The Moon and St. Christopher

Carpenter wrote both music and words. It closes Shooting Straight in the Dark (1990) at 4:21 as a duet with Shawn Colvin, and she recorded it again for Sometimes Just the Sky (2018), at 4:25, with a band built around Duke Levine's guitars and Georgina Leach's strings. Vincent Harris of the Charleston City Paper reported in 2018 that she found herself just getting really choked up in the middle of recording it; the 2018 piece is, in her words, about a former love. One reviewer of the 2018 version hears it as more hushed, with blurred electric guitar, subtle percussion and a deeper vocal, which we did not check against a primary source.

The blog Meet Me in Montauk called it a beautiful, simple track that could really have been written and recorded at any time. It was not a single, and we found no chart history, video or setlist.fm entry. MusicBrainz lists versions by Mary Black, one with Carpenter, and by Simon Nicol, whose years and albums we could not verify. We could not tell whether our upload is the 1990 duet or the 2018 re-recording; the running times, 4:21 and 4:25, differ by only four seconds.