Mary Gauthier

00:00:08 Speaker 1: Pushkin. Just a quick note here. You can listen to all of the music mentioned in this episode on our playlist, which you can find a link to in the show notes for licensing reasons, each time a song is referenced in this episode, you'll hear this sound effect all right. Enjoy the episode. Mary Goche believes that good songs can save lives. She turned to music in her thirties and became a songwriter of incredible depth and honesty with songs like Mercy Now, A Long Way to Fall, and I Drink, songs that she says helped save her life. A few years ago, Mary started collaborating with US military veterans and their spouses, helping them write songs about their own experiences. Those songs are featured on her latest album, Rifles and Rosary Beads. Recently, we sat down with Mary in Nashville asked her to play a few songs from the album and talk about this unique collaboration. I'm Bruce Headlam and this is broken record, So tell me a bit about this song. Yes, thank you. This was written with a group of military spouses from a bunch of different branches of the military, five different spouses and my fellow songwriter Beth Nilson Chapman, and we wrote this at a Songwriting with Soldiers retreat. Songwriting with Soldiers is a nonprofit that pairs civilian songwriters with veterans and military spouses so that we can make songs out of their experiences. Now you came to this, you've done this for several years, but you don't come from a military background. Your family wasn't in the military, Is that right? Well, my dad served in Korea, but we never ever heard a word about his service. There's one picture of him in uniform, and he never ever talked about his service, but he he did serve. I have zero experience with the military, and until I started working with Songwriting with Soldiers, I didn't know anyone who'd served in Afghanistan or Iraq. So take me inside the room. When you first started working with veterans and spouses. I was asked to do it by the founder of Songwriting with Soldiers, Darden Smith, because of a referral through Darryl Scott, fellow songwriter here in Nashville, who had done a program with them, and thought I would be I would be up for the task of doing one of these retreats. So Darden invited me, and the first retreat I did was all women, all female soldiers. I got paired with two women and we sat down, and I was a nervous wreck because of my limited knowledge of what they'd been through, and so I wanted to get it right and I wanted to capture what they had to say, but I didn't know what I was doing yet, and so I just kind of interviewed them and they had a lot to say, and as they spoke, I just typed it into my laptop. And I learned right away that at some point the title a song title is going to pop out of their mouth. And just put that on top of the page and start working on it. Now, you know military people, and I've done a project with veterans as well and their spouses, and they're the first to tell you that they don't always have access to those emotions and to those feelings. Was there something you had to break through? Were they guarded? What I remember is that when the music starts to come and it reflects what they're saying, it is kind of a can opener. It just opens the walls of protection that they've built around their heart. Melody is very powerful, and when it reflects you, you feel seen and heard, and that empathy bond breaks down. I think the natural self protection that someone has when they've been traumatized, and so many of our veterans do carry war trauma. So I think the answer is yes, a lot of the vets are protected, especially with civilians, because we don't know what they've been through. But also I think there's a sense that they're being heard when the music starts to come. So you were first working on the words, you said, you were at your laptop, you didn't have your guitar, that's right. When could you bring the guitar in pretty quickly? I think once I have a couple of lines and I want to see how they're going to sing, So I'll just start messing around with very simple core progressions and it starts to sing pretty quickly. And I've been doing this for six years now, so I have quite a bit of experience. But I like to look up when the music starts to come because almost always their eyes get big. Is it's music sees us in ways that there's not really an explanation for. Music goes to the deepest part of who we are, and when the music sees them, they they kind of are blown away in a way like it's like, what, like this is going to really truly reflect me? You know? That's what we as songwriters just sort of take for granted, and because this is our job, we know it as part of our everyday life. But for someone who's never experienced an original song of their story, is it is? It is quite astonishing process. And how do they react after that? Do they feel a little self conscious again or do you feel it opens up something that stays open. I think there's a real sense of intimacy that's formed and empathy in the co write in the writing room. But when we take the song back into the large group and they realize, oh my god, what I just revealed is