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
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.
I think we're very much in a mystery here in this life and that artists try to pierce the mystery with their art.
I've come to terms with the fact that I'll probably be in therapy all of my life.
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?
Songs have been my greatest teachers and continue to be really important in my life.
Once I got my life sorted and started to get healthy, then I was able to focus on writing.
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.
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.
When I first got sober, I hadn't read anything for six or seven years. I didn't have even that much focus.
What matters is what happens in the soul of an artist when you're playing.
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.
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.
I think music is the highest form of healing.
I've got lots of problems. Being gay isn't one of them.
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.
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.
When I finally got sober, I moved towards what I might have been if I hadn't been destroying myself when I was young.
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.
Ultimately, what I want is for my songs to outlive me: I want my songs to keep being played even after I'm gone.
I don't really write for catharsis; I get that kind of work done in therapy.
I guess I find it easier to talk when I have a guitar in front of me.
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.
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.
A song is an emotional lightning bolt - a good one, anyway.
I always knew I was going to make a record called 'The Foundling.' Since I picked up a guitar, I knew it.
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.
I try not to eat cakes, but sugar screams my name.
The job of the artist is to go to the places where most other people are embarrassed to go to. And show it.
I got sober at 27 and started writing around 30 and started playing music in public around 32, 33.
I'm sort of stuck in adolescence in many ways, like most artists, and march to my own beat.
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.
I love SongwritingWith:Soldiers.
I did not know that the wounds of war are often invisible.
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.
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.
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.
If I start tracing, I bet I will find a writer in my family tree.
I got issues. Boy, have I got issues.
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.
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.
The world doesn't need any more pretty good songs.
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.
When you see validation for a life's work and dedication, it's a beautiful day.
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.
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?
It can take me many months to write one of my own songs.
I would make a terrible soldier, because I don't follow orders.
Music had always been a kind of anchor for me. But I didn't write my first song till I was 35.
People who have been through trauma, their souls are hurting.
