Today we’d like to introduce you to Candi Carpenter.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I know we covered a lot of my backstory in our last interview, but for anyone starting this show mid-series, here’s the “last season” recap.
I grew up touring the Midwest with my family’s gospel band, The Carpenter’s. The apostrophe “s” was there because, as my parents said, “we belonged to Jesus.”
My dad was a Christian Missionary Alliance pastor, but that didn’t stop my family from enthusiastically pushing me toward a career as a child performer in what our religious community called “secular” country music. They believed in eternal damnation, but they also believed I could become a star. I was being taught to “be in the world, but not of it” while simultaneously getting pulled out of school at 15 to sing all night in the bars on Lower Broadway. Why did they ever think that would have been a part of “god’s plan” for their kid? It feels like my childhood was shaped by one disorienting paradox after another, which created a deep sense of shame and confusion in me for a very long time.
That’s why so much of my art centers around destigmatizing religious trauma, healing, and rebuilding the sense of community that many of us lost while trying to find ourselves. At my live shows, and in our Discord server, the goal is to create the kind of safe space we’ve all been searching for. https://discord.com/invite/HucqJQkb83
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
I take a lot of heat from folks online who feel personally attacked by my message of love and mental health advocacy. Some people accuse me of attacking their faith when all I’m really addressing is my own personal experience. Others go so far as to threaten my life, or threaten me with bodily harm. Those same self-proclaimed believers and disciples find out I’m queer and autistic and hurl slurs and hate speech at me. Modern-day Pharisees and Sadducees. I’m not interested in tearing down people who are coming at their faith from a genuine place of love and acceptance toward others. I’m interested in speaking out against religious abuse, and I still can’t understand why protecting people from abuse is considered controversial or divisive by anyone.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
My first album, “Demonology,” meant everything to me. It helped me remove the mask, and come out to the world, and to myself, as the me that I’d been hiding. For the first time, I met friends and fans really who got me. We were healing together in real time, and it felt like sharing my story was making a difference. Eventually, though, I had to start asking myself, “Where do we go from here?” Feels like I never really know what the hell I’m doing, and I’m just as surprised as everybody else to find out what it is.
I changed musical genres shortly after making my debut at the Grand Ole Opry and performing on Dolly Parton: 50 Years at the Opry. I have a long history with the Opry from spending most of my teenage years there and touring with country legend Jack Greene. Because I started performing so young, I never really went through that normal process of experimenting with different genres to figure out “my sound.” I decided to turn my upcoming EP, “Reincarnation,” into an opportunity to explore that; to try living my life inside of different sonic landscapes, and find the place where I was the happiest and most at home. “Demonology” was about discovering myself. “Reincarnation” is about finding out what I actually want in this life, now that I get to be the person to decide.
My best friends and I created a short film around the “Reincarnation” EP. The semi-fictional world the film takes place in is called “Garbage World.” We collected recycling and saved our own trash for months to build a whimsical horror-movie garbage dump inside a warehouse. I call it semi-fictional because it’s less of a completely imaginary place and more of a grotesque caricature of our current economic, political, social, and environmental landscapes. The zombies, for example, are a pretty unapologetically on-the-nose allegory, but that felt most appropriate to me. The process of collecting the trash was ragged. I was running cat food cans through my dishwasher, and painting, and covering the brands on each individual piece.
We created a music video for each of the six songs on the EP, and together they connect into one long-form visual album. I’ve always wanted to make a rock opera, and now that I’ve done it once, I already can’t wait to do it again because of how much I learned from the mistakes we made while making this project.
My co-star in what we are calling REINCARNATION (THE SHORT FILM VIDEO SEMI-ANIMATED MOTION PICTURE MOVIE) is rock icon Jane Wiedlin, co-founder of The Go-Go’s. Jane and I became friends over social media, and I still can’t believe she agreed to fly to Nashville to make this with us. She even stayed an extra day to share her incredible energy and help out on set. I’m eternally grateful for the way Jane champions new artists and important causes. She’s my hero in more ways than one. My friend, April Ajoy, one of my favorite voices in the EXvangelical space, also appears in the film as one of Jane’s angels. We’re planning a movie premiere and EP release show sometime in late July, and the dress code will be clothing made from trash. Start working on your Kroger bag outfit now and come join us in the garbage heap!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.candicarpenter.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/candicarpenter
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/candicarpenter
- LinkedIn: https://candicarpenter.myshopify.com/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@CandiCarpenter
- Other: https://discord.com/invite/HucqJQkb83
