Pop : Mary-Chapin Carpenter Plays It Her Way at Wiltern Theatre

With her Ivy League roots and I-can-have-it-all stance, Mary-Chapin Carpenter is to traditional country music women what Hillary Clinton is to traditional political wives. Her songs of finding strength and fighting for personal independence are closer to “Sisters Are Doing It for Themselves” than “Stand By Your Man.”

But the mainstream country world has embraced her: Last week she was named the year’s best female vocalist by the Country Music Assn.

That a woman who started off her Wiltern Theatre show on Friday with a biting set of songs she referred to as “my most recent ex-boyfriend trilogy” has been accepted on her own terms might say more about the broadening of country’s horizons than all of Garth Brooks’ mega-sales.

Carpenter (who also appears at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano on Friday and at the Arlington Theatre in Santa Barbara on Sunday) neither panders to country conventions nor shatters them, at least musically. There was a gentility and restraint to the folk-pop music that she and her four-man band played at the Wiltern, but there was also a friskiness in her best songs--the feminist (but non-didactic) “I Feel Lucky” (a strutting, flirtatious hoot) and “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her” (in which the she is packing up and leaving, no matter what he thinks)--that underscored the fact that she is having it her own way in a notoriously conservative genre. That alone makes her as noteworthy as L7.