Attention Songwriters (and those want to give it a try!)

Please come join us for a Week Long Songwriting Workshop In Costa Rica December 27 2010 thru January 1 2011. My friend Chris Williamson and I want to invite you to a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to ring in the New Year 2011 focused on your creativity, high on a mountain in Costa Rica. We will be leading a group of aspiring songwriters into the realm of the sacred at 5000 feet above sea level.  Warm, sunny and beautiful,  Pura Vida Yoga Spa is located on a gated, 8-acre mountainside estate in Costa Rica’s Alajuela province. The focus of this workshop will be to help students delve deep into the well of their own creativity to access their own writer’s voice and create from their hearts.

Note from Mary: This will be my third year in a row teaching songwriting over the holidays at Pura Vida, and I am very much looking forward to returning. Every year here has been wonderful…. watching the students gain confidence in their ability, hearing their songs improve, watching a community of artists form as people reach out and support each others’ efforts, watching the New Year’s Eve fireworks in the city below from the spa’s hot tub high up on the mountain, savouring the amazing healthy food the chefs prepare for us three times a day… Heaven! I am excited to be teaching with my friend Cris, if you’re not familiar with Cris Williamson, check this out: Cris Williamson Retrospective She is a gifted teacher and an amazing artist, with so much experience to share with us. It’s an honor and a thrill for me to be working with her.

Note from Cris: I’ve taught songwriting in various places around the world, but I suspect none more exotic than the one Mary and I will be teaching in Costa Rica.  I’ve traveled there and seen its beauty.  I am so looking forward to spending days and nights in Pura Vida, a place that offers the “pure life” in so many ways.  Songwriting is a distilled form of communication, and a real craft combining poetry and music.  Add the natural beauty of the surroundings and the food, and you’ve got something not to be missed. What a gift! Come and join us!

If you’ve been thinking about taking a songwriting workshop, but have felt unsure, we encourage you to take the leap of faith this year and come with us. Starting the year focused on what’s important (creativity, community, health of mind, body & spirit) sets the tone for the rest of the year. Your pilgrimage to Costa Rica will reset your compass, with the reminder that life is so much richer than we are often aware of, that we are indeed co-creators of our world, and what a beautiful world it is!

Includes:

- 5 night accommodations

- Daily classes, discussions with Mary and Cris leading the workshops

- 3 wholesome, healthy & delicious meals per day…amazing fresh & local food, prepared by local chefs three times a day, with plenty of fruits, vegetables, salads as well as    fish and chicken

- Opportunities to work on your songs with the teachers

- A nightly open mic for the class to share their songs with each other

- A supportive and festive community

- A retreat space that encourages creative energy flow

- A day off to go whitewater rafting, or go to the beach, or to see a volcano, or to the rain forest…or to the hot springs…or the waterfall gardens

- Plenty options for the best body/energy work anywhere! (the spa is on-site)

- Yoga, swimming pool, hot tub, fire pit, tour of the coffee fields….

- A special workshop on accompaniment with Grammy award nominee and Juno award winner Tania Elizabeth

- A final evening concert that Mary and Cris will put on for the entire retreat community

- The perfect viewpoint for the amazing New Year’s Eve San Jose fireworks celebration

Prices are all inclusive (excluding airfare). The price depends of what type of room you choose. We encourage you to bring a friend, your partner and/or spouse (space-mate). They will love the bodywork and sit happily by the pool while you work on your songs, and you can share three meals a day with them in the dining room.  Or, you can venture into the songwriting experience together. Our pricing and packages are set up to accommodate your choice of participation.

Pricing:

Double and single pricing includes workshop. Spacemate does not include workshop.

Make your reservation today! Call:  888-767-7375 | Fax: 770-785-9260 | reservations@puravidaspa.com www.puravidaspa.com

Here is an interview with Here and Now, from NPR station WBUR in Boston. Scroll down a little, and hit the play button, and there it sits. Till it doesn’t anymore.   LIVE ON HERE AND NOW

The Foundling/US CATHOLIC

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Danny Duncan Collum

Mary Gauthier (Razor and Tie, 2010)

Singer-songwriter extraordinaire Mary Gauthier (“go-shay”) has a voice like a rusty string on a slide guitar. But that never held Bob Dylan back, and in Gauthier’s musical vision, pretty is hardly the point. That same jarring, unvarnished quality runs through her lyrics. A recovering alcoholic, early in her career Gauthier laid her disease on the line with a song that proclaimed, “fish swim, birds fly . . . I drink.” At the center of many of Gauthier’s best songs is her harrowing life story, a tale that makes some recent recovery memoirs sound like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. At 15 she stole the family car, ran away, and spent the next 20 years drunk, high, and/or institutionalized. But on this new album she cuts to the painful, bleeding core of her biography and turns it into a jewel of poetic narrative, with accordions and fiddles on the side.

