Mary Gauthier

I think music is the highest form of healing.

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 I first got sober, I hadn't read anything for six or seven years. I didn't have even that much focus.

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.

What matters is what happens in the soul of an artist when you're playing.

I try not to eat cakes, but sugar screams my name.

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.

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.

The job of the artist is to go to the places where most other people are embarrassed to go to. And show it.

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 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 got sober at 27 and started writing around 30 and started playing music in public around 32, 33.

It can take me many months to write one of my own songs.

I always knew I was going to make a record called 'The Foundling.' Since I picked up a guitar, I knew it.

I'm sort of stuck in adolescence in many ways, like most artists, and march to my own beat.

I would make a terrible soldier, because I don't follow orders.

I've got lots of problems. Being gay isn't one of them.

Music had always been a kind of anchor for me. But I didn't write my first song till I was 35.

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.

I love SongwritingWith:Soldiers.

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.

I did not know that the wounds of war are often invisible.

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.

A lot of songwriters have written about soldiers and war, but very few have written with them.

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 guess I find it easier to talk when I have a guitar in front of me.

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.

When I finally got sober, I moved towards what I might have been if I hadn't been destroying myself when I was young.

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'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.

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.

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 we're very much in a mystery here in this life and that artists try to pierce the mystery with their art.

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've come to terms with the fact that I'll probably be in therapy all of my life.

I don't really write for catharsis; I get that kind of work done in therapy.

If I start tracing, I bet I will find a writer in my family tree.

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?

It is a form of arrogance to assume that other people are even thinking about you.

I got issues. Boy, have I got issues.

Songs have been my greatest teachers and continue to be really important in my life.

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 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.

Once I got my life sorted and started to get healthy, then I was able to focus on writing.

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.

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.

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.

A song is an emotional lightning bolt - a good one, anyway.

The world doesn't need any more pretty good songs.

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.