"No, we haven't nude sunbathed yet."
Marshall Chapman has just jumped up from her kitchen table to take a quick check-in phone call from her husband, Chris Fletcher.
I'd asked her for an informal interview, the sort of scenario that would let me soak up the essence of the everyday Chapman experience without having to rely on my digital recorder. She'd quickly emailed back and invited me to join her in her regular ritual of stripping down and lying out in her fenced-in backyard.
But because I was distracted by other assignments, I hadn't responded right away.
"I thought I might have scared you off," she'd confessed.
Not a chance.
The thing was, when I got to her house, neither of us could muster the energy to head out back and de-clothe. Cramps were my excuse. Chapman's was sleep deprivation, thanks to fielding unexpectedly high demand for her new album and her time. She and Fletcher wrangle most of the business stuff themselves. The rest is in the hands of a publicist, a radio promoter and a social-media guru — the latter of whom, Chapman proudly notes, happens to be one of the biggest badasses on the Nashville Rollergirls roster.
By the time Chapman has revived us both with some homemade agua fresca, we've lost out on the good sunlight for the day. So we wind up taking a fully clothed two-mile stroll around her neighborhood instead, and agree to a raincheck on the bare-assed sunbathing — it is going to happen.
Strolling around, standing at a microphone or doing practically anything, Chapman rarely fails to make an impression. She's the self-styled Tall Girl — long-limbed, crowned with a shock of flaxen hair, buzzing with intensity and intellect — and telling true-life tall tales is her specialty.
Last year, I saw her play a show at The Station Inn clad in sweatpants, flip-flops and a string of pearls — the uniform of a well-bred wild thang — and the image stuck with me. Especially since she'd announced that night that she was going to call her next album Sexagenarian — because that's the proper term for someone who's in her 60s, which she is, and because it begins with "sex."
At some point, Chapman changed the title of her new album to Blaze of Glory, so named for the last of its 11 tracks. By the time you reach that song — a meditation on mortality, with languid, tropical undertones — you've been treated to a rich lexicon of desire, from Bo Diddley-fied flirtation to ardent jive-talk, slow-burning sensuality and boogieing come-ons, and for good measure a taste of whimsical mysticism.
I'd come to this interview with some burning questions: Why doesn't aging seem to cramp Chapman's style, the way Botox-pushing mass-cultural messages about womanhood say it should? And how it is that she's put in 40 years of songwriting, performing and recording in Nashville, seen countless next-big-things come and go, yet remained the most compelling personality in the room?
Chapman tells me that the album's getting a level of response she hasn't seen in years, decades even. I ask what the first sign was that things were different. She thinks for a moment before launching into a story about an email she sent to Elvis guitarist Scotty Moore while she was drugged up from a colonoscopy, even pulling it up on screen for me to read. I swear it actually includes this sentence: "As James Brown would say, I FEEL GOOD!" After that, she pitches Moore on giving her new album a listen and writing a promo blurb.
Until she received the reply — a "yes" — Chapman didn't remember doing it. She gives me a peek at the email containing his hearty endorsement; he more or less credits her with summoning the vitality of Sun Records in its '50s heyday, no slight praise coming from somebody who was there.
Moore makes a good point, but I have my own theory about what Chapman accomplishes on this album. For the first several songs, she sounds giddy, girlish, womanly and experienced all at once, squealing and moaning over this guy, letting herself get caught up in the undignified ecstasy of a crush, at her age.
The product of South Carolina high society, she's long made art and entertainment out of rejecting the script of genteel Southern womanhood, as she puts it, walking the line between funk and elegance. And she's still at it, refusing to lop off that part of herself that revels in feeling and expressing pleasure. You know, the part we so admire in the young.
They say that a lady never reveals her age. Bullshit. Chapman owns hers, in a way I find powerfully inspiring. She jokes about what gravity's doing to her body and savors the fact that she's survived that uniquely masculine myth, live fast and die young.
"I'm not afraid to die," she says to me on our walk, paraphrasing a new song that serves as her answer to The Louvin Brothers' scare-'em-out-of-hell number "Are You Afraid to Die?" "The only thing I'm afraid of is not living."
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