Gauthier was the foundling of the album’s title. As a newborn she was left on the steps of St. Vincent’s Infants Home in New Orleans to be adopted into a family dominated by a raging alcoholic father. But she says a sense of not-belonging dogged her from childhood and well into her sober years. Recently she tracked down her birth mother and called her up, receiving a painful brush-off that is transcribed in The Foundling’s central song, “March 11, 1962” (Gauthier’s birthdate).

Gauthier’s artistic template for The Foundling was Willie Nelson’s 1975 album, Red Headed Stranger. Like that classic, The Foundling features consistent instrumentation and repeated musical themes (including two “Interludes” and a “Coda”) that lend coherence to the narrative. It suffers for the lack of Nelson’s pipes and mad-genius guitar work, but The Foundling’s emotional wallop far outstrips the model.  But Gauthier’s tale is never played for bathos. Indeed, her matter-of-fact, off-handed restraint, which makes the tragedy so disturbing, also renders credible “The Orphan King’s” affirmation: “I still believe in love.”

This article appeared in the August 2010 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 75, No. 8, page 42).

On her new album, Mary Gauthier channels the restlessness and heartache of being given up for adoption at birth.

Click Here for  The Advocate.com Lost and Foundling, Mary Gauthier

Mary Gauthier, storyteller in song

One of the most electrifying moments at this year’s Stagecoach country music festival had nothing to do with the high-wattage, big-budget stage productions that accompanied performances by the event’s main attractions, Toby Keith, Keith Urban, Brooks & Dunn and Sugarland.
In fact, it came as the result of a technological breakdown. Inside a tent with the noontime sun blazing above, Louisiana singer and songwriter Mary Gauthier was in the middle of a song from her new album, “The Foundling,” when a loud pop was heard over the PA, and then the sound system died.
Gauthier and her two accompanists looked momentarily perplexed. The she led them to the front of the stage and, literally unplugged, continued playing “The Orphan King,” a redemptive song centering on one person’s adamant faith in the power of love in the face of overwhelming disappointment and betrayal.

Several hundred fans on hand for the first set of the festival’s second day cheered Gauthier, some with tears streaming down their cheeks, as she sang the song’s refrain, “I still believe in love.”

“I didn’t know which way it would go at this event — it was Brooks & Dunn and Toby Keith day, for God’s sakes,” Gauthier, 48, said several days later from London, while on a trip to Europe to stump for the new album. “But I found a connection with a good number of people there.”

cont’d

Review of the Eddie’s Attic Show.

The Word was voted the UK’s best music Magazine in 2008 and 2009. Here’s a podcast of  my interview with David Hepworth. He’s a great interviewer, and I enjoyed speaking with him.

Click Here to listen to Listen to Mary discuss The Foundling on All Things Considered, National Public radio.

Back to her roots

Being adopted has inspired Mary Gauthier like no artist before her

Over 13 years and six albums, singing in that cracked voice that channels Johnny Cash’s last days, Mary Gauthier has established a reputation as one of the finest American songwriters around. Although tracks such as I Drink, Mercy Now and Different Kind of Gone are snapshots of a life laid bare, nothing prepares you for the searing honesty of her new album, The Foundling — a song cycle about adoption.

Most female songwriters — even those for whom soul-baring, self-loathing, angst and unrequited or broken love affairs are sources of inspiration — have skirted round the subject. One might think that being abandoned at birth would prove fertile ground for creativity, but perhaps this is too raw an emotion to expose. While Gauthier has tackled the pain head on, other adoptee songwriters — Diana Jones, Gillian Welch, Sarah McLachlan — have been more oblique.

In literature, the foundling has always been a popular subject. Read the Old Testament, fairy tales, Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, novels and comic books, and you will find Moses, Snow White, Oedipus, Perdita in The Winter’s Tale, Tom Jones and Superman. Because life likes to imitate art, reuniting adopted children with their birth mother is a popular media story — especially if, like Clare Short or Joni Mitchell, the mother has a high profile — with an upbeat message.

