| Sometimes Just the Sky | |
| Type: | studio |
| Artist: | Mary Chapin Carpenter |
| Cover: | Mary Chapin Carpenter - Sometimes Just the Sky.jpg |
| Alt: | A woman seated in a field with hay bales |
| Studio: | Real World Studios, Box, Wiltshire, England, United Kingdom |
| Genre: | Country, folk |
| Language: | English |
| Label: | Lambent Light |
| Producer: | Ethan Johns |
| Prev Title: | The Things That We Are Made Of |
| Prev Year: | 2016 |
| Next Title: | The Dirt and the Stars |
| Next Year: | 2020 |
Sometimes Just the Sky is a 15th studio album by American singer-songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter, released by Lambent Light Records on March 30, 2018. It features re-recorded songs from earlier in her career, with one track from each of her previous studio albums and a new title track. The album has received positive reviews from critics and was commercially successful, placing on several charts, and topping Official Americana Albums Chart in the United Kingdom.
The album was recorded live in studio at Real World Studios and was accompanied by a tour celebrating 30 years of Carpenter's recording career. Carpenter set about to make the new recordings by choosing songs that were not hits of hers and that she also had not recorded on her 2014 orchestral album Songs from the Movie, which saw 10 cuts from her career reintepreted.
The editorial staff of AllMusic scored Sometimes Just the Sky 3-stars-out-of-5, with reviewer Mark Deming comparing this to Songs from the Movie; he considers this re-recorded material to have "a strong enough personality of its own that it avoids this pitfall" of being weaker than the originals or unable to stand on its own as a musical statement. Jim Hynes of Glide rated this release a nine out of 10, writing that fans can enjoy "intense listening" to the instrumentation and sometimes radical reinterpretations of Carpenter's songs, summing up that "there’s more than enough to savor here" while waiting for an album of new material.
All songs written by Mary Chapin Carpenter