Mary Gauthier

I want to thank Randy Lewis of the LA Times for selecting The Foundling as his pick for his #3 best album of the year. It sure feels good to get that nod from such an acclaimed and well respected music journalist. Thanks Randy!

“The acclaimed Louisiana singer and songwriter tackles the most powerful story of all — that of her own life — in this extraordinarily powerful and clear-eyed song cycle encompassing issues of abandonment, adoption, identity, blame, forgiveness and love set to music as richly diverse as the thematic content.” – Randy Lewis

I am finally back home in Nashville, where it’s freezing cold, the first snow of the winter is falling, and it’s beautiful sitting by the fireplace in my little house tonight. After nearly 11 weeks of travel, after  playing songs in Harrisburg, PA., Stone Ridge, NY., Philadelphia,PA., New York, NY., Ridgefield, CT., Provincetown, MA., Raleigh, NC. Then off to Oslo,Bergen and Trondheim     (Norway)–Gothenburg, Malmoe, Orebro, and Stockholm (Sweden)…..Brighton, London, Birmingham, Bristol, Nottingham, Norwich, Manchester and Gateshead (England)……Galashiels and Edinburgh (Scotland)….Brussels, (Belgium) …..Melbourne, Queenscliff, Mullumbimby, Adelaide and Sydney, (Australia) and finally…Aukland, (New Zealand), I am home.  Whew! Literally, Tania and I flew around the world in the last two months.

Brussels, Belgium Nov. 13, 2010

It’s been an amazing journey, meeting people in different cities every night, playing songs and telling stories to audiences from so many different cultures in such a short time. Everywhere I went I saw  tired, stressed out adult stares looking up at me from the audience, expressions that I watched slowly melt into childlike wondrous gazes as songs and stories broke down the walls of time and space to briefly relieve them of their  burdens, bringing us together into one human experience…for a short while, for the duration of a song.

From the stage, the process is amazing to watch. Before I became a performing songwriter, I had no idea that performers watch the audience as the audience watches them. But we do. It’s different every night, but yet…good nights are always the same. I look out into the audience after a few songs, after my own nerves are calmed down by the music. Then I look into people’s faces. After that, no matter where I am, I focus all the weapons at my disposal on transcendence. Transcendent relief  for all of us..from all the wedges that politicians and religions have used to separate us since the beginning of time…age, race, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality, our indoctrinated belief systems. Songs and stories can transcend oceans of differences and unite people, they have the power to connect us like no other medium. Woody Guthrie was well aware of this, when he wrote “THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS” in bold letters on his guitar. Nixon was aware of this when he tried to have John Lennon deported for his work to stop the war in Vietnam. Songs are powerful things.

On good nights, I forget that I am on stage, I forget that I even am. I lose my awareness of myself, (self awareness?) and disappear into the songs I sing and the stories I tell. Even when the song stories are about me, it’s no longer ME I sing about. The stories, if told right, are about all of us, all people..humans, mortals trapped in the human condition, and I am not fully there while I sing them.  I slip away into the song, into the story.  Even after the final chord has been played, during the milliseconds before self consciousness returns, all that exists is the fading ring of the music. This is artists’ bliss, to be relieved of ego, of separateness. I suppose its one of the big reasons why musicians put themselves through it, all the difficult , painful travel racing through multiple time zones in short periods of time, bone chillingly early flights to the next town carrying heavy suitcases, guitars, heavy boxes of gear, and  bags and boxes of CD’s, the hundreds of hours in filthy graffitti covered green rooms with their broken chairs and worn out soiled, sunken in couches sitting on disgusting sticky floors…. the cold, bad road food, the constant abuse from airlines, the disrespect from those promoters who are only in it for the money, the aching loneliness. We do it for the moments of bliss. And as tired as I am right now, I am already starting to think about getting up there on the next stage in the next town and doing it again. And again.