going to be played in front of all these people, I think a lot of fear is experienced. And when we talk about it in the retreats, the founder Darden Smith always says there's two kinds of courage. At least, there's the kind of courage it takes to put the uniform on and go serve the country, and the kind of courage it takes to take the uniform off and be honest about what happened over there and what remains inside of you that's unresolved. And so this is courage time. When their song is about to be played in front of their group, I think there's a lot of fear. I mean, I've seen guys from Special Forces break into a cold sweat that's running down both sides of their face. Do you remember playing this song in front of the wares after the war? Do you remember taking this song into a bigger room? Yes? Do you remember what the reaction was? Yes? All of the women who co wrote it were huddled into a group and they were holding each other's hands, and there were tears, and there was a sense of sisterhood and understanding and instant bond that a song is. It's empathy. They they know each other's experience, they've lived each other's lives. And what was the reaction in the audience was the audience was their husbands, and their husbands, if I remember right, so many of their husbands say, the true hero is my wife. Nobody knows what she's gone through. You know, people thank me for my service, but she's going through the aftermath and deserves that. I think the husbands were grateful that that this song gave voice to their hero. In many instances, it's their wife. Did did that surprise any of the men? I think it was a relief because this was a co write with a group of women, so it wasn't any couple singled out. It was five women and five men, and that the group proved. I tod cover and relief, like, Oh, we're all going through it. It's not just it's not just us, which is that's the great power of song in a nutshell songs let us know we're not alone, right, That's that's what I was drawn to all along, from the very beginning. Listening to the radio as a kid, It's like, oh my god, that's me coming out of that little box on the wall the intercolm. You know, do you remember the first song that did that for you, that made you feel that you shared an experience with someone else, someone you didn't know. Oh God, the radio when Casey Casem was American Top forty. I listened to it in my room, laying in my little twin bed under the intercom and Baton Rouge Louisiana in the seventies, and song after song after I tried so hard to Stay Awake for the top ten. Song after song after song it was. Bruce said it the best Springsteen. I learned more from a four minute record than I ever did in school music and songs. I've always been where I've tried to where I have I've found my story myself, my emotional reality is in songs. What surprised you the most when you started working with the veterans and with their families. I think what's been most surprising to me is the heaviness of the weight that they carry, Just how hard it is to deal with war trauma inside a family system in a war that goes on and on and on. A lot of these troops are active duty, so they're going to be called back. A lot of the vets we've worked with have multiple, multiple deployments, if I'm not mistaken, winner eighteenth year of the conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq, and it's falling on a very proportionally to the population, small number of people. They carry so much, and one of the shocking things for me is this could be my kids. I'm fifty, I'll be fifty seven in the next little while, and these could be my babies. It really activated a maternal impulse in me I didn't even know I had. I just want to wrap my arms around them and keep them safe. I found myself in many ways drawn to them, and in a way that is new for me, very quickly, deep deep love. I love these people. Now we should say this song, and many of the songs you're going to play today, were from your most recent album, which is Rifles and Rosary Beads, which was all the songs are co written with veterans YEP and their spouses and their spouses. Now, not to scare people away, but I think a lot of these songs, they are incredibly powerful. But you know, there's some songs that explicitly address the war experience. But there's songs like this one. It's got that great line, and I'm not going to ask you to say which one of the people wrote it, because I'm going to just assume they all did. Caught between my pain and the pain of someone else. I think that's something that even people who aren't veterans or in their families people understand that kind of experience. Were you trying to write songs that could be lifted out of its immediate circumstances like this is a song for everybody, definitely, not No. What I was trying to do is get to their deepest experience. Because of the years I've been doing this, I know for a fact that if I can get to their deepest experience, it will just be a song for everybody, because if you go past the personal to the deeply deeply personally, you hit the universal, and the universal is what makes the song great. And what we try to do is write great songs with