Mary’s Mercy Missives Issue #8: Family Matters

Dear Mary,

Have you ever written songs about family members that reveal things they might rather keep quiet about? How do you deal with that?

- Annette
Tacoma Park, WA

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Dear Annette,

I try not to censor myself when I write. In a perfect world, the song leads, and I follow. I never really know where a song is going, and like it that way because discovery and epiphany become a natural part of the process. It can be exciting to unearth buried treasures, but as you probably know, it can also mean uncovering and disclosing something unsettling. A song can be a passageway to a deeper knowing, but the hallways are often haunted. After decades of wandering spooky passageways, I’ve come to expect that this is how songwriting usually works - it is supposed to scare me. 

I have to navigate fear to get to discovery, then navigate even more fear when I bring a new song out into the world. I never know how a song will land on people, or what they will hear when they listen.

Tennessee Williams, in The Beautiful and the Damned, wrote (in the voice of Zelda Fitzgerald), “Between the first wail of an infant and the last gasp of the dying—it’s all an arranged pattern of—submission to what’s been prescribed for us unless we escape into madness, or the act of creation.” 

Like Zelda Fitzgerald, artists are often black sheep, but the real work is to remove the wool from our own eyes. Songwriters are given a chance to break free of prescription and conformity in their songs. For many, myself included, our creations are a pushback against that which could damage or destroy us. I have a book coming out in July called Saved by a Song. It is both a memoir and a discussion of my songwriting process. I chose the name for a reason. 

When inspiration guides my hand and asks me to write something into a song, I write it. I allow myself in my art to disregard many of the rules imposed on me by outside forces who try to tell me what is acceptable for me to say and do. Tennessee Williams (who is speaking to me right now because I am in Key West—his longtime home), also wrote, “All good art is an indiscretion.” I say, yes, yes, yes. Artists reaching for truth is the foundation of all art, and often a desperate play for salvation.

The songs I love most tell secrets and say something honest in a new way. They pin down a core of significance—while the songs that hold back are less compelling because they let an essence slip away. Great songs are fevered visions that render a soul vulnerable, emotionally naked. To withhold out of fear of offending is to capitulate to forces both internal and external that would silence us. 

For the artist, silence is not safety. Fear-based self-protection can become, over time, an existential threat to the creative process. A fully insulated heart might be inoffensive, but it is creatively dead; nothing enters, nothing exits. If I know in advance what I will not allow a song to say, I am imposing limits on inspiration and vision. It is to say, “I agree not to look. I agree not to see. I agree not to reveal.” In essence, it is to agree not to learn anything from the song. If you’re fighting a song that’s trying to get written, it’s going to enter the world bruised at best. Fighting to simultaneously reveal and conceal is a losing battle. One side or the other will win out; there really is no meaningful middle ground.

Inspiration is difficult to source, but it is born from willingness to lean into not knowing. Not knowing and agreeing not to look or to see are two very different stances. Not knowing is a place ripe with possibility, receptive to discovery. To work this way requires audacity and boldness whether I am writing about my family or not. Agreeing not to look is a capitulation.

Let me give you an example.

From day one as a songwriter, I did not want to use gender in first person love songs. This left me one choice, I had to refer to my love or former love as “you”, never “she”. I did this even when the narrator was not me, knowing there would be listeners thinking it was me. I came out as gay in my early teens and was never closeted in my adult life, but I censored my songs because I was trying to avoid being pigeonholed as a “lesbian folksinger.” This made perfect sense to me, even though it has always been obvious to anyone with eyes that I am a lesbian folksinger.

So why did I do this?

Fear.

What mattered most from the very beginning is that my songs reach a larger audience than just those interested in what was then called “womyn’s music.” I wanted to follow in the footsteps of my songwriting heroes, songwriters like John Prine, Guy Clark, Hank Williams, Lucinda William, Willie Nelson, Billy Joe Shaver, Nanci Griffith, Woody Guthrie, to name a few. These were songwriters whose work shaped what I did. I did not want to risk offending anyone with a lyric that was outside of what I believed would be acceptable to fans of these masters. I did not want to be put in a box, labeled as a stereotype. So I made a rule and stuck to it for six studio records: Do not record a love song or breakup song lyric that sounded like a woman singing about or to a woman. Keep it universal, keep it safe. I wrote lines like this:

The clock inside the church bell tower
Rings your name every hour
I see your face I touch your hair
Then the ringing fades and nobody's there

It wasn’t bad writing, in fact, it worked well for quite some time. I defended it by saying it allowed all genders to put themselves into the skin of the narrator, but I eventually ran out of running room. I hit a wall writing my seventh record, Trouble & Love. The songs were written after a particularly painful breakup, and the intensity of emotion behind the songs would not allow my self-imposed rule to stand. Twisting myself into a pretzel to avoid gender had become too much. My new songs demanded I blow up the jail I’d put myself in. I did not have the strength to walk the labyrinth any longer. For the first time, I wrote things like:

Tryin’ to catch my breath, she moved so fast
Rumble strips, red lights, broken glass
Twisted steel, sirens, and blood
Love and trouble, trouble and love

The world didn’t end. Fans didn’t run out of concert halls with an appalled looked on their faces. 

And, most importantly, I was finally free to write in a much more natural way. Now, I understand this example both is and is not a family story. Gender is personal, yes, but every story I tell is a family story in some way because my willingness to speak from all of my truth was certainly shaped by the family I came from. 

