Mary Gauthier
When you see validation for a life's work and dedication, it's a beautiful day.Collection: Work
I spent my 18th birthday in jail. Charges were dropped as long as I promised never to return to the state of Kansas. My parents took me home to Louisiana. I lasted there a week. Then I ran away.Collection: Birthday
Creating something beautiful out of pain helps ease the pain. So, that's kind of how I got to songwriting - quite honestly out of desperation.
There's an ocean of misunderstanding. It's called the civilian-military divide. I had a lot to learn about our military - who they are, what burdens they carry.
The belief when your mother gives you away is that there's something deeply wrong. Mothers don't give babies away. There's something wrong with me, something unlovable, something seriously flawed in me. It's a fundamental thing; it's precognitive. You feel it rather than think it. How could you not?
As a songwriter, I was always mining my own depths, which were filled with confusion and darkness.
Melody's like tweezers that go into the infection and pull out the wounded part. You can almost not stay silent in the face of a melody that matches your emotion. You feel seen.
I'm an old-fashioned folk singer. I stand in front of an audience with a guitar and a barstool.
By the time I got to songwriting, I had been faced with a lot of troubles as a result of my own collective of trauma. I was someone who instinctively figured out that writing songs about the struggle helps you with the struggle.
I think Bob Dylan showed us that songs can rise to the level of literature, and he proved it over and over again. That's why they keep trying to get him a Nobel Prize for literature: because there is no Nobel Prize for songwriting.
We can't see ourselves very clearly. This I learned as a songwriter. I'm forever trying to figure out what my own truth is.
Music and books, I think, were the two things I trusted the most as a child - songs and books.
I don't really write for catharsis; I get that kind of work done in therapy.
I've always been drawn to the hard story, the trauma, because I think art can turn it around.
In a lot of ways, songwriting helped save my life.
Recovery stabilized me; songwriting gave me a purpose.
I learn something every time I go to work with a veteran. Every single time.
I'm grateful to songwriting and recovery to bringing me to a place of peace.
What I've found at 48 years old is that there's nothing about me that's unique.
There's a universal inside of me. So if I tell my story, you're going to see parts of your story in it. I don't know which parts, but we all overlap. We're all very much alike.
What I'm finding is there's an awful lot about adoption and relinquishment and the complicated nature of family that we, as human beings, haven't been able to have a real discussion about yet without a lot of censorship.
I'm from New Orleans, and I have a French last name - although I have no real relationship with my last name because it's not my name. I don't know my name.
I don't know who my dad is.
There's such a thing as a tribe - and family of choice.
Soldiers are trained not to be vulnerable, but when they come home, they've got to learn it.
I don't have the experience of being in a war.
I don't ever want to tie a song in a little bow. Life doesn't work that way, and war doesn't ever work that way.
I don't play everything I write. I mean, everything I write is not that good. I bring out into the world the ones I think that are really worthy of an audience's attention.
A lot of times, a bunch of songs have to be written to get to the next really good one.
I teach songwriting a lot, and I always tell my students, 'You gotta write the little songs sometimes to get to the next big song in the chute.' You gotta write 'em to get to it. You never know what's going to be a little song or a big song.
I think having near-death experiences, they sure made me free.
I felt my whole life like I didn't have a family, and I needed one. So I had to build one, and you build one with faith, hope, and the healing power of love - or you end up the 'Unabomber.' That's the choice.
I have such a good life. It's something I couldn't have imagined in my wildest dreams.
What I really like is this salted calamari - with jalapenos on top.
Songs are here to help us: they build bridges from heart to heart.
I was in the orphanage in New Orleans until I was almost a year old. I don't think I ever got held by my mama, so that was completely and utterly traumatic. I think it was trauma from the first breath, and I think I've spent my whole life trying to heal from that trauma. So it shaped my brain.
Songs, especially lyrics, have always been really important to me.
I long for real and true connection. It has been the theme of all the songs in my whole life.
I think each veteran's soul has something that it needs to say. I know from my own personal traumas, it's very hard to know what that is. But when I'm watching someone else struggle, it's not as confusing for me, 'cause it's not my struggle, so I can help identify that.
I've learned our soldiers are so much like everybody else. They're just put into an extreme situation.
Fundamentally, our job as songwriters is to sit down and listen.
'I Drink' took me two years to write.
War is hell. Sending young people to conflicts that are unwinnable and unresolvable - it puts them in a position where they're going to suffer. And yet their experience is that they're proud of their service, and they should be. Service freely rendered is a noble thing.
I think if people really listened to what our families who serve go through, we could have a realistic discussion of what it means to send young people to war.
Art, when done well, creates empathy.
I haven't been in the military, but I've known my share of pain. It allows me to sit with someone who's struggling and not be afraid.
Being in recovery for a lot of years now, I've worked with a lot of people who've gotten sober and sat with a lot of folks who are suffering. Bearing witness is a really underrated thing; it's a big damn deal.
If somebody in a family is in service, the whole family is in service. I didn't know that. I didn't know our veterans were being deployed seven, eight, nine, 10 times. It's inhumane.
They send women into combat without being prepared for women in combat. The men resented them being there, and it was just very, very difficult for them, and they had to fight for the respect they were earning. And that's all they want is the respect.
I think it's a stereotype that soldiers don't talk, because my experience is that they will talk if they are met with empathy and no judgment.