Mackenzie Carpenter on her delightful, unique and comfortably familiar country success
For some artists, TikTok-assisted country acclaim allowed seemingly impossible dreams to come true.
However, Mackenzie Carpenter has a growing body of work that makes her TikTok success feel like it has simply hastened an inevitable outcome.
The Valory Music Co.-signed 23-year-old Belmont grad and 2023 CMT Next Women of Country class member is from a town of less than 150 residents 15 minutes Northeast of Athens, Georgia. Her father is a preacher and her mother developed shopping centers and trailer parks.
They passionately supported their Carpenter's country music dreams and, she told The Tennessean before making her Grand Ole Opry debut, they "wouldn't let [her] have another option for her."
Carpenter's life has progressed quickly.
"I'm engaged to be married, signed a record deal, am releasing an album and became a full-time resident of Nashville in the same year."
She only arrived on Tik Tok a month after the start of COVID-19's first lockdown in April 2020. This occurred not long after she helped her fellow Georgia-born Belmont classmate and current Big-Loud signed artist, Lily Rose, write her virally mega-successful track "Villain" (released to Tik Tok in December 2020).
Almost exactly two years later, Nashville music impresario -- and The Valory Music Co. imprint founder -- Scott Borchetta was singing her praises while discussing her signing to the imprint of his Big Machine Label Group.
"Mackenzie's take on life, faith, love, and everything in between rings with such an originality, we couldn't wait for people to hear her music," he stated.
Though a Belmont student, Carpenter wasn't fond of parading her songwriter bona fides or playing numerous songwriting rounds in town. She remained studious instead, essentially willing to use her time in college to develop a sturdy, educated backup plan if her country music industry success didn't occur.
She credits a meeting with Doug Howard, then the dean of Belmont University's Mike Curb College of Entertainment and Music Business for pushing her to double down on being both a student and a working singer-songwriter to improve her talent.
Dig through her catalog and a song entitled "Jesus I'm Jealous" stands out as a pointed choice for a song title.
"Yes, I, like everyone, am prone to having the occasional pity party. But if you go to that song's bridge, the song more specifically refers to the fact that, when I wrote it, the place where I'm at right now seemed so far away," says the singer-songwriter.
These days, she's working with co-writers like Songs and Daughters label chief and renowned songwriter Nicolle Galyon.
One song on her self-titled EP, "Hunting Season" (co-written with Galyon and Micah Carpenter), evolves from the type of small-town gossiping about unhappily married people familiar to country music into a cheeky yet honest homage to binge-watching TV while online shopping and drinking copious amounts of wine.
As Carpenter notes, mining golden lessons into platinum-selling success via the self-aware skill of recognizing the appeal of your own rural-born naivete is a "magical" skill.
"Creating music while creating the next chapter of my life is hard. However, it's magic to stay still grounded in not knowing what I don't have or caring about what else is possible," she said. "
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Mackenzie Carpenter on her delightful, unique and comfortably familiar country success