members of the military and their spouses. The goal is to find what the song wants to say and what their souls need to say. Well, let's hear a very different song, a great song which is called Iraq, and it's about a very different experience. Thank you. We'll be back with Mary Gache's song Iraq after this break. We're back with Mary Gasche performing her song Iraq from the album Rifles and Rosary Beads. Can you tell me the story of writing this song? Yeah. I wrote this with the female large engine mechanic who served in the Army. Her name is Brandy Davidson, and she was a vibrant, incredibly charismatic, beautiful woman with a million dollar smile and beautiful clothes, and she was a class president of her high class, and she just had personality. And she feels or felt at the time that the sexual harassment she experienced in Iraq broke her down and she had to rebuild herself after she came home. And it was stunning for me to hear her say that her enemy really was in Iraq, that the battle she was fighting and the war that she was engaged in was sexual harassment. Was that the phrase she used, her enemy wasn't Iraq. That's correct. When you heard that, did you? I said, sweetie, let's call this thing Iraq. What do you think? And you know, I tried to imagine what it was like for her, and so I just asked her, you know, were you covered in Greece. Give me the names of some of the tools. I don't know what the torque wrenches or any of those things she listed, but she does. And she was one of only two large engine mechanics in the area where she served that were female, and so she was up against it and it was really hard for her. There's such beautiful lines in that song, the double meaning of I worked on my back, the image of her drawing a line, of course, your mind fills in the rest of it in the sand, in a place where the wind blows the dust. That's quite incredible. Thank you. You've written a lot about trauma in your own life and for people who don't know your story. You were adopted, You were in a foundling hospital for a year back when they called them foundling hospital. You struggled with your adopted family, ran away from home. You did open a restaurant in Boston and stopped drinking alcohol at some point. Does your trauma make it easier to relate to the trauma of someone like this who had a very different experience. No, I think so. I think it does. Although all of the songwriters that work with the Songwriting with Soldiers program are really good at what they do. I feel drawn to it in a way that feels natural to me. Once I got over my original fear around doing a good job and realized I could do this job, I have a real strong belief that it's the songs and songwriting that were my life jackets. After I got clean and sober, I needed something to hold on to. It couldn't be accumulating capital in a restaurant making Jamalaya. I needed something more, and so I walked away from the restaurant and became a full on, full time songwriter and literally worked my way through my own story in my writing, using the songs to in many ways, release the poison. What happens is empathy. You know, people say, oh my god, that's my song. You know me, you see me. I'm like, well, you know, we're made of the same stuff, and that is very powerful for both the songwriter and the person who resonates with the song. And you know, you did not take up songwriting because you wanted to be Britney Spears. You did this at age thirty five, Is that right? Yeah? I started writing songs in my mid thirties and came to Nashville at age forty. Do you remember the first song you wrote? Not really, I think it was probably pretty bad. Had you been did you play the guitar by then or was it did you just start from kind of well scratch? I kind of always had a guitar. My aunt Jenny, gave me her guitar. She was a bit of a folks singer, and she gave me one of her old guitars when I was thirteen, and then I got my own guitar a few years later from the music store round back ovation very first guitar that ever plugged in and made an acoustic electric guitar. But I didn't write songs until I got clean. So play some of my hero songs, you know, the simpler songs. But after I got clean sober, I was very much called to write, and I couldn't really explain it. I didn't know why, but it became very clear that this is what I had to do. I never expected to make a career out of it, but that just came on. It was a process, and they came on, and then I just surrendered to it and came to Nashville when I was forty. When did you first step on a stage and sing your own songs? Probably when I was thirty two thirty one. What was that like? It's probably the most frightening thing I've ever done. I was terrified. I was absolutely terrified. I remember all the spit drained out of my mouth. It was like I could have spit dust. I had nothing. I had my heart exploding in my ears, no spit. My hands were shaken, and I forgot the words, I forgot the chords. I lost it on stage. It was terrible, but something in me said, well, you're gonna have to do that again, you know, I just told myself, yeah, that was horrible, but the good news is it can't be worse than that. Do it again? Had that