Also, I am an adoptee, a product of the family I know and the one I have never met. No one in my family but me could possibly be aware of what it was like for me to be adopted.To be honest, it took many years of therapy, a pilgrimage to the orphanage, and deep research that included reading dozens of books on the psychology of adoption for me to begin to make sense of it myself. I have written many songs that explore my attachment troubles and addictions, through the lens of my beginnings; there is enough story there for me to make a career out of it—and yeah, I pretty much have. 

So, I write about the impact of family, the one I know, and the one I do not know. I do so even when I do not mean to. It would be impossible not to. Untangling the ramifications of these complex interconnections is my soul’s journey, and I’m still on it. Where I came from shaped me into who I am. I pick up my guitar to write, and BOOM, there it all is, again.

Annette, it sounds to me like you are worried about offending family members with your songs. But you can’t ever know what will offend people in a song, you just can never predict it. The danger in censoring yourself is not just shorting yourself of an epiphany or being a lesser writer and writing a lesser song; the danger runs bigger than the individual songwriter. Because revelation and disclosure in art are often the source of connection and resonance in the world, the risk in censoring yourself is that the world will be less populated with honest music. Songs that will bring people together, in ways that matter. It’s like the old saying, “You can count the seeds in an apple, but you cannot count the apples in a seed.” Focusing on who might be offended, avoiding subject matter that might disturb someone, can limit a song’s ability to do its work in the world, work that transcends the individual songwriter.

Songs create connection, understanding and resonance through revelation and disclosure, but also through empathy. I would never single out a family member, friend, loved one, or anyone and write a song to intentionally bring pain or shame them. Revenge songs are not my style, they put the songwriter in the wrong relationship with the song. The job of a song is to create empathy for its message, and the mystery of how it does this cannot occur when a song is not free to become what it wants to be. Going in with an agenda never really works. The best songs tell us who they are, not vice versa. 

Back to your question. I write about my family, but the work is to find deeper truths about the complexity of family by searching my soul, not theirs. It is to tell my truths, not theirs. There is an art in knowing whose story to tell, and there are ethical boundaries around whose story a writer has the right to tell. I tend to focus on telling my own story, which is no simple feat. Making sense of my own life has been anything but easy. Writing about my family, and the lifelong effects of coming from this complex family, is a powerful way of engaging with the larger subject, one that is found in all great art—our shared humanity and what it means to live in this word.

As long as what I write what is true for me, and I am not intentionally cruel or mean or vengeful, I will allow my songs to go wherever they need to go. Even if I know there will be people who might not like it.

- Mary

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Mary’s Mercy Missives Issue #7: No Matter What

Dear Mary,

I am extremely conscious of my own limitations. How do I gain confidence to write songs and perform them? Who encouraged you? 

- Simon
Kendal, UK

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Dear Simon,

It’s a long, scary walk from sitting safely in an audience to standing in the spotlight, believing you have something to say. It takes courage to get in front of a microphone with an original song and ask for people’s attention. Audacity is required, something most singer songwriters must learn to muster. For most, it doesn’t come naturally or quickly. It’s developed over time.

When I first took the stage twenty-five years ago, like you, I hyper-focused on my limitations. Performing only magnified deep-seated insecurities and inflamed self-doubt, triggering a myriad of other dark feelings I’d tried to keep hidden for years. Even worse, it activated shame - That intensely painful experience of feeling fundamentally flawed, unlovable, and unworthy of belonging. 

I would take the stage, trigger an invisible tripwire, and KABOOM, a wildly unpleasant feeling would wash over me like a 10,000-foot wave of desperately needing to disappear. It’s enough to make a person run for the hills and never walk onto a stage again.

Why shame? I’m not exactly sure, but people with low self-esteem can struggle with feelings of shame even when they can’t point to a specific source. My guess is that shame came to me because I did not believe I was deserving. When I made even a single mistake, it was like gasoline on the fire of my self-doubt, proof that I was undeserving of the stage I stood on.

I came to songwriting a few years after I got sober. I showed up wounded, with an ego deeply damaged from years of addiction. Like most addicts in early recovery, I had an inflated sense of self-importance, and an arrogance that I now believe developed as protection from self-loathing and low self-esteem. Addiction, a disease of the ego, left me lonely and removed, a condition I have heard described as an egomaniac with an inferiority complex. I also carried two other early-in-recovery opposing emotions: a deep sense of entitlement, and the conviction that I was unlovable. As you can imagine, this churning cauldron of toxicity within me was painful. I needed some kind of miracle to bring me to a better place, to find peace, to help me become right sized and reality based.

I did not know it yet, but music and song would become a part of that much needed miracle, a huge source of healing for my soul wounds. It would teach me how to replace negative, binary thinking with positive action. 

But every step forward required courage and commitment.

You ask, who encouraged me? Well, no one really. The journey, and the struggle, were mine. But I did find community to lean on as I made my way from chef/restaurateur to singer songwriter.

I remember speaking in a twelve-step meeting in early recovery as I was trying to make sense of what was swirling inside me. Naming my heart’s desire and claiming it out loud had proven to be extremely difficult. It took me six months of trying, and all the guts I could gather to say in front of my group, “I want to write songs.” 

