Mary Chapin Carpenter, Julie Fowlis & Karine Polwart, Edinburgh review: 'inspired'

An Evening with Mary Chapin Carpenter, Julie Fowlis & Karine Polwart, Festival Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★★★

There was much humanity as well as environmental affinity in this inspired collaboration between the esteemed American singer-songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter and two well established Scottish artists, Julie Fowlis and Karine Polwart. An expertly responsive quartet of Rob Burger on keyboards, percussionist Chris Vatalaro, bassist Euan Burton and Polwart’s guitarist brother Stephen allowed the singers’ lyrics to come over strikingly clearly.

Their repertoire was based around but by no means confined to their album Looking for the Thread, opening with Fowlis’s traditional Gaelic lament, Gràdh Geal Mo Chridhe, its cadences of yearning hanging over a drone before the trio’s vocal harmonies meshed together, as they did effectively throughout the evening. Carpenter followed with another album song, her beaty anthem of burden-sharing, A Heart that Never Closes.

Polwart’s striking Rebecca transcended the scars left on trees and people, while an old Carpenter favourite was the doggedly optimistic tread of the accordion-backed Traveller’s Prayer. Polwart’s deeply moving Hold Everything, meanwhile, was indeed a showstopper, seething with open-armed empathy.

A wonderful trio of science-informed songs, described drolly by Polwart as “the geek set”, opened with Fowlis’s Silver in the Blue evoking the miracle of migrating salmon; Polwart’s You Know Where You Are also referenced celestial navigation, in this case of a tiny migrating bird, while Carpenter’s “love song to a zombie spaceship”, Satellite, extended empathy even to wandering space hardware.

An encore had Fowlis and Polwart leading the beguiling Lost Words Blessing from the Spell Songs project in which they’re involved, before Carpenter’s titular Looking for the Thread – “that ties us all together” – shone a winsome, questing light to close the concert’s beacon of humanity in an increasingly unkind world.

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