Carlene Carter photo courtesy of Yep Roc Records.
Joe is a veteran of the Broadway, television and studied singing at the Juilliard School of Music. The same school Carlene’s mother, June wanted Carlene to study piano. He appeared with Carlene and her cousin Lorrie Carter Bennett in the 2005 Nashville musical Wildwood Flowers" The show was about the lives and careers of Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters. Carlene played her mother, June.
"I was happy playing Mama. It felt good. I was challenged, because it was really emotional. But it had a lot to do with me wanting to come back to music again."
Strengthened by the encouragement, songs began to pour out of Carlene. "Judgment Day" grieves for lost love, and "To Change Your Heart" has a folkie, wistful quality, but most of the rest of the songs on Stronger sound like celebrations. "On to You" is sly and sexy. "Why Be Blue" is catchy and sunny. Even the heartache lyrics of "The Bitter End" and "Break My Little Heart in Two" are delivered amid punchy, crackling rhythm tracks. She dusted off her wry 1980 tune "I’m So Cool" for the new project to give it one more irresistible rocker.
The one performance that stares directly into the enormity of her 2003 losses is the title track "Stronger." Its lyrics are an elegy for Rosey, and Carlene says that they came with some difficulty.
Carlene Carter's 2008 CD, Stronger. Photo courtesy of Yep Roc Records.
"It’s the story about how I felt after Rosey died. It actually came because of the combination of all of those losses that year. I knew I had a song in me about it, but I couldn’t quite get there. It was too painful. I was in such grief over everything. That song really helped me to heal a whole lot. When I started writing it, I was able to put into words how I felt about Rosey. The chorus being about survival is because I could never figure out why I was still here, as hard as I ran."
Long known as a Nashville "wild child," Carlene Carter is the daughter of June and honky-tonk king Carl Smith. As a youngster, she embarked on a series of ricochet romances, musical experiments and headline-grabbing escapades that made her one of the most colorful characters in the country-rock pantheon. A stint living in swinging London resulted in marriage to rock star Nick Lowe and to her acclaimed 1980 album Musical Shapes. It was the forerunner of a sound that Nashville would take to heart in the 1990s, but when it was released, the LP was way ahead of its time. A testament to the quality of the music that Carlene Carter made during this era is the fact that all of her early albums remain in print today.