Time slipped into slow motion as I finally said those words out loud. The sensation was like being in a car crash. Intensely focused on myself and what others thought of me, consumed with what recovery language calls “self-centered fear,” I went into a shame spiral when I opened my mouth. Those five forbidden words “I want to write songs” ricocheted around the room like bullets and I fully expected one to bounce off the wall and kill me. I kept my eyes to the floor, convinced that what I was saying was delusional. I ended my share abruptly when fear drowned out my ability to put thoughts together.

I did not feel worthy of the dream in my heart. I felt like a fraud and my longing sounded absurd. I’d missed my chance when I was young and flirting with it now seemed like a form of middle-aged madness that exposed me to annihilation. My cheeks burned with embarrassment. I was terrified at being laughed at by people who knew me only as a restaurateur/cook and a person in recovery. People whose opinions very much mattered to me.

Thank God when I ended my share, someone else immediately spoke up and took the group’s attention off of me.

The speaker was a young lawyer named Brad. Inspired by what I had revealed, his voice quivering, Brad said, “I relate to what Mary said. I’m a successful attorney, but I am not happy. I went to law school to please my father, who cannot and will not accept the fact that I am gay.” 

Tears began to fall down his cheeks. 

“I want to be an actor. It is what I have always wanted! But I have never said those words out loud. Now, I feel sick, I feel like running out of the room. I am terrified.” He began to weep, and his emotion was so heart felt that other members of the group began to tear up too.

Even though it was nearly thirty years ago, I remember this scene like it was yesterday. Two newly sober artists, reaching through terror, to try and become authentic. To become real. Reaching for life, after failing at death via addiction.

In bed that night, it occurred to me for decades it had made more sense to destroy myself with drugs and alcohol than to chase dreams that may not come true, dreams I did not feel worthy of. Better to bury my heart’s desires, than to have them exposed to derision. 

I was beginning to understand.

Fear had been my constant companion for most of my life. I dragged it around like a wet blanket, carried for so long I did not remember life without it. Fear made my choices for me, and as my addiction grew bigger, so did the fear. I drank to have courage, which in turn made the fear worse. So, I drank more. The cycle is deadly, and terribly familiar to anyone who has loved an addict. It is an ever-tightening noose that kills most who get caught in it. Before recovery, as the disease of addiction spread like cancer on my soul; failure, loss, and disappointment were commonplace. Yes, addiction is about excessive drinking and drug use, but underneath inebriation, the fire that burned the hottest, the pressure that pushed the hardest, was God-awful fear. 

Rilke said, “Our deepest fears are like dragons, guarding our deepest treasures.”

Integrity, integration. This is what was lacking. 

But here’s the thing: I was not aware that this was what I needed. 

I’ve worked with thousands of songwriters who have struggled with integrating their love of music and song into their daily lives. They fail to name and claim their dream and fully incorporate songwriter into their understanding of who they are. Not as something they want to become, or something they dream of, but as something they are.

This is the point at which my story intersects with yours. Publicly naming and claiming my heart’s desire (to become a songwriter), was the beginning of integrating this dream into all aspects of my life. This, I believe, is crucial to getting good at it. Half-heartedness dominated by fear was never going to get me where I wanted to go. And where did I want to go? 

I wanted to become a better singer, player, and writer. I wanted to learn how to speak to an audience. I wanted to become as good on stage as I was in the restaurant. 

And most of all, I was slowly discovering that I wanted to live. 

Every creative action in service to my art was an assertion of my  commitment to life. 

No wonder my disease was throwing the kitchen sink at me. The more alive, authentic, and integrated I became; the less power it had over me. The act of naming and claiming myself as a songwriter was directly attached to embracing life, with all of it’s imperfection and glory. It was a rejection of self-destruction, hiding, and playing small. Each new song was an assertion to myself that what I do matters. To the world? Well, no. More importantly, TO ME! I matter to me. Whew, even thirty years later, this is hard for me to write.

So, back to your awareness of your limitations. Like you, I was very aware of the fact that I was not much of a guitar player. I also sang flat at times, and had no idea how to address an audience from the stage. These were all limitations, and yes, I was acutely aware of them. 

But with integration, over time, I became less fragile. It was as though I were a three-legged stool prior to my commitment to songwriting. Once I fully articulated my dream to write songs, play them, and commit myself to it, I grew a much needed fourth leg. This helped stabilize me. This is integrity. The disabling fear became much less disabling. The more committed I became, the less urgent the fear felt.

I began to tell myself, “I’m gonna write songs and play them even though I suck. I’m gonna do this even though I am worse at it than everyone else. I am going to do this until I get good at it, no matter how long it takes.” 

I had to accept that there will be moments of humiliation along the way. And yes, there were thousands. There still are. I had to accept that there would always be a whole lot of songwriters who are better at this than me. There are, and there always will be. Better singers? Check. Better guitar players? Check. But I also had to accept that my songs matter, and my voice matters, these are sacred parts of me. They matter to me.

So, I commit daily to doing my best, not being the best. 

Doing so has helped my ego heal, it has helped me become right sized in my mind, a worker among workers, a teacher and a student. Becoming authentic and living in truth is the definition of recovery. It’s also the definition of integrity. 

Confidence comes from commitment, it comes slowly over time. It comes from knowing that, even if I fall on my face while walking to the stage, I am going to get back up, dust myself off, and keep going. 

I am DOING THIS.

No matter what. 

- Mary

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Mary’s Mercy Missives Issue #6: Calling

Dear Mary,

Do you think it’s possible to become a songwriter later in life?

