ASCAP Audio Portrait for The Foundling
20 Sep
Click on the image to visit the ASCAP media player. Steven Rosenfeld has outdone himself!
Story in The Tennessean Mary Gauthier finds comfort in darkness of ‘The Foundling’
16 Sep
Mary Gauthier finds comfort in darkness of ‘The Foundling’
PUBLISHED
BY
PETER COOPER
ON SEPTEMBER 15, 2010
Mary Gauthier
Mary Gauthier hates to use the word “healing.” It’s a fit, but a cheap fit, and the wordsmith in her grimaces at such things.
“Writing and singing these songs, you’d think it would be a bummer,” she said, and she’s correct. “These songs” are the ones that make up The Foundling, an autobiographical song cycle about Gauthier’s experiences as an orphan. (She’ll play songs from that album Thursday night at the Belcourt.)
Those experiences aren’t limited to childhood: As an adult, Gauthier hired a private detective to locate her birth mother, and she eventually contacted the woman, who rejected any notion of a meeting.
“It sounds sad,” she continued, sitting outside a coffee shop on a sunny Nashville day. “But it actually makes me feel better. I play a song, look out at the audience and see people nodding, like, ‘Yeah, me too.’ People who have blood family are going, ‘I know that feeling.’”
Since The Foundling’s May release, Gauthier’s job has been to travel all over the world and sing to audiences about isolation, despair and rejection. She even sings one called “Sideshow” that’s about the singing itself: “Another truly troubled troubadour, writing songs to even up the score/ A tune for every single body blow, and I sing ’em at the sideshow.” Her shows these days find her doing what Tom T. Hall called “telling the untellable.”
The fact that the concerts aren’t exercises in communal misery is testament to the songs and their craftsperson. The healing might not be possible if Gauthier weren’t fussy enough about the details to detest the word “healing.”
“In the end, hopefully it’s a story of just how amazing we are as human beings,” she said. “It’s about how adaptable we are, and how capable of rising above circumstances that on paper look hard. The ‘I’ thing doesn’t really work in songs. I’ll use myself as an example of the human condition, but this is not about me so much as about human nature. It’s in the tradition of the great orphan stories. Like Dickens, but not British.”
The album’s emotional centerpiece is “March 11, 1962,” a poetic documentation of the phone call Gauthier made to her birth mother.
“Hello, this is Mary,” she sings. “March 11, 1962. It took me $500 and 40 years to find you.”
The rest of the song is the rest of the wrenching conversation. And though it seems to be an internal excavation, Gauthier wrote it with Grammy–winning songwriter Liz Rose.
“The song is just what happened, and we wrote it in 10 minutes,” she said. “I was so sad and disappointed and hurt, to finally find my mother and then learn that she doesn’t want to meet me. She can’t meet, because it would blow up her life. She’s lied about having me, no one in her life knows she even has a child. But the sadness was overwhelming.”
At song’s end, though, there is gratitude rather than anger: “I’m not looking to lay blame,” Gauthier sings. “I just had to thank you once before this life went by.”
“It’s primal and complicated and complex,” Gauthier said. “But intellectually, I know it’s not her fault. In the 1960s in the south, the unmarried pregnant woman was a shamed woman in very deep trouble. And she did have me. In the end, she made a supreme sacrifice, and so it just didn’t seem I had the right to be angry.”
That said, she was looking for a different outcome, one that involved physical reconciliation and answers about ancestry. Many adoptees, Gauthier included, are denied access to original birth certificates through laws meant to protect birth mothers’ privacy, and Gauthier has no idea who her father might be, where he might live or whether he’s alive. And yet The Foundling’s ending, Gauthier insists, is happier than what it might seem.
“In the end, it’s good,” she said. “It’s good to continue, to believe in love and to know that human connection saves us. Isolation is death, and art brings people together. People see themselves in it, and they feel less alone, and the artist feels less alone, too. It can either be a bummer, or I can turn it into something useful. I’m a songwriter, so my work does the work.”
Reach Peter Cooper at 615–259-8220 or pcooper@tennessean.com.
3 Responses to “Story in The Tennessean Mary Gauthier finds comfort in darkness of ‘The Foundling’”
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Mary Gauthier Pulls Into the Station With Personal Tunes
11 Sep
Mary Gauthier‘s wry sense of humor brought so much good cheer to the audience gathered on September 9 at Nashville’s historic Station Inn, it was as if a pressure valve had released pent-up tension leaving jubilation behind.
Not that those at the Americana Music Festival take themselves overly seriously, but Mary’s showcase did almost immediately follow the festival’s star-studded awards ceremony that had everyone from Dierks Bentley to the Avett Brothers, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Jack Whiteand Robert Plant as presenters, performers and recipients at the Ryman Auditorium event.
“I won a few awards in this business,” Mary told the crowd. “Two to be exact. One was an Americana Award. The other, well, you are looking at the gay country artist of the year … before me, nobody was stupid enough to do it.”
