When you see validation for a life's work and dedication, it's a beautiful day.
Mary Gauthier
I have such a good life. It's something I couldn't have imagined in my wildest dreams.
I got interviewed by one writer who started with the line, 'Mary Gauthier is a woman who clearly doesn't care how she looks.' I do too. It's just that I'm not very good at it.
Songs, especially lyrics, have always been really important to me.
I got sober at 27 and started writing around 30 and started playing music in public around 32, 33.
I knew I had that Cajun heritage, that Acadian heritage; I just feel it. And my gut says Irish on the other side. Irish and French, that's what I feel. When you're young, it doesn't matter so much, but as you get older, I would suspect part of the ageing process is to wonder about your ancestors - who were they? What were their lives like?
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.
I think music is the highest form of healing.
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.
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.
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.
Music had always been a kind of anchor for me. But I didn't write my first song till I was 35.
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?
I don't really write for catharsis; I get that kind of work done in therapy.
The world doesn't need any more pretty good songs.
I've learned our soldiers are so much like everybody else. They're just put into an extreme situation.
A song is an emotional lightning bolt - a good one, anyway.
Fundamentally, our job as songwriters is to sit down and listen.
When I first got sober, I hadn't read anything for six or seven years. I didn't have even that much focus.
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.
People in Ireland take in the whole song. After a long history of great singers and songwriters and poets, they are able to consume the entire song - not just the external; they go inside.
I have got my story. Adoptees rarely get our stories. We only know what we are told. I don't even have my story, really. My mother won't tell me. She won't tell me who my father is. She won't tell me the story of my birth.
A lot of time, if you spend too much time in Nashville, songwriters get caught up in charts and numbers and the music business politics.
It is a form of arrogance to assume that other people are even thinking about you.
I learn something every time I go to work with a veteran. Every single time.
People who have been through trauma, their souls are hurting.
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.
What I really like is this salted calamari - with jalapenos on top.
I did not know that if a member of a family serves, the whole family serves. I did not know that the spouses of our service members carry such a heavy load.
Songs bring us into connection with each other. When they resonate, when we're in resonance, singing together, we become one for that 3 1/2 or four minutes the song lasts. It takes away that isolated loneliness that modern life is so full of.
What I was told is that I was born to a mother who was a Catholic, while her boyfriend was not. They couldn't get married unless they put me up for adoption.
If I start tracing, I bet I will find a writer in my family tree.
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.
I'm an old-fashioned folk singer. I stand in front of an audience with a guitar and a barstool.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
