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Music

Casting light into dark corners

A musical outsider looks inward, drawing selectively from her checkered history to shape her haunting, shadow-stippled songs.

By BRIAN ORLOFF
Published March 16, 2006

Mary Gauthier is an alt-country crooner in the tradition of Johnny Cash. In the casually twangy, haunting songs from her affecting fourth album, Mercy Now, Gauthier writes about outsiders with spare imagery that recalls the best of the Southern gothic tradition.

"That's just the way I see the world, and that's the way I write it," Gauthier says of her semi-autobiographical songs as she speaks by phone from Berkeley, Calif. "I don't know what the name of the (genre) is, but it's dark."

Before writing her first song at 35, Gauthier was the chef at a successful Boston restaurant, a career she launched after a past that included jail, drug addiction and alcoholism. Gauthier talks about songwriting as cathartic, but also as a way to process the world.

When she comes to town Monday for an intimate performance at the Jaeb Theater at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, Gauthier and her band will unveil many of the unflinching songs from Mercy Now, including the supple title track and the album's jaw-dropping I Drink, a raw first-person character sketch from an alcoholic's point of view.

It's tempting to read every song as autobiographical. Do you consider yourself a semi-autobiographical writer, or are you an observer reflecting people's life experience?

I'm just trying to make sense of things and tell stories. Sometimes it looks like it's about me but it's not. Every song is a different experience. Songwriters use first person as an intimate way of telling stories and oftentimes get confused with characters in the story.

Because my story has been so amazing and interesting, and I've had two or three lifetimes jammed into my little 44 years on this planet, people want to read a lot more about the personal nature of my own life into my songs.

But sometimes they just aren't about me.

You write about social and sexual outsiders in many of your songs. Do you feel comfortable with your position in the music world, specifically the mainstream Nashville scene?

I feel really accepted. I'm comfortable there. It's home. It's what I do. I really don't feel like I'm a mainstream artist in Nashville, and so that makes me an outsider. It is because of the subjects I choose to write about; because I'm openly gay; because I'm 44 years old. There's a lot of reasons why I'm not mainstream in Nashville, but there's something really, really cool about being an outsider and still having a major label record deal in Nashville.

Let's talk about your songs. The title track has this incredible sense of redemption.

Mercy Now started off as a very personal song. I was writing about my father who has Alzheimer's and was being put into a nursing home, and it just got big on its own somehow. It just grew. The camera lens I was looking through - the camera was backing up and the picture in the lens just got bigger.

It has such a humanistic message with a line like, "I love life, and life itself could use some mercy now," and it expands, as you said, to encompass larger ideas. Are political dimensions involved? I'm thinking about the Iraq war.

Interestingly, yes, and people have used that song as a way of expressing both positions on the war. That's interesting to me, because I didn't understand when I was writing it that it could be seen as for the war or against the war. I didn't mean to be that open-ended.

Personally, I'm against the war. I think the unilateral invasion of a sovereign nation is against our constitution. I think it's reprehensible . . . yet I don't write preachy songs, because preachy songs are dreadful and boring. I don't want to be told what to think. And I don't think people need to be told what to think.

"I Drink" is another remarkable song. You convey so much emotion in so few words. Talk about the narrative of that song.

To me, the character in that song is a guy who is looking at 50, who has blamed his dad his whole life for his problems and continues to do so. This character is not going to quit drinking. He has just accepted his fate, and he's sitting in a room alone, and he's isolated and resigned to his fate . . . he's going to drink himself to death.

I'm in there obviously. I struggled with drinking. That could have been my fate. Sometimes I think maybe I was writing about me if I didn't get sober. But I did get sober 15 years ago and that, so far, has not been my fate. But the character just seemed to me like a guy who wasn't going to use a whole lot of language to express his situation, so I had to give him just a few words to say.

What is so appealing for you about these dark characters and stark settings?

My fascination is always with people who are in crisis or who are at a fork in the road and the next thing they decide to do is going to change their whole life. To me, that's interesting. And I don't like to tell you where the character's going. I just like to describe the situation. I don't like neat, little packages. My life has never been one, and so I don't want to impose one.

[Last modified March 16, 2006, 10:47:06]