- Gail
Pullman, WA

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Dear Gail,

For me, songwriting is a calling. A calling presents itself as a tiny, nagging thought or far-off feeling that grows, and sooner or later begins to consume your mind and drive the decisions of your everyday life. A calling works on a timeline of its own. It can surface quickly or take decades to fully announce itself. One thing is for certain, unlike whims, callings endure.

The call to song first came to me when I was in my teens. I bought a guitar, a Mel Bay chord book, and learned to play. I was unable to embrace songwriting without encouragement and support. With no creative community to help guide my young heart’s desire, I was too wounded and insecure to go it alone, so I stopped trying.

Every couple of years, the call to song would resurface. I’d try to write, but along the way, vulnerability would fill me with terror. I know now that there’s no songwriting without vulnerability. Instead of running to my heart’s desire, my calling, I ran from it. 

Then, I dismissed it.

I put songwriting in the category of “childish things.” Corinthians 13:11 reads, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put aside childish things.” I figured my desire to write songs was a childish whim. I told myself it was good that I’d grown up and left it behind. I put my guitar in a case, left it there, and banished songwriting from my mind to pursue other things. 

I completely forgot I ever longed to write songs. 

I went to culinary school, found investors, and opened a couple of restaurants. I stayed very busy, intensely focused on success in my businesses. The guitar stayed in its case in a hall closet, and the call to song laid buried in my subconscious mind for years, dormant and unspoken, a truth I’d successfully hidden from myself. 

Then I got sober.

During moments of silence and stillness in my early sobriety, when I was not busy with the extreme demands of running multiple restaurants and juggling thousands of items on an endless to do list, I felt an aching deep in my heart. A voice in my head whispered, “Do you really want this life? Endless busy work, the endless churn of acquisition?” At dusk, perhaps, when I was driving on an empty highway listening to a song I loved, or when I sat by the fireplace after reading the last page of an incredible book and looked out the window at snow falling, the voice would ask, “Is this all there is?” 

Recovery from addiction asked me to be honest, and the truth was, I was not happy in the restaurant business. I liked dreaming them up and making them work, but running them made me feel trapped. I longed to transcend the confines of the routine I’d made myself a slave to.

My life changed the night I went to an open mic and saw a room full of entry level songwriters take their turn on stage. Sitting in that club, watching the courage of those young artists was a lightbulb moment for me. I knew right then, instantly, what I wanted.. It was what I’d wanted to do since I was a teenager. I wanted to write an original song and sing it on stage. And within a few months, I did.

I began writing songs in my mid-thirties, which is hardly “later in life,” but the music business is youth driven, and I was well aware of the age difference between me and the other songwriters when I started playing open mics.

No matter, I began showing up to my writing desk daily, playing out nightly, and slowly coming to terms with my calling. Ten years after that lightbulb moment, at age 40, I moved to Nashville to start a new career: Songwriter.

So, to answer your question, do I think you can become a songwriter later in life, my answer is yes. You can. I did!

But answering a calling does not require you to make a career of it. Answering is exactly that - saying, “Hey there! I hear you, and I will dedicate a part of my being to what you are asking. I’ll put time aside to get good at it, and I’ll give it my best. 

I’ve taught hundreds of songwriters in their sixties and seventies, many of whom were just getting started. Most were aware of the call to song inside themselves for decades, but they’d left it unanswered, thinking it was childish. They moved through their lives, got “real” jobs, raised their families. They shyly answered the call only after their children were grown and they’d retired from their careers.

It is forever thrilling for me to see the joy on a songwriter’s face as they take their first steps in the direction of their heart’s desire. Some cry when they share their first song with a group of other songwriters who are rooting for them and support their efforts.

Gail, my guess is the call to song has been inside you for a while, probably quite a while. Festering underneath a million rationalizations and excuses, sitting dormant, waiting. The calling will never knock down your door or jump up and down to get your attention. It simply waits for you to be ready. Answering it will catapult you into a new reality, but you have no way of knowing that. Not answering it will leave parts of you unrealized, and to me, this is a sad state of affairs. I shiver to think of all the souls who have left this earth impoverished for having not answered their calling. One of the reasons I decided to pursue songwriting was that I did not want to be on my death bed full of regret, wishing I’d had the courage to do so.

"If you bring forth what is within you, 
what you bring forth will save you. 
If you do not bring forth what is within you, 
what you do not bring forth will destroy you." 
- Jesus, The Gospel of Thomas

Callings, like wounds, when ignored, denied, repressed, neglected or pushed away, will begin to fester and can eventually poison us. Those called to song would benefit from answering. Not because the world needs more songs, but because to ignore your heart’s desire is to ignore your creator’s instructions. Creating art by writing songs, is about growing the heart and soul and increasing their reach. It has more to do with the act of creation itself than what is actually made. That said, what is made might be exactly what a soul needs. But you’ll never know, if you don’t answer the call.

 - Mary

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Mary’s Mercy Missives Issue #5: Salvation, Healing, and Catharsis

Dear Mary,

Alanis Morissette recently commented that she found the songwriting process cathartic, but not healing. Your thoughts?

- Jen
London, UK

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Dear Jen,

In 1990, I was arrested for drunk driving. A judge sentenced me to a year of probation and six months of weekly twelve-step recovery meetings. It worked. I got sober, then entered therapy. I wanted to recover, I wanted to heal. A few years later, I wrote my first song.

