The Universal: Mary Gauthier
Louisiana truthsayer plays twice at the Cactus Cafe Saturday
By Doug Freeman, 4:20PM, Fri. Nov. 21, 2014
Mary Gauthier knows that her seventh album, Trouble & Love, is a difficult listen. It’s raw and intense, staring down the debris of heartbreak without pretense. Yet the new disc never dips into the maudlin or self-pitying, instead unfolding an unvarnished exploration of hurt and healing that ranks it among the truly great breakup LPs of all time.
Gauthier’s songs exhume the deeply personal with an insight and fearless awareness that few songwriters can achieve. Yet for the Louisiana native, revealing the marrow of the personal connects to a more universal truth. That perspective of experience has steeped her writing with an honesty and purpose as she prepares for a two-show stand at the Cactus Café on Saturday night
Austin Chronicle: Congratulations on the new album.
Mary Gauthier: Thank you. It’s a hard listen, it is. It takes a lot out of somebody to get through that record.
AC: I’ve read you scrapped the first round of songs written because they were too dark.
MG: I scrapped three rounds of songs, 35 songs, and I’m not going to go back to them because they’re just too sad. They’re super epic sad.
You know, there’s a lot of writing that has to be done by me to get to what it is I need to say. I don’t get there straight away. It takes time. It’s way more work than people think: hundreds of hours to get to the really good stuff. I don’t wake up and have a masterpiece in my head. It’s work for me.
AC: At the same time, though, all your albums are personal. Was this album harder or different in that regard?
MG: This album was harder. I tried to write it in the middle of the experience, and that’s the challenge – getting perspective when you’re in the middle of something. In some ways, it’s like when they talk about the fog of war. You’re in the middle of it, shit is flying right and left, and you’re not sure who’s firing what, and you’re wounded and trying to describe what’s happening when you’re not exactly sure what’s happening.
I think that’s why I had to write so many songs to get to these that made the record. I had to find my way through the smoke and the soot and the ash and the rubble.
AC: You talk about having to get to the other side of a song before you can let it go, so was there some kind of relief once you got these songs down? Did you feel it finally make sense for you?
MG: In a lot of ways, yes. I didn’t know what I was doing the first 10 years, but I think I’ve always used songwriting as a way of working through a difficult and challenging and emotionally complex situation. Consequently, that’s probably why I don’t have and probably won’t have hits, pop songs. When I’m in the state of mind to write a pop song, which I think is in the first six months of a romantic relationship where everything is just going in a direction that’s blissful, I don’t sit down and write in those moments.
That’s the good stuff. I’m just living that. I don’t try to capture it. It doesn’t confuse me. I enjoy it and I want to just live it. I wasn’t called to write it.
But when things get tricky and hairy and complicated and I don’t know what’s going on and suddenly there’s disconnects, I find that songwriting is a wonderful way of trying to reconnect. And by that I mean reconnect to myself, reconnect to what it is I believe to be true and who it is I believe to be. I think songs create connection.
This leads me to wanting to talk about [Austin’s] Darden Smith and working with the Songwriting for Soldiers program. Darden has been a mentor and a teacher to me, and has helped me understand what I’ve been doing intuitively but without understanding what I’ve been doing, which is working through traumatic experiences by using songs to articulate them.
My writing is much bigger than that. I don’t just do that, but in its deepest and most challenging form, that’s exactly what I’m doing.
So when Darden asked me to write with the soldiers, and I started working with his group, light bulbs went off. I got it – that songs help reconnect traumatized people to themselves and to other people. In other words, I honestly believe that songs heal.
AC: Your songs are so deeply personal that I’m curious how it was for you to work on the other end of that – to help shape and tell someone else’s story?
MG: Here’s the beautiful thing. The deeply personal is where we truly connect. The deeply personal is universal. Not the slightly personal. Not the specific human being who hurt me last week. It’s not the specifics or the slightly personal, but the deeply personal – the emotional level where impact is carried for decades.
This is where we connect.
That’s why I write the deeply personal, because I know it’s the universal. And I know that that’s an artist’s job, to reveal that. We reveal as our work, and reveal knowing that we’re talking about the human condition. Knowing that it’s not actually just me. It’s what happens to human beings in these situations.
And that’s why working with the soldiers is so familiar with me. I’ve not been to war. I’m an old hippie. I love peace and anti-violence. I don’t know anything about the military, and until working with the soldiers, I was even suspect of patriotism.
But I realized these kids are me and I am them. I love the soldiers, and I admire the soldiers, and deeply respect the sacrifices they’ve made and the work they’ve done. And it’s not foreign to me. There ain’t no them. It’s just us. It’s always us when you get down in there.