been I mean, you know you were a cook before then. Did you always throw yourself at things you found really hard? Apparently? Yeah? Is it getting easier? It's gotten incredibly for me to be on stage. Yeah, It's where I belong there and I can take over a stage without terror. Do you want to play another song? Happy to do it? So tell me about your co writer. Sailor in the Navy. His name is Jamie Trent. He served in Desert Storm. He wanted to write a song about how complex Veterans Day is for him, how the feeling things that he has on November the eleventh or not at all simple. In fact, he feels opposite and conflicting emotions on that day and I wanted to help him try to get to that. And as we talked, he told me that in his town on Veterans Day, if you have an active duty military ID, waffle House will give you a free breakfast. And for me, as a songwriter, that just the whole movies right there. So let's send you to waffle house on November eleventh, and you tell me what happens. And we wrote the story basically using our imagination and his experience to move the parade past the waffle house while he's sitting there with conflicted emotions. How did you get that out of him? Well, songwriting is a skill, and I've been at it quite a while, and I know that it needs to be a little a movie, and the listener needs to be able to see the scenery and put themselves into the protagonist's body and look out from their eyes. So when I ask them questions about what's going on in the little movie and they give me great answers, it's really exciting for me to ask Jamie what about when people thank you for your service? And he's like, I just don't know about that. What I got from him is that a lot of the folk who thank him for service don't understand what his service is and continues to be he's struggling. If I got text from him yesterday, he's been out of the military for quite some time and he's in hospital today. He struggling with a heart condition that was brought on direct result of his service. He calls it the gift that keeps on giving. He's dealing with probably the lifetime of health issues from what happened to him on the carry aircraft carrier that he worked on. So the movies come alive with detail. The songs are little movies, and the vet's just give me the detail if I ask them the right questions. Is that the same process you put yourself through. Absolutely, you ask yourself those questions. Yep. Do you see the movie first or do you have to build the movie? Build a movie. I never know how it's gonna end. In this song, when the last line became clear that it was gonna rain, we both screamed. It's so perfect. It's so perfect. We didn't know it was gonna rain. It was coming along and it was just we both went as it begins to rain, and we just screamed because it's just like and then the curtain closes. The songs have their own intelligence. In many ways, we're just trying to get David out of the marble, like Michael Azelo said, But in other ways, I kind of know I got the chisel and the hammer. I kind of know where to bang. Okay, I'm going to try and steal some more of your tricks for our listeners. Pretend I'm sitting here, I'm not a veteran. I've got a guitar in my hand, and I wish it were as nice as your nineteen fifty Gibson, which is really beautiful. I know three or four chords, like most people do. Where do I start? Well, you ask yourself what matters to me today, what's important to me today, what's going on inside me today? What are my concerns areas of concern? Well, I teach songwriting a lot, and my hope for each student is that they write the songs only they can write. You know, everybody wants to be their hero or sound like Bob Dylan, But Bob's got that covered. And I think that we each have songs only we can write. And so my guide would, my guidance would be to address your areas of concern, deep concern. What really matters to you today, what's really bugging you today? What's bringing great joy today? I don't know if you're can write a happy song or sad song. I don't know your mood yet, but be honest about it. In your song and just come up with three chords that sound like that feeling and let it start to be guided with an invisible hand that I don't have a name for. It exists for all of us. If we ask it to help us, it will Does every one of your songs have in the writing have that kind of Eureka moment like when you realized that it was going to rain at the end of his song. No, not all of them, but I think the good ones all do. Yeah, the good ones all contain what I call a godline, a line that is so good I couldn't have possibly written it that it came through me more than from me. And I look at the page and go, oh my god, look at that. Are you one of Because your song seems so focused and so concentrated. I think most people who listen to you imagine that that you just write these songs and that these little jewels and you uncover them. Are you that kind of writer or are you a kind of let a thousand flowers bloom? You write a lot of songs and then whittle them down a whittle hard work. Yeah, The simplicity is because I've edited it and edited it and edited it even in individual songs. How many verses would