root salad Mary Gauthier
No stranger to hard times and dark times, she’s put her experiences into songwriting. Tony Montague listens.
I
f Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams had married and raised a lovechild – with a little help from weird uncle Lou Reed – she might have sounded like Mary Gauthier. Opening her Vancouver show in a thoroughly desanctified wooden church – its arches like an upturned ship’s ribs, with amen balcony at the back – Gauthier sang about American Thanksgiving in prison. It’s familiar terrain for her.
Gauthier’s life has been troubled and
she isn’t afraid to sing about it, whether directly or not, in a voice that’s calm and assured, despite the work and pain involved. In her efforts to disperse the shadows inside and out, the New Orleans- born and Nashville-based Gauthier never slips into murky self-indulgence. Through her craft she helps listeners deal with their own darkness by probing hers in a dry matter-of-fact way.
“I write to make some sense of things that confuse me,” says Gauthier, inter- viewed earlier. “The mechanics of my own heart are the most confusing I know about – and don’t know about – and other peo- ple’s are a bit confusing too. I think we’re very much in a mystery here in this life and that artists to try to pierce the mystery with their art.”
Gauthier was left in an orphanage by a mother who won’t meet her, and she’ll likely never know who her father was. Her ordeal and that of other abandoned and adopted children provide the theme of The Foundling (2010), Gauthier’s powerful seventh studio album. At fifteen she stole her foster-parents’ car to run away, became a drug addict and alcoholic, and spent her eighteenth birthday in the clink.
It took many years for Gauthier to get clean. She kept a diary all the while – though it grew thin when she was more strung out – but only began writing songs and performing them once she’d come clean in her mid-30s.
“If you can get past your navel-gazing into the deepest part of yourself as a writ- er you find everyone – we’re all there. The reason Hank Williams’s catalogue is still so active is because he had a very deep grasp of how to articulate very complex emo- tional states simply, so everyone can understand. My experience is that the uni- versal is the personal.”
Williams is certainly one of Gauthier’s inspirations. Her lyrics and music lie between folk-noir and alt-country. The low-key, intimate delivery recalls another source. “I’m a big fan of Lou Reed, and do a lot of talking through songs. It’s more effective with my vocal limitations, and also more powerful, to slightly-sing some-
times. It depends on the emotion, but I’m never going to try to compete with great singers.”
The sold-out
crowd in Vancouver didn’t wait long for Gauthier’s best- known song I Drink. For economy and understatement it takes some beating – especially the cho- rus: “Fish swim, birds fly/Daddies yell, mamas cry/ Old men sit and think/I drink”.
“It took me two years to get that song right. I write down my thoughts when I hear them. Then I sit down and work, and work. The perspiration of flesh- ing out is always a lot more time-con- suming than the flash of inspiration. I edit relentlessly and mercilessly.”
Despite or
maybe because of the concision and starkness, Gauthier’s songs are engaging, and can be humor- ous in a hard-bitten way. “Sometimes just the telling of the story, the char-
N
acters, the human condition, can be quite funny. Especially in the dark parts, because that’s where humour lies. It comes from sadness – we laugh at ourselves and at our predicament here.”
ot all these songs are seen from her perspective or persona. Last Of The Hobo Kings, written in Amsterdam “with the North Sea generating a terrible storm – for me that’s the perfect time to write” – is inspired by an obituary she read there for Steam Train Maury. When she found a photo, “he looked like Santa Claus the day after Christmas”. Gauthier talks rather than sings the tale, her phrasing, timing, and intonation superb.
She ends her Rogue Folk Club set with a song from her forthcoming and as yet unnamed album. It’s a blues, written in Belfast, about Robert Johnson based
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on a conversation Gauthier had – whether or not you can really sell your soul to the devil at the crossroads. It was agreed you could. “Oh my soul, I sold you away/Oh my soul I sold you away/ Oh my soul I sold you away.”
Even more interesting was whether you could get it back and what would Old Nick want in return? While the song eludes this last question, after the show Gauthier confided “humility” – a revealing answer from a songwriter ultra-wary of the music business.
Knowing Nick’s excellent taste, how-
ever, he would probably want a bit more – how about a clutch of redemptive songs finely crafted from pain, and no questions asked?
Gauthier continues to deliver.
www.marygauthier.com
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Photo: Michael Wilson
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