“When you see validation for a life’s work and dedication, it’s a beautiful day.”
― Mary Gauthier
“There’s such a thing as a tribe – and family of choice.”
― Mary Gauthier
“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.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I have such a good life. It’s something I couldn’t have imagined in my wildest dreams.”
― Mary Gauthier
“A song is an emotional lightning bolt – a good one, anyway.”
― Mary Gauthier
“If I start tracing, I bet I will find a writer in my family tree.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I think we’re very much in a mystery here in this life and that artists try to pierce the mystery with their art.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I would make a terrible soldier, because I don’t follow orders.”
― Mary Gauthier
“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.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I felt my whole life like I didn’t have a family, and I needed one. So I had to build one, and you build one with faith, hope, and the healing power of love – or you end up the ‘Unabomber.’ That’s the choice.”
― Mary Gauthier
“In my early years, I couldn’t find a community. I couldn’t find anybody like me. I felt so isolated. There was nothing but shame and loneliness.”
― Mary Gauthier
“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?”
― Mary Gauthier
“When I became a songwriter, it was out of some sort of desperation. I needed to create something. I had to latch on to something, and the guitar was what I grabbed.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I’ve always been drawn to the hard story, the trauma, because I think art can turn it around.”
― Mary Gauthier
“In a lot of ways, songwriting helped save my life.”
― Mary Gauthier
“Recovery stabilized me; songwriting gave me a purpose.”
― Mary Gauthier
“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.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I learn something every time I go to work with a veteran. Every single time.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I’m grateful to songwriting and recovery to bringing me to a place of peace.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I’m an old-fashioned folk singer. I stand in front of an audience with a guitar and a barstool.”
― Mary Gauthier
“What I’ve found at 48 years old is that there’s nothing about me that’s unique.”
― Mary Gauthier
“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.”
― Mary Gauthier
“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.”
― Mary Gauthier
“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.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I don’t know who my dad is.”
― Mary Gauthier
“Soldiers are trained not to be vulnerable, but when they come home, they’ve got to learn it.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I don’t have the experience of being in a war.”
― Mary Gauthier
“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.”
― Mary Gauthier
“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.”
― Mary Gauthier
“A lot of times, a bunch of songs have to be written to get to the next really good one.”
― Mary Gauthier
“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.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I think having near-death experiences, they sure made me free.”
― Mary Gauthier
“What I really like is this salted calamari – with jalapenos on top.”
― Mary Gauthier
“Songs are here to help us: they build bridges from heart to heart.”
― Mary Gauthier
“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.”
― Mary Gauthier
“Songs, especially lyrics, have always been really important to me.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I long for real and true connection. It has been the theme of all the songs in my whole life.”
― Mary Gauthier
“Music and books, I think, were the two things I trusted the most as a child – songs and books.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I think each veteran’s soul has something that it needs to say. I know from my own personal traumas, it’s very hard to know what that is. But when I’m watching someone else struggle, it’s not as confusing for me, ’cause it’s not my struggle, so I can help identify that.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I’ve learned our soldiers are so much like everybody else. They’re just put into an extreme situation.”
― Mary Gauthier
“Fundamentally, our job as songwriters is to sit down and listen.”
― Mary Gauthier
“’I Drink’ took me two years to write.”
― Mary Gauthier
“War is hell. Sending young people to conflicts that are unwinnable and unresolvable – it puts them in a position where they’re going to suffer. And yet their experience is that they’re proud of their service, and they should be. Service freely rendered is a noble thing.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I think if people really listened to what our families who serve go through, we could have a realistic discussion of what it means to send young people to war.”
― Mary Gauthier
“Art, when done well, creates empathy.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I haven’t been in the military, but I’ve known my share of pain. It allows me to sit with someone who’s struggling and not be afraid.”
― Mary Gauthier
“Being in recovery for a lot of years now, I’ve worked with a lot of people who’ve gotten sober and sat with a lot of folks who are suffering. Bearing witness is a really underrated thing; it’s a big damn deal.”
― Mary Gauthier
“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.”
― Mary Gauthier
“They send women into combat without being prepared for women in combat. The men resented them being there, and it was just very, very difficult for them, and they had to fight for the respect they were earning. And that’s all they want is the respect.”
― Mary Gauthier
“As a songwriter, I was always mining my own depths, which were filled with confusion and darkness.”
― Mary Gauthier
“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.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I spent my 18th birthday in jail. Charges were dropped as long as I promised never to return to the state of Kansas. My parents took me home to Louisiana. I lasted there a week. Then I ran away.”
― Mary Gauthier
“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.”
― Mary Gauthier
“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.”