With fifteen years of serious drug and alcohol abuse behind me, I had no idea what all was festering inside me. I didn’t know where my wounds were located, how they got there, or precisely what I was recovering from. Songwriting worked hand-in-hand with sobriety and therapy to keep me looking inward, looking outward, and staying open to discovery. It took decades for me to learn the truth of my own story. Thirty years later, I’m still working on a deeper understanding of how it shaped me. Sobriety, therapy and songwriting all ask me to tell stories in ways that move my life forward in positive new directions – I doubt I would be here today without all three.

But I sometimes wonder, does songwriting, in and of itself, provide healing? I think it does. But how? What do I even mean by “healing”? And for that matter, healing what? 

As soon as I put pen to paper and try to explain how the art of song works, I lose my bearings inside mystery and paradox. I do not know where songs come from, or exactly how I write them. The mystery of creation does not give way to analysis or reason. One observation is quickly cancelled by a counter observation. For example, while John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance” is credited with helping end the war in Vietnam, Hitler used music and song to incite mass murder. In Germany today, the public singing or performing of songs identified exclusively with the Nazi’s can be punished with up to three years of imprisonment.

Music and song are tools, neither intrinsically good nor bad. Like all tools, music and song can be used for a variety of purposes. They can be used for both peace and war, for both love and hate. They can be used to check-in, or check-out.

I am in awe of the creative process and remain its humble servant. Humble, whose root word is humus, earth: dirt, from where we came, and where we shall return. But while here, like all of us, I’ve been given the power to co-create with that which has created me and vested the sacred power of co-creation inside me. I’ve chosen to commit my life to these powers greater than myself: imagination and creativity. Embedded in those powers is a mystery that lends itself to a litany of questions whose answers are always just out of reach. Words cannot do them justice. In fact, if we had the words, we wouldn’t need the art.

Art, when magnificent, always touches upon the ineffable.

I’ve written a book called “Saved By A Song” that comes out in July 2021. It is a collection of thoughts about the redemptive power of song, yet I still ask myself, exactly how does the art of song offer salvation? 

I see salvation as the state of being saved from some kind of harm, redeemed from transgression and discharged from some kind of debt. Songwriting became a salvation for me after I got sober. It saved me from meaninglessness, saved me from work I did not love; work that did not connect with spirit. Songwriting gave me purpose and a goal that resets itself daily.

Every new song is a new challenge, forever leading to yet another a new beginning. I never feel like I have gotten “there” for very long. No matter the accolades my efforts bring, there is always the morning after, the blank page, the fear of having written my last good song. The work of song anchors me to life and to what matters, and my work is never done. Songwriting has given me a way to name and articulate the various traumas I’ve carried, helping pain get “unstuck,” making room for joy, and moving me forward. Undoubtedly, this catharsis has saved me from self-harm and relapse.

I think of catharsis as the release of emotion, often pent-up, that brings relief, especially when there is trauma and deep wounding. Like the unclogging of a drain or the tearing down of a dam, allowing water to flow freely, catharsis is the opening of a spigot.

Music and song speak the language of emotion. They activate brain areas associated with feelings and bring them to the surface to be released. With catharsis comes cleansing, clarity, and a feeling of relief that can be carried out of concert halls and into our lives. Releasing half-expressed emotions stored in the body, waiting to be fully expressed, can be in and of itself healing. Crying old tears can help put the past, finally, in the past. The power of art to induce collective emotional release has value in every culture. 

I’ve revelled in the catharsis of writing and singing my own songs. My work has been a joy even when my songs have brought tears. I am forever inspired by the power of truth to raise goosebumps on my skin and put a lump in my throat. But for me, the effect of songwriting goes beyond catharsis. 

To heal is to regain health, to mend, to get well. Songs, my own and others, have helped bind my wounds and harmonize my hurt by forcing me to stare down the stories of how it got there. Songs have helped bring clarity when I was confused, closure when I needed an ending, and faith when I longed for a power beyond myself. Through song, I’ve become my own witness and have been witnessed with empathy by others.

But to answer your question, Jen, I don’t think I can fully separate the impact of songwriting from the effects of therapy and twelve-step recovery. All three have all worked for me in tandem, a holy trinity of sorts, like guardian angels or guardrails, keeping me on the road and out of the ditch.

There is no cure for what I have - Alcoholism, addiction, and multiple layers of trauma. I deal with life a day at a time. While I know I am not cured, I’m healing, and in many ways, I am healed. Three decades later, I am more often at peace than not at peace.

There are plenty to whom the crucial problems of their lives never get described in ways that they can understand. They remain strangers to their own stories, alone in the confusion of their emotional woundedness. Again and again, they act out their pain on themselves and others. Like me, these souls are in need of salvation and healing.

I am forever grateful that I find salvation and healing through recovery, therapy, and a daily commitment to the art of song. I am a believer, and I count myself among the lucky, and the blessed.

- Mary

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Mary’s Mercy Missives Issue #4: Pick Up the Chicken

Dear Mary,

How do I get beyond the editor/critic who says nobody wants to hear my truth?

- Jenny
Jackson, MS

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Dear Jenny,

I am thirty years and ten records into my songwriting career, and I still hear the voice of an internal critic every time I bring a new song into the world. A voice appears (disguised as me) and says things like, “you are a fraud, you are a terrible singer, you are an awful guitar player, all your songs sound alike, and you are… OLD and FAT!”

