] series that are played in bars, and I play in churches, and I don’t change my show.”
Newcomer seeks to balance the sacred and secular, and similarly, art and activism.
Newcomer grew up in Elkhart, Ind., and attended nearby Goshen College for two years. Her father has Mennonite roots and she is now Quaker, having first encountered that peace church tradition while in Costa Rica with Goshen College’s Study-Service Term. While at Goshen, she appreciated finding others concerned about peace and justice.
“I was really attracted to the social justice component,” she said. “I really came to value the community.”
Newcomer considers herself an activist as well as a folk singer. She is tithing with her album, in a way, donating 10 percent of the proceeds to American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker development organization.
Newcomer performed for the first time in November at the School of the Americas Vigil, an annual event remembering victims of actions committed in recent decades and currently by Latin American soldiers trained at a U.S. military school in Georgia.
Newcomer was encouraged by the number of young people who came. “The next wave is showing up and they’re pretty glorious,” she said.
While themes of faith and activism run through her work, Newcomer’s goal is to create quality music. “You can’t substitute the art for the message,” she said. “It has to be art first.”
Newcomer differentiates her music from many popular singer-songwriters by expanding from the usual subject matter of romantic relationships, she said. “I also wanted to write about spiritual relationships, family relationships, community relationships, political relationships,” she said. “All these currents run through my art because they run through my life.”
Creating music, recording and touring, Newcomer draws strength from family, which includes a husband and daughter, as well as her community in Bloomington, Ind.
She is also rooted in a sense of being at home in Indiana. “I have a really Midwestern voice,” she said. “There is a powerful voice that comes out of the Midwest. We speak the truth, and we speak it powerfully, but with a real good-heartedness.”
Being Midwestern is authentic to Newcomer in her art and in her life, she said. “I’m a nice Midwestern lady at heart,” she said. “I’m the lady who brings the casserole when someone’s sick.”
Touring the Midwest and the rest of the U.S., Newcomer has been encouraged by response to her new album, her 11th on Rounder Records. “Folks are so generous with me,” she said. One fan will tell her a particular song was comforting in a time of grief, while another will say a song made her 3-year-old child dance.
Touring builds new energy, but it can also be draining, she said. Before concerts, Newcomer finds a quiet space to sing, breathe and listen to silence. “The winds of the music business blow pretty hard,” she said. “You really have to center yourself or it will buffet you around.”
On stage, Newcomer reflects out to the audience some of the light that falls on her, from golden accents of her jacket, the yellow wood of her guitar and glints in her red hair. After her opening song at the Old Town School of Folk Music, she swept her arm out over the audience and asked where community happens. “I’ve come to expect it in the most unexpected places,” she said.