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 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.
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.
As a songwriter, I was always mining my own depths, which were filled with confusion and darkness.
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.
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.
Fundamentally, our job as songwriters is to sit down and listen.
Music and books, I think, were the two things I trusted the most as a child - songs and books.
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 have such a good life. It's something I couldn't have imagined in my wildest dreams.
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 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.
There's such a thing as a tribe - and family of choice.
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 an old-fashioned folk singer. I stand in front of an audience with a guitar and a barstool.
I learn something every time I go to work with a veteran. Every single time.
In a lot of ways, songwriting helped save my life.
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.
It is a form of arrogance to assume that other people are even thinking about you.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've learned our soldiers are so much like everybody else. They're just put into an extreme situation.
I long for real and true connection. It has been the theme of all the songs in my whole life.
Songs are here to help us: they build bridges from heart to heart.
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.
A lot of times, a bunch of songs have to be written to get to the next really good one.
I don't have the experience of being in a war.
I don't know who my dad is.
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.
I'm grateful to songwriting and recovery to bringing me to a place of peace.
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've always been drawn to the hard story, the trauma, because I think art can turn it around.
A lot of songwriters have written about soldiers and war, but very few have written with them.
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.
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.
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.
Art, when done well, creates empathy.
'I Drink' took me two years to write.
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.
Songs, especially lyrics, have always been really important to me.
What I really like is this salted calamari - with jalapenos on top.
I think having near-death experiences, they sure made me free.
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.
Soldiers are trained not to be vulnerable, but when they come home, they've got to learn it.
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.
What I've found at 48 years old is that there's nothing about me that's unique.
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.
Recovery stabilized me; songwriting gave me a purpose.