Yes, the critic is an age and fat shamer, which has a grand total of nothing to do with songwriting. No matter. The critic criticizes, punching wildly till it lands a blow. This mean-spirited voice pops up like a clown out of a jack in the box and asks with an evil grin, “Who in the hell do you think you are?” 

Then I remember, oh yeah, you: the neighbourhood bully. You never really leave, do you?

The critic’s voice is different from the editor’s voice. The editor is a useful voice that helps improve my songwriting. The critic is not interested in betterment. It wants to silence me.

It claims to want to protect me from being hurt, rejected, abandoned, or banished. When the inner critic warns that my work will get me thrown out of the group, it strikes fear in my very being. Forget that this is a lie and I know it, humans believe things because they are true, and because they will help us maintain membership in groups of people we care about. In this arena, expulsion feels like a mortal threat - Writing/performing this song will kill me. This feeling is innate, and goes back to a primal fear that we still carry from the very real days (millennia ago) of death by banishment -  Lions and tigers will kill and eat me!

The inner critic is an expert at amplifying feelings of inferiority and thrives on comparison (the thief of joy). It ultimately aims to scare us into silence. Humans need connection, we need to belong. Whether or not we like it, we are herd animals. We all want to earn the respect and approval of our peers. The inner critic uses these primal needs to scare the bejesus out of us.

If I let the critic convince me that the cost of belonging is perfection, I’d enter the land of “the hell with it. I quit.” Fear of imperfection will shut down my songwriting. I will end up divorced from my connection to purpose, and meaninglessness will creep in. As a sober addict, this is a dangerous place to lounge. Relapse is a regular customer at that sad little bar. Truth is, the new song in front of me is not, and cannot be, a mortal threat. If there is a mortal threat here, it is the critic, trying to scare me into abandoning songwriting!

What to do?

Shouting down the critic or telling it to go to hell does not work. It discounts all rejection, laughs, and grows louder. Ignore it? Impossible. The critic is here for the long haul. It will never fully leave, so I have to work with it. This work always requires courage. Songwriting, all writing, is an act of courage. Courage is one of the most important qualities creative people are asked to embrace. That’s true at any age, but writing songs later in life, well, that may require even more bravery due to the music industry’s emphasis on youth. Songwriting is not just for the young, of course - It is for all who are called. The creative fire burns in committed artists of all ages, if we can work through the fear.

Here’s what I know: Fear will rise when I allow myself to write my truth. I must feel it, understand it as a part of the creative process. Fear of not being good enough, fear of having nothing important to say, fear of not being as good as other songwriters, fear of not being as good as... Myself! At this stage of my songwriting, my inner critic will point to some of my own songs and tell me I am not ever going to be able to write that well again. Of course, when I was writing those songs, the critic was telling me they sucked. The voice would be laughable, if it wasn’t so convincing.

In the end, I show up and do the work in spite of fear. I have developed a few strategies. I will talk back to it, calmly. “I hear you, and I know you think you are protecting me. I thank you for that, but I must proceed. Can you give me a couple hours to work on this project, and I will let you have a look at it before I call it done?” This seems to calm the beast, for a little while, anyway. 

I also will convert overly pessimistic thoughts into realistic statements. “I am not the worst guitar player in the world and being the best guitar player in the world was never my goal. My heroes write their truths, and their courage is applauded - If I write mine, why do I think I will be laughed at?” 

The worst-case scenario really isn’t ever as bad as the critic imagines. When it predicts that I’m going to embarrass myself, I tell myself, “Embarrassment is not going to kill me. We all embarrass ourselves from one time to another. It's just part of being human.”

My job is not to be perfect. My job is to show up, do my work to the best of my ability, and always remember the truth. The mortal threat is not writing/performing new songs, the mortal threat is allowing the critic to silence me. Some people will like my songs, some people will not. I have no control over it, and focusing on applause does not serve me. What serves me is focusing on my songwriting, and getting off of the result committee.

When cellist Yo-Yo Ma makes a mistake while performing, he often thinks about how Julia Child would react when she erred in the kitchen. "Oh my, the chicken’s fallen on the floor! Yes. Oh, well, I shall pick it up and put it right back in the pot."

Jenny, like Julia, we all must pick up the chicken sometimes. It’s just a part of the process.

- Mary

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Mary’s Mercy Missives Issue #3: Guitars & Love

Dear Mary,

Please tell us about your guitar. At first I was thinking "she needs to get it fixed," but I reckon there's story there?

- Sally

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Dear Sally,

Yes, my guitar has a story. I purchased it to console myself after a romantic relationship ended badly. I showed up to a guitar exhibition on the fairgrounds in Nashville with a broken heart, knowing this would be the day I'd lay down the money I had saved for a rainy day. I was going to buy a guitar, no matter what, and kickstart my healing. 

At some of my earliest performances, I played in Boston/Cambridge with a black Everly Brothers Gibson with a double pickguard. I bought that guitar because I saw Steve Earl playing one, and it replaced the round back Ovation I had as a teenager. One night, the black Gibson fell off the stand and the neck broke. I had it fixed, but I could never trust it. I worried that the neck would pop off again. I traded it for a brand new, blue, Taylor C112 cutaway. I bought that guitar because Nanci Griffith played one. I liked both of those guitars, but I can’t say I ever truly loved them. I told myself I didn’t want to travel the world with an irreplaceable vintage guitar that could get destroyed by an airline or stolen on the road. Looking back now, I lived with a fear of loving wholeheartedly and losing, so I settled for expediency. 