― Mary Gauthier
“It is a form of arrogance to assume that other people are even thinking about you.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I keep seeing the headline on articles that says something like ‘Mary Gauthier Helping Our Veterans.’ It’s troubling – and it’s condescending. Whatever I’m doing as a songwriter to help them tell their stories, they’re giving it back to me double, triple, quadruple.”
― Mary Gauthier
“A lot of songwriters have written about soldiers and war, but very few have written with them.”
― Mary Gauthier
“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.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I did not know that the wounds of war are often invisible.”
― Mary Gauthier
“We can’t see ourselves very clearly. This I learned as a songwriter. I’m forever trying to figure out what my own truth is.”
― Mary Gauthier
“People who have been through trauma, their souls are hurting.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I love SongwritingWith:Soldiers.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I’m openly gay, and I’ve got a major label record deal in Nashville, and it happened when I was 42 years old. It’s not supposed to happen that way.”
― Mary Gauthier
“Music had always been a kind of anchor for me. But I didn’t write my first song till I was 35.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I’ve got lots of problems. Being gay isn’t one of them.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I’m sort of stuck in adolescence in many ways, like most artists, and march to my own beat.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I think music is the highest form of healing.”
― Mary Gauthier
“It can take me many months to write one of my own songs.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I got sober at 27 and started writing around 30 and started playing music in public around 32, 33.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I came to music and knowing a little bit about life, and I came to music knowing a lot about business – and that’s a real advantage. By the time I came to music, I had purchased real estate, opened restaurants, and been in the business world, so the music business didn’t blindside me.”
― Mary Gauthier
“The job of the artist is to go to the places where most other people are embarrassed to go to. And show it.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I’m a traveler and a vagabond and an observer, and the songs come through that. And that’s just the way it’s going to be.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I think I’ll always draw from being a person that doesn’t know how to have a normal life, whatever a normal life is.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I try not to eat cakes, but sugar screams my name.”
― Mary Gauthier
“What matters is what happens in the soul of an artist when you’re playing.”
― Mary Gauthier
“If I write for beauty and truth, the songs will find their way to me. Then, it’s the songs that speak to the audience, and they can become part of the tribe that is into what I do.”
― Mary Gauthier
“When I first got sober, I hadn’t read anything for six or seven years. I didn’t have even that much focus.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I feel as though I came to music with something to say. It wasn’t like that when I was younger. I didn’t have the ability to articulate what it was I wanted to say.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I always knew I was going to make a record called ‘The Foundling.’ Since I picked up a guitar, I knew it.”
― Mary Gauthier
“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.”
― Mary Gauthier
“The world doesn’t need any more pretty good songs.”
― Mary Gauthier
“There’s a lot of vulnerability in songs – I’m not talking about pop songs – from people that are in the art of songwriting more than the commercial enterprise of it.”
― Mary Gauthier
“By the time I got to songwriting, I had been faced with a lot of troubles as a result of my own collective of trauma. I was someone who instinctively figured out that writing songs about the struggle helps you with the struggle.”
― Mary Gauthier
“Creating something beautiful out of pain helps ease the pain. So, that’s kind of how I got to songwriting – quite honestly out of desperation.”
― Mary Gauthier
“Once I got my life sorted and started to get healthy, then I was able to focus on writing.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I think, because of the kind of writer I am, I can’t do it halfway. I can’t do it without dedicating my entire life to it. I have to give it a hundred percent.”
― Mary Gauthier
“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.”
― Mary Gauthier
“Songs have been my greatest teachers and continue to be really important in my life.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I got issues. Boy, have I got issues.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I guess I find it easier to talk when I have a guitar in front of me.”
― Mary Gauthier
“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?”
― Mary Gauthier
“I don’t really write for catharsis; I get that kind of work done in therapy.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’ll probably be in therapy all of my life.”
― Mary Gauthier
“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.”
― Mary Gauthier
“Ultimately, what I want is for my songs to outlive me: I want my songs to keep being played even after I’m gone.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I write to make some sense of things that confuse me. The mechanics of my own heart are the most confusing I know about – and don’t know about – and other people’s are a bit confusing, too.”
― Mary Gauthier
“My experience is that the universal is the personal. If you can get past your navel-gazing into the deepest part of yourself as a writer, you find everyone – we’re all there.”
― Mary Gauthier
“I’m a big fan of Lou Reed, and I do a lot of talking through songs. It’s more effective with my vocal limitations and also more powerful to slightly sing sometimes. It depends on the emotion, but I’m never going to try to compete with great singers.”
― Mary Gauthier
“When I finally got sober, I moved towards what I might have been if I hadn’t been destroying myself when I was young.”
― Mary Gauthier
“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.”
― Mary Gauthier
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