That’s why the artist’s work is so important. It helps remind us that the false categories created by prejudice and politics don’t actually exist. It’s only us humans. We’re going to figure this out together or we’re going to take us all down. So working with the soldiers has been incredibly important to me.
AC: I’ve been really impressed by that program and the work that’s come out of it. It seems as revelatory and rewarding for the songwriters as it is for the soldiers.
MG: Maybe more. It reconnects us with what we’re doing. A lot of time, if you spend too much time in Nashville, songwriters get caught up in charts and numbers and the music business politics. Then you work with soldiers and you realize, “Holy shit, God gave me this gift to help people heal.”
I was given the ability to write songs and articulate things that most people don’t want to talk about because my job is to help the world be a better place – to help people find the language for their experience so that they can move through it and past it.
We don’t want these soldiers to continue to hurt themselves, commit suicide, have PTSD episodes, and be afraid of going out. We want to help them. And songs do help them. It’s amazing how when you articulate this stuff, it releases it.
AC: You came to songwriting relatively late.
MG: I started my first song at 35, so I didn’t get to full-time touring and being a songwriter without another job until I was 40.
AC: How do you feel that informed your songwriting, or what advantages do you feel there were to your coming to it later?
MG: For me, it’s hard to measure since I don’t know what it would have been like to write in my 20s. Now, I feel a burning intensity of wanting to make up for lost time. I’m on the road all the time, and I feel that I’m so excited to have enough fans to support something like a seven-week nonstop tour in countries that aren’t my own. That’s still exciting to me.
I guess maybe what I’m saying is that at the stage I’m at now – I’m 52 – a lot of musicians are just sick of it. They’re just bitter and burnt out and tired. They didn’t get what they were dreaming and hoping for, and it didn’t work out the way they expected it to. They’re exhausted, the business is full of criminals and thieves that have robbed them blind, and they’re just tired.
I’m not. I’m still excited and invigorated. I’m only 10, 12 years into this now. A lot musicians are 30 years into this and they’re just beat up.
The biggest upside is that I’m grateful. I’m still so excited about what I do, and I feel it’s a privilege to be allowed to do it. It’s not the other way around. I don’t grace people with my presence. They grace me with theirs. And I think that’s part of being older. When you’re in your 20s, you don’t understand that kind of narcissism. You don’t realize you’re doing that.
AC: What was the impetus for you to finally pick up the guitar and start writing?
MG: I got sober. I had a very serious drug and alcohol problem, and I wasn’t able to articulate or understand who I was or my deepest desires, my calling. I didn’t get it. I was not able to be in touch with that. I got sober in July of 1990, and then I started to heal and recover. I had struggled with drugs since I was very, very young. Since I was probably 12. I went to my first rehab when I was 15 and had my 16th birthday in rehab.
So I was in very early developmental stages when I got addicted. I had to heal, and then the songs started coming through. The drugs and alcohol were blocking my access to my truth. It’s an upside down thing. Most musicians do it the other way around, don’t they? I started out an addict and have wound my way back into mental health and emotional stability.
AC: That brings me back to this album, which, heavy as it is, remains a fantastic and moving work.
MG: Thank you for saying that. In my deepest heart of hearts, I wanted to do Mary Gauthier’s Blood on the Tracks.
AC: There’s something transformational that happens through the course of it.
MG: I think so. In the end, there’s the assertion that there’s going to be another train, even though it felt like it could have killed me – and it could have killed me. When you deeply love someone and you dedicate your life to them and they betray you in a very public and fundamental way and then they’re gone and they never come back or look back, it’s a blow that does kill people. You have to decide to live again.
I didn’t want to whitewash it. I didn’t want to pretend it wasn’t as bad as it was. I wanted to express really how it felt and what it was like to go through that. The key is to come through that transformed. The key is to understand my part in it. How did I contribute to it, and what can I do differently to not end up there again? How do I find my way back to hope?
When that happens, there’s a hopelessness and despair, but if you wait it out long enough and hang on – and this is what I hope people get from this record – you realize that’s just a stage of grief. Despair is not some place that we have to spend eternity. It’s a stage of letting go.
AC: Sounds like you came out on the other end of that.
MG: I did. I came out a better person, a wiser person, and against all odds, a gentler person. It gentled me. It deepened my compassion. I believe that’s what this kind of pain does and why we go through it. It softens us. It just does. It takes the rough edges and saws them right off, and we become more compassionate. What’s the William Blake line? “Those that have suffered understand suffering and thereby extend their hand.”
That’s the purpose of this, and when you’re in the middle of it, you don’t want to hear that shit. But on the other side, you go, “Ok, it did.” It made me a deeper person, a more compassionate person, and a person who is more likely to offer my hand.
It made me less judgmental and more present, all the things we want but don’t want to have to do the work to have them.
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Mary Gauthier, Songwriting for Soldiers, Darden Smith, Bob Dylan