Of course, Mary was referring to coming out before Chely Wright, Jennifer Knapp and others, and receiving the GLAMA (Gay and Lesbian American Music Awards) accolade in 2000.
As the audience happily clapped and cheered, Mary continued: “Mama wasn’t quite sure what to do with that one. Before you adopt anyone, think about it. You might get me.”
Those who don’t understand the point need only listen to the songs on Mary’s latest album ‘The Foundling.’ After facing down demon addictions and going on to write her first song at age 35, Mary moved to Nashville five years later and found critical success with her 1997 debut album, ‘Dixie Kitchen.’ Her breakthrough album ‘Mercy Now’ was released in 2005 and still holds a place in many fans’ hearts as evidenced by the calls for the song of the same name.
“I knew it was a late start but thought I could pull it off when I was 35,” Mary tells The Boot about her career. “As I got sober and was able to read books and as my language skills opened, I moved more toward songs as a way of expressing myself.”
That’s why Mary could write so openly about the heartbreak she felt when, at age 45, she found her birth mother who again rejected her, setting off events that led to Mary writing the songs of abandonment, loneliness and despair and finally emerging somewhat philosophical.
“I have got my story. Adoptees rarely get our stories,” she says. “There is some power in going in and doing this terrifying work and being able to say ‘You know what? I have the right to ask these questions.’ It’s taboo. You’re not supposed to ask. But you have a right to know.”
And to tell what you know, of course, about your life. That’s just what Mary did during her Station Inn set, singing fan favorites including “For Rose,” “I Drink” and ’Drag Queens in Limousines.’ Perhaps the song that received the most heartfelt cheers, though, was ‘Last of the Hobo Kings,’ which Mary wrote after reading a New York Times obituary about Steam Train Maury who held the king of the hobos title longer than anyone else. Mary delivered the lyrics, “he knew how his nation’s doing by the length of a sidewalk cigarette butt/born with an aching wanderlust/Embedded in his gut,” almost as if they were about the songwriter herself. Little wonder the filled-to-capacity crowd gave her a long, hearty standing ovation.
Mary’s next show is September 10 in Austin, Texas. For a complete list of dates and cities, check here.
One Response to “Mary Gauthier Pulls Into the Station With Personal Tunes”
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vivienne says:
I hope it’s ok to mention this here.
The night before this showcase, Mary participated in a riveting discussion/performance with author Jewly Hight, Tania Elizabeth, and singer songwriters Elizabeth Cook and Abigail Washburn. It related personal approaches to the process of songwriting and about a book by Jewley, ‘Right by Her Roots: Americana Women and Their Songs’.
I sort of fell over a videorecording of it while trying to learn more about Country Music and Americana. I would recommend it to anyone interested in the process of writing. (It’s about 1 hr long). It’s at:
http://countrymusichalloffame.org/watch
Go to Archives, and it’s under ‘Special Programs’ – and it is very, very special.
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Check out the music
I feel a lot of comfort in Mary’s repertoire, I think many of her audience do. As well as every crucial and essential word, Mary also makes great use of silence, pauses, variations in rhythm, as well as the well tailored pace of the song itself. I need these variations and silences to digest and process what I’ve just heard. They also add to the narrative and emotional impact of the song.
Listening to say Prayer Without Words, dripping with metaphor and alliteration, putting great emphasis on the density of imagery, I am taken at almost-frenetic pace to a place I’ve never been. And this little agnostic has been changed for the experience.
There is much to love and enjoy about Mary’s work, but above all for me it is her humanity. I feel a bit shamed by her nobility sometimes, she’ll not want to judge someone, and I’ll be thinking “Go in there girl, judge the hell out of ___”. But these decisions are hers alone to make. And so, I learn more about myself.
So Mary means many things to each person who has been lucky enough to hear her. For me she is wise woman, strong woman, fragile woman, beautiful woman, songwriter and above all poet – America’s Poet Laureate.
Every word is
extraordinary.
Whispers on paper boats
waved off from the pier,
bonny mots wreck on
jagged reefs because
they are not.
Our Titanics of tragedy
have their truthteller.
Merci beaucoup à Mary
Bien à vous.
acknowledging pain, feeling it, maybe even talking about it can be a way of getting through it and beyond it. the really hard part is undoing the damage i’ve done and the hurt i’ve caused. and if i ever forget, people are ready to remind me all about it. it takes a strength sometimes i don’t have, but am basically moving on.
habits i’ve used to cope with the pain, wanting to numb out and be out of it are hard to let go. the love and support of other people helps, but when i most need it, i push it away. still don’t understand that one.
biggest helps are from music and poetry like mary’s, and from books and talking with people who are also hurting and alone.
didn’t mean for this msg to be a downer, just want to say thanks to mary for making a difference, for being a soul sister to us waifs and strays across the planet. take care of yourself mg.