This fear pointed to deeper issues, but I did not know that, yet.

I also still didn’t know what appealed to me about different guitar sounds or what guitars felt right in my hands. I had no idea which instrument made my heart sing, or which one matched the music I was making. I went for what I thought looked good, what appeared to be the right choice. I had a similar problem when it came to picking romantic partners.

I just didn’t know myself, yet.

Over the years, something inside me smiled when I played someone else’s old Gibson. I could feel the reverberation of the wood and strings in my body, not flashy, but deep and instantly familiar. Much like the acoustic guitar songs I loved on the radio as a kid in the 1970’s. With age, these Gibson acoustic guitars get lighter. The wood releases its moisture and the varnish peels off, which seems to make the bass strings resonate more deeply.

After my breakup, I needed a hard reset. A brand-new old Gibson guitar would help me restart my life. 

My friend and producer, Ray Kennedy, and I walked into the guitar exhibition. We saw old Gibsons everywhere, a handful at every booth. Having played a few, including several from Ray’s recording studio collection, I was sure an old Gibson was what I wanted. Ray calmly spoke with the dealers and asked to play the guitars that were in my price range. After a few hours, we made our way around the show and narrowed it down to three guitars that we both loved. Several musicians and songwriters gathered around to help; I remember Jim Lauderdale and Gary Nicholson, specifically. We played the three finalists, Ray inspected the inside with a mirror and flashlight, and the bystanders offered their opinions. In the end, I chose the most beat up, but best sounding instrument. It was very lightweight, and the low-end absolutely boomed.

It made my heart sing - I loved it so much! The day had come when the risk to love fully was less frightening than the pain of loving halfway. Yeah, losing it would crush me, but playing it brought me so much joy! I also picked up a great traveling case and never looked back. It’s the guitar I play to this day.

It is a 1950 Gibson J-45 with a sunburst finish. It was beat up, bruised, scarred, and kinda tight because it hadn’t been played in a while. Ray figured it was sitting in a case under someone’s bed for a few years. He said it would open up more once it was loved again. After traveling with me for a bit, it surely got better (and more beat up, as I’ve added to the nicks and cuts.) My hand fits perfectly around the neck, and the low-end still makes me smile when I strum a big fat open E chord. My guitar and I are kindred - We’ve both seen a lot of miles, been through a lifetime of love and loss, taken blows, been ignored, kicked around, taken for granted, left behind, then, amazingly, cherished and appreciated again. My guitar is older than me by 12 years (her: born in 1950, me: born in 1962), a well-travelled, wise, beautiful old music maker.

My star guitar strap also has a story. I treasure it as much as my guitar. During a connecting flight to Dublin, Aer Lingus misplaced my guitar for a few days. I was booked to open two weeks of shows for Willie Nelson in Ireland and the UK, but when I got there, I had no guitar! Bee Spears, Willie’s bass player, took pity and walked me to the local music store to rent one for the show that night. Bee had provided a solid backbone to Willie Nelson’s behind the beat phrasing and guitar acrobatics since 1968. He wandered around the store while I talked with the manager to work out a rental. As I turned to leave, Bee was already outside with a bag in his hand. He handed it to me, I opened it and smiled when I saw a black guitar strap, covered with big orange and yellow stars. Bee said, “I bought a star strap for you, ‘cause honey pie, you are a star!” His kindness in that moment steadied me.

He sadly passed in 2012, but the star strap he gifted me is the only guitar strap I use on stage to this day. 

I learned a lot about love through finding this guitar with the help of my friends and here’s what I now know: It’s better to love wholeheartedly, even though it’s a risk. My guitar is a part of my being now, a part of my body, like an arm or a leg or… 

A heart. 

And I can’t imagine wanting it to be any other way.

- Mary

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Mary’s Mercy Missives Issue #2: Grief

Dear Mary, 

My best mate sadly passed away this year. When grieving and feeling lost, how do I find that crucial emotional headspace to write a song? I used to have lots of resilience, but these days it seems to be slipping away.

- HB
London, England

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Dear HB,

First of all, I am sorry to hear that your friend passed. I, too, am dealing with the sudden loss of a close friend. I’m in shock and I miss her every single day. When I found out about my friend’s death, I dropped into the land of disbelief; a place where what happened was so far from what I ever imagined would happen that I couldn’t make myself believe it. Of course, I know the truth. My friend is gone and it cannot be undone. That said, I still can’t make myself believe it or even accept it. Not yet. There is a gap.

So precious is the time we spend together, so temporary. We humans know we are going to die. We know our loved one’s will die too. Most of us cope with this knowledge by trying to forget about it, or better yet, deny it. It makes life less terrifying. On a moment to moment basis, it would be difficult to live any other way.

You ask, “How do I find that crucial emotional headspace to write?” How does one get to the heart of things and turn feelings into words?”

These are big questions - How do I write when I don’t know what to say? How do I sing when I know my voice will be drenched in grief? 

Songwriters (like most artists) are often told that their art should be uplifting, that our creations should make people happy. These voices proclaim, “No more razor blade songs! Play something happy!” This request seems innocent, but it can have an injurious effect on an artist’s willingness to share their truth. It can scare them into silence. I sometimes think that underneath the demand for constant upbeat happy-clappy tunes, there is a longing to escape reality. Escape grief, struggle, sorrow, heartbreak, death. If the happy-clappy people had their way, they’d turn all us songwriters into human antidepressants, insisting we use our music to change brain chemistry in order to suppress, alter, and rearrange human sorrow!