In fiction, the foundling is a blank slate on which to create a life unburdened by the past. In reality, says Gauthier, “it feels like you’re falling through space eternally”. More than 40 years after she was left in St Vincent’s Women’s and Infants’ Asylum in New Orleans, she tracked down her birth mother. That first stilted, apologetic conversation is recounted in March 11, 1962, the emotional centre of both the album and her current live shows. In the third verse, the lyrics hit you like a slow-motion car crash: “You say that I’m a secret nobody knowsyou can’t talk about it nowyou really gotta go.”

Yet the question that had dogged Gauthier all her life — “Who am I?” — had in part been answered. “I had found my birth mother. It wasn’t what I wanted to find, but there’s not a question mark any more. The little kid in me is gonna be dealing with abandonment until my last breath. I’m driven to write songs as a way of making sense of my life.

Most songwriters — like most people — have a family and know where they come from. Adoptees can lack that sense of place. Raised in an emotionally troubled family, Gauthier always felt she “didn’t belong”. “I always knew I was gay. I was an alcoholic from my first drink. There was just a hole. I had to get sober and start to heal from addiction before I could create art,” she explains.

“The interesting thing about being adopted,” says the singer-songwriter Diana Jones, “is, potentially, you could be from anywhere, from any kind of family, any kind of background. I grew up having all these fantasy families in my head. All my childhood, I had a sense of longing for home, a need to belong. I had to find me before I could figure out what I wanted to write, and that took time.”

Growing up just outside New York listening to show tunes, the Stones and the Beatles, Jones had fallen in love with Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison and found herself drawn to roots music. She finally tracked down her mother’s family in Tennessee. Her grandfather Robert Lee Maranville, who had once played with Chet Atkins, had a similar-sounding voice.

“I do believe there is a genetic connection between where I come from and the music I play,” she says. “Finding my biological family explained so much about who I am, but it took me a while to feel like I could claim it.” After her grandfather died in 2000, Jones, who had previously released two indifferent albums, found her voice — My Remembrance of You (2006) and Better Times Will Come (2009) are gems, more roots than country, full of beautifully observed songs set off by the warmth of her voice. Pony, about a Native American child taken from a reservation and placed in a settlement school, and All God’s Children, about kids who leave foster care at 18 with nowhere to go, are songs not just informed but enhanced by her experience. “I’m only interested in true stories,” she says. “For me, it’s to make sense of my story, but also to make sense of it in the context of the world.”

Gillian Welch’s adoptive parents were entertainers who moved to LA to write for The Carol Burnett Show. Her biological mother hailed from the mountains of North Carolina and her father was a drummer. Like Gauthier, she doesn’t do happy, preferring to chronicle the misfortune and torments that befall the disconnected living on society’s edge. Abandonment in all its forms — drug addiction, poverty, the wreckage of love — is the spine that runs through her songs.

Some adoptees, however, have fewer issues. “I got told I was adopted when I was nine, and it was never a big deal to me,” says the Canadian singer Sarah McLachlan. “I met my birth mother when I was 18. It was neat, because so many things I felt started to make sense, but, especially after I became successful, she wanted too much. I have a mother already. The older I become, the more I realise I am more like her through environmental conditioning.”

As Joni Mitchell has discovered, giving up your child for adoption is both a catalyst for creation and a scar that never heals. In 1965, when she was a penniless art student, she handed over her baby girl. She didn’t speak about it publicly for 30 years, but the clues were stamped all over her songs — especially Little Green, from Blue. “It left a hole in me,” she said, “that I didn’t fill until the day I saw her again. In some ways, my gift for music and writing was born out of tragedy and loss.”

When touring with Jones, Gauthier found they had much in common. Both had been adopted into dysfunctional families, left home at 15 and lived rough; and both have adoptive brothers with drug problems. Music was not part of their childhood — “There were no books, no music, no art,” Jones says — and they came to it relatively late. Jones was an artist, Gauthier a chef who wrote her first song at 35.

During their discussions, Jones introduced Gauthier to the work of BJ Lifton, an advocate of adoption reform. “Her books helped me to understand, to the point where I knew I was ready to write this record,” Gauthier says. “I wanted to write it as a song cycle, like Willie Nelson did with Red Headed Stranger; to start at the beginning, work to some sense of redemption and, in the end, come out and say, ‘I still believe in love.’”

“On a good day,” she says, “I believe. On a hard day, I need to believe.”

The Foundling is out now; Mary Gauthier is touring in June