Fans of the heartland singer-songwriter will eat up her new album, For All We Dreamed Of. There’s a “Puff the Magic Dragon” for the word-processing age (“Mr. Typewriter”). There’s a Graham Parsons cover that’s better than the Black Crowes’ version (“She”). There’s a gimlet-eyed take on selfie-culture (“Coffee Shop”). There’s even a song about loving a rat (as in rodent, not loser boyfriend.)
But Mary also has a chip on her shoulder: she doesn’t feel that she ever got to capitalize on her brief time in the spotlight.
The year was 1994, and she was in the studio with big-name support making the proto-Americana Yelling at Mary for Atlantic Records. Reviews were good. The world was her oyster. Then it clammed up. “Atlantic was shedding a lot of artists,” she says. “Juliana Hatfield, Melissa Ferrick—we were all just out.
“In the olden days, they’d sign an artist because they believed in where they could go,” she continues, “and then they’d develop them and help them get there. But at that time they were just throwing spaghetti at the wall.” It didn’t help that she’d been signed by a recent A&R hire with little clout. “When they’re cutting bands,” she observes, “they’re not gonna cut who the vice-president signed.”
She scored a moral victory of sorts by going on to make the best music of her career post Atlantic (for Dualtone and her current label Y&T). But the recognition she’d hoped for (and deserved) didn’t materialize. And when she became a mom, she put her music on the back burner. “I wanted to be the best mom I could be,” she says, “and that meant not going out touring and being away from home all the time.”
She must have done something right: she was her now-grown younger daughter’s most-played Spotify artist of 2025. “It was fun when they were little because they thought making music was something every mom did,” she says. “They’d go to somebody else’s house, and they’d be like ‘O.K., play your mommy’s music now!’”
For All That We Dreamed Of is available on Mary Karlzen’s website.