you write? Well, I write, I write more verses than you hear. But each line I could easily spend the whole day, eight hours on a line you're writing often reminds me of Leonard Cohen's. Well, Leonard's one of my heroes who wrote pages and pages of lyrics to get it down to that, to that very and you have the same quality of being able to take something very large and amorphous, a feeling and put it in very concrete language. Yeah, it starts a morphous for me too, very very large and amorphous, and the process of getting it too simple is quite complex. Actually, there's just a feeling in my gut that says you're not there yet, and I honor it and it it makes me work harder, and I don't let I don't let myself off the hook very easily. I just keep going and try to get to that truth that I know is underneath all of the almost truths. Do you write every day? No, I have zero discipline around writing. Okay, what makes you sit down and write? Then? Well, with the vets, it's urgent, I'm sating, I'm sat down in front of them and I got to get them a song, and I got two hours. These all these songs are written in less than two hours, so I don't do the hardcore witty thing with these as I would with my own. So that's urgent. I gotta do it. What gets me to write a song these days are intense emotions and the confusion co writes help. I mean, I live in Nashville. It's co writing town, and we sit down with co writer and have some coffee and talk about life, and that'll get me to a song. But I'm not. Uh. Yeah, I wish I was more disciplined around that. I wish I produced more songs. I want to ask you about something you said a couple of years ago when you released an album. You said you were at a point in your life that you wanted to de romanticize romantic love, but you were through with the idea of romantic love. I was through with the idea that romantic love was gonna save me. There's a difference. Okay. For the longest time, I thought romantic love would fix me, kind of like the way I thought booze and dope were going to make me less anxious. I thought romantic love was going to make problems go away. I think the move towards de romanticizing romantic love is a move towards adulthood. In some ways, I believe in romance. I believe in romantic love. I'm currently in love in fact, but it ain't gonna fix me. The problems that I take into romantic love will remain the problems that I have to deal with. What did you think romantic love was going to fix when you belie leaves that romantic left could fix you? Oh God, you know that's a hard question. You're going Barbara Walters on me here, I'm going to ask you what kind of tree you would be? Now? Yeah. I think for the most part of my life, I've been incredibly lonely. Music has helped ease that loneliness by connecting me to people and the process of working in therapy on a lot of the stuff that happened when I was a baby that year in the orphanage has a greater impact than if you'd have told me the impact of that when I was twenty. I mean, it would have just destroyed me because I wouldn't expect it fifty going on seven that I'd still be dealing I'm going to be dealing with that for the rest of my life. We think of as an infide as, they don't remember it, so it really isn't going to have an impact. Turns out it affects the brain chemistry and it leaves a traumatic imprint on the brain to not be held as a baby. And there is something about romantic love that I thought would replace the affection I didn't get as a baby, and I had to come to terms with the reality is I have to I have to learn how to deal with that in a way that it isn't going to make someone else my savior. So we still believe in romantic love. Absolutely, you're putting it its place. What comes along after, what sustains people. And I'm thinking particularly of a lot of the people you were working with on this most recent album, what's the stains in them? It's not romantic love. What Guther said, oh, we really are is hoping machines. And so you have to have hope. And there are many, many, many forms of love. Romantic love is only one. We kind of idealize that. I think culturally, well certainly songs have idealized that. But if you were to asked me how the veterans in that position of de romanticizing romantic love or able to keep it going. I think that's their love of each other. It's it's it's it is love, but it's the love. It's family love. It's making its family of choice, it's hope and again back to the power of grace. Can you uh, can you finish by doing mercy now? Would be my pleasure. I love Jamie's playing on that. I love that one little dissondant note. I thought, is that a mistake? But then she know she pulled it off. To learn more about Marygotier, go to Marigotier dot com to hear other Broken Record episodes and also a playlist of marygoche songs. Head to Broken Record podcast dot com. Broken re Kurt is produced by Justin Richmond and Jason Gimbrel, with help from me LaBelle, Jacob Smith, Julia Barton, and Jacob Weissberg. Our Broken Record theme music is by the Great Kenny Beats. This show is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. For my co hosts Malcolm Gladwell and Rick Rubin. I'm Bruce Headlin.