That said, if happy music works to bring brief relief to those who are suffering, I am all for it. There is a huge market for exactly this sort of thing, but it can go too far and result in the Disney-fication of music, the creation of a fake world where all is well all of the time. 

This is not the world I live in, and it is not the kind of songwriter I am. I see songwriting as a mechanism best used to show true human emotion and convey honest human experience. It’s a vessel for asking questions more than answering them, a place for observations more than conclusions. My approach to songwriting doesn’t change when I’m grieving. I allow my feelings to be what they are, and when I have the strength, I try to find a chord progression and melody to match them. Next, I search for words to illuminate the way I feel. If a blow is mighty and my world is forever altered, it could take me months to get back to my writing desk. However, I will get back there when I am ready and able. I know I will because songwriting isn’t just something I do, it’s something I am.

You mention resilience. Resilience can be thought of as someone’s ability to return to their original state after being shattered. Another definition is the ability to adjust to or recover from illness, adversity, or major life changes. Neither of these definitions is satisfactory. As a songwriter, I see resilience as the willingness to try and write the truth as I experience it, no matter what that truth might be. Writing about life’s struggles is the way I make sense of how they have shaped me, changed me, and created the person I currently am. Resilience and courage have a lot in common.

The poet Bohemian-Austrian poet Rilke believed that language is not a tool to tell us where it hurts or how bad it hurts, but rather to build something out of the pain. I see songwriting exactly the same way. When a song does what it’s supposed to do, it isn’t simply a mirror representation of hurt. The song is a tool for alchemy, a mechanism for some kind of transformation, a personal experience made into a shared experience. Songs have the power to turn the I into a we. Does this heal everything and take away the pain? No. But it does help in ways that amaze me and lets others know that they are not alone. Songs connects us to each other's hearts in mysterious ways.

I do not know what death means. I do not know where souls come from or where they are headed. I believe we come from somewhere and are going somewhere, but no matter how much I try, I can’t conceive of where. I have a sense that we are in an eternal circle, that we somehow go around and around. I wrote a song about this many years ago called “The Wheel Inside the Wheel.”

To answer your question about writing while grieving, my answer is this: All I really know right now is that like you, I deeply miss my friend. I believe you will write about your loss when you are ready to bring yourself to the writing desk, and so will I. Once we get there, the hope is to write our truth, knowing that truth is what matters. I wish you courage, because it will most certainly require plenty.

- Mary

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Mary’s Mercy Missives Issue #1: Hope

Dear Mary,

I watched one of your streams recently and you mentioned that you don't want to sit down to write when you're happy. I know that sad songs bring hope in their own way (they're my favorite) but have you ever tried to intentionally write a hopeful song?

- JH

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Dear JH,

Thank you for this wonderful question. Ever since I was a young teenager, when I was hurting, I would take to the page to write down what I was feeling and thinking. The page became my confessional, my safe place to howl, my reprieve from the outside world. I was not able to change my feelings, but I was able to transcribe what was happening, and that felt like something. I put my story into writing, to try to make sense of it. Writing is a kind of rebellion against loss, pain. I felt that if I could make something out of it, sentences, a poem, I was no longer powerless over the events. I was fighting back. It was helpful, in some small way.

Fast forward to my early thirties. I was still keeping journals and writing, as always: when I was disturbed. But I also began writing songs. And songwriting became my focus. By the time I was forty, I'd quit my job, moved to Nashville, and made songwriting my job, and a way of life. 

It is true that when I am happy, it is hard for me to sit myself down to write a song. Songwriting is hard work, it’s effortful, sometimes a torment. It takes quite a bit of focus for me to get it right. When I am feeling great, I just want to enjoy my happiness. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve found myself more and more at peace, less tormented by emotional extremes, and this steadiness has me believing that I am a fairly happy person. So I have had to learn how to write for reasons other than pain. This was not true for much of my life.

So, you ask, have I ever tried to intentionally write a hopeful song? Writing, whether it's a song, a journal entry, a poem, a short story, a book, is in and of itself an act of hope. People without hope do not write. Hope is what fuels the effort. Hope for clarity, hope for understanding, resonance. 

I didn't know it when I was younger, but writing helped me to become my own witness. And this made me stronger. Being witnessed locked in a new connection to myself and others, it moved things around inside me. In many ways, taking a step back by writing my story shifted me from being the story, to becoming  the storyteller. It helped me heal. Storytellers have power. Storytellers get to shape the story.

But I digress. Do I try to intentionally write hopeful songs? No, I don’t. I try to write honest songs. My mission, always, is to find emotional truth. As I chase that truth down, my job is to listen, pull the song into this world across time and space, through the mystery, and shape it into a form that can be sung and understood by people everywhere. I am a song chaser, a song catcher, a song hunter. I am an archeologist, digging up bones, trying to reconstruct something that already is. All I can do is transcribe what I find there, in the mysterious fires of creation. Songs come through me more than from me, and the best of them know who they are when they arrive. I look to the song for direction, and it will tell me who it is. My work is to listen more than talk. I do not impose myself, and I do not impose hope. That would be arrogant. The best I can do is be vulnerable, brave, and emotionally honest. That’s my holy grail, and it does not change. 

There’s hope in that, yes?

- Mary

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