Carlene Carter – Back in the fold
In 1993 she followed up with Little Love Letters, which was even more popular and produced several video and radio hits, including “I Love You ‘Cause I Want To”, “Every Little Thing” and “Unbreakable Heart”.
Two years later came what Carter considered at the time to be her best album, Little Acts Of Treason. The album didn’t live up to its two forebears commercially, probably because it is her darkest and most precise album. She maintains its strength as a work of art and was especially proud to have many of her immediate family members play on it.
Among its songs is “Change”, which Carter wrote about the moment she knew she had to get sober in the late 1980s:
Well I’m sittin’ in this room
With my cigarettes and wine
I’m out of all the other stuff
And now I’m runnin’ out of time.
She soon found that song to be much too relevant once again.
“I didn’t want to go but I had to,” she says, talking about the night she left Epstein. “The road we were on was so dark and scary and as it turned out, he didn’t survive it and I did.”
Carter pauses, folds her hands. Despite her penchant for telling stories, this one is a bit harder to get out. “I knew if I didn’t get out of there I was going to die. Not even from drugs, the way he died. Instead, I thought somebody was going to kill me, the people around us at that time….I was scared of them. I had to get out of there.”
Carter glances out the window, her face bathed in white light, but charges on. “I’m pretty tough. I’m not a fraidy cat at all, but these people…I knew it was going to end really badly. And I thought if I left, he’d leave there, too. But he didn’t. So I just left with nothing. With just my suitcase, and that’s it.”
She has been prompted to revisit that fateful night because she’s been talking about the haunting, piano-driven “Judgment Day”, which appears on Stronger. The song contains one of her most remarkable lyrics of imagery:
So I’m gonna lie on this floor in my black funeral dress
Grieve for the man who held my heart in his hands
And tomorrow I’m gonna get up and make my life shine
“That’s about the day I left the house and how hard that was, and it’s about when I got the call that he was gone. I had to go back and claim his body. It took me awhile, to realize it wasn’t my fault.” She takes a deep breath. “Yeah, that’s a heavy song.”
Stronger is an album made up of songs both heavy and joyous, both dark and light. Carlene thinks it’s most likely her best work to date. “It’s an album about love, loss, inspiration. Faith,” she says. “If people really listen to it, they’ll know my story.”
Stronger is also a record of catharsis, one in which Carter grieves her people and her old life while also celebrating her people and her new life. It is the culmination of a sort of modern-day story of Job, written after Carlene suffered the loss of four of the most important people in her world in a matter of one year. In 2003, she lost Epstein, her mother, her stepfather, and her sister.
All this shortly after she had sought recovery for her addiction to heroin. The world found out about her drug dependence when she and Epstein were busted for possession of 2.9 grams of black-tar heroin and paraphernalia in June 2001, a rock-bottom moment widely reported in the media.
Upon leaving Epstein, Carter called up MusiCares, an organization that caters to musicians in times of need, specializing in treating addictions. “They look after their own,” Carlene says. “I’ll always be indebted to them.”
Just as she got on her road to recovery, however, she received the news that Epstein had died, in February 2003. Devastated, she barely had time to grieve before the death of her mother in May, of Johnny Cash in September, and of her sister Rosey in October, from carbon monoxide poisoning.
“I was still reeling when Rosey passed away and that’s when I just went off the deep end,” she says, determined to not cry. “Rosey was such an inspiration to me.” She seems to laugh to keep from crying. “She was just wild as could be. People think I was wild, Lord!”
The two songs Carter picks as her best-written are both mostly about her sister: “Me And The Wildwood Rose” and the title track from her new album. “I miss all of them, of course. But Mama and Rosey…well, no matter what, as long as I can remember, it was always the three of us. But they’re in such a better place. Particularly Rosey. She’s sparkling now.”
“Stronger” is about Rosey, but also about all of her family who had recently died. “It was devastating to me,” she says. “I couldn’t believe that it kept happening, that I kept losing one after another. I used to sit and cry and say, ‘Why why why why why?’ I don’t want to get into the ‘poor me’ thing, but, well, it was tough.”
So tough that folks could barely blame her when she was jailed seven months after Rosey’s death for breaking her probation by failing a drug test. “I knew that I had to drink to get through all of that, when they all passed away,” she says. “And I did the cocaine, too. But I didn’t go back to the really bad stuff [heroin]. I’m so glad I don’t have to deal with that hassle anymore.”