Mary Gauthier: Saved By A Song

00:00:15 Speaker 1: Pushkin. Mary Goshet is a folk singer songwriter whose songs have quite literally saved her life. Born a bastard child in New Orleans, it's two old woman I have never seen. I don't know if she ever held me. All I nasees she like go me. Writing music didn't come easily. To go shat. She began abusing drugs and alcohol as a young girl growing up in Louisiana. After years of struggling with addiction, Goshe got clean at age twenty seven after getting arrested for a dui. She picked up a dusty old guitar not long after and began to frequent open mics around Boston, where she eventually found the community in Connection she craved. Mary Gosche released her debut album, Dixie Kitchen in nineteen ninety seven. She moved to Nashville not long after, and a sense become known for her ability to write vivid, literary style lyrics that pull from her past trauma, loss, and heartbreak. Early this year, Goshe published the book Saved by a Song, The Art and Healing Power of Songwriting, which documents her process and inspiration. On today's episode, Bruce Heath them talks to Mary Gosche about how the same determination that once drove her to drink now powers her songwriting. She also talks about how conversations with young US veterans inspired her Grammy nominated album Rifles and Rosary Beads, and Goshe recalls seeing one particularly moving, open mic performance that inspired her to become the artist she is today. This is broken record liner notes for the digital age. I'm justin Richmond. Here's Bruce Utlam and Mary Gotchet. Your great book Saved by a Song, the art and healing power of songwriting. It is a great guide to songwriting. However, when you flip it open and you go to the epigraph, I'm going to read the epigraph. So the epigraph is from the Gospel of Thomas. If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. I thought way to take the pressure off there. I interpret it as meaning is that music and song is this opportunity to bring forth what's very hard to articulate any other way. And a lot of these things are deeply embedded in trauma. For me, I've used music and song to move trauma through my cells and out of my body. If we carry our trauma without working through our trauma, we find often that it gets heavier, not lighter. And so I see that passage is hopeful. You didn't come to songwriting the way a lot of people I interview. D tell me a little bit about when songwriting really started for you. Yeah, I didn't start writing songs until my thirties. I went to chef's school and trained to be a better cook. While I was in the restaurant business, I had found some backers to open a place in Boston and then another place in Boston. I got sober when I was twenty seven, after getting arrested for drunk driving opening night at the second restaurant. And after I got sober, I finished chef school and I started to go to open mics. And it started with one of my waitresses at the restaurant. Had all this time on my hands. After I got sober, I didn't. It felt like a day was forty years long. Wait a second, you were running two restaurants, Yeah, but still drinking and drugs took a lot of time. What you're doing, it took it was the way I completed my day, and without that completion ritual, I needed a way to complete my day. And I was brought to an open mic and it was a lightbulb moment for me. I was like, ah, I want to do this. I want to I want to write a song and get on that stage and play here. It was at Club Pass simon Hervard Square, and so I had an old guitar that I'd been traveling around with for years, but it was dusty and old and the strings were rusty, and I needed to change the strings and rebuild callouses and like put put it in my hands and find my way to chords again. And it was homecoming of sorts, and I took to it really passionately. And what happened was, you know, I'm an addict. So I went at open mics like an attic wood and what I found there was kind of what I was looking for all along with drugs and alcohol, which is community and connection, hanging out with other songwriters and artists and performance poets and just a bunch of wackos and misfits and beautiful crazy people. I found my people. I found community, and I wasn't drunk so I connected in a way that didn't disappear the next morning. I was really rebuilding my life, and music and song became the tap root, I think, to my sobriety and recovery and to my life. And here we are thirty one years later and it still is. So tell me there are people, a lot of people probably listening that have dusty guitars at home who can play a few chords. Where did you start with writing a song? That first day? I said, Okay, I'm gonna do you remember that first day when I was like kind of I didn't have any idea what I was doing or how to do it or but I'd seen a room full of people do it. And I started going to that open mic every week, and I watched, you know, nervous people, people who really weren't very good at it, people who were just getting started, people who were older than me, which was great relief to me because I felt old at thirty one thirty two, however old I was there for me. It was a matter of finding a melody and some words and a handful of chords that my handkerd shape and saying something. And it took me quite a while to figure out what it is I wanted to be saying. I finally made up nine or ten songs and I made a little demo record. When I look back on that, I think, well, you know, I'm imitating my heroes like most people in the beginning. In retrospect, if you listen to that first Bob Dylan record, he's definitely imitating his heroes, from Dave von Ronck to Raandland Jack Elliott to What He Got. Three has one original Dylan song on that first record, and you can see the promise that he has fulfilled. And then some The beginning is I think naturally about trying to figure out what you're supposed to be talking about and what you're supposed to sound like. It's interesting because you know, we're in Nashville. In fact, we're a long music row where a lot of people, you know, they really learned not by figuring out what they had to say, but by just the craft of it. Like I got to write a song because this is how I make a living, and I'm going to try and sell it to somebody. Right, that really didn't go through that for you. It was it was the subject had to come. Yeah, Well, two things One I didn't have to make a living at it. I owned two restaurants and I made a good living, so it wasn't about money for me. And the other thing is I never played in covers bands. I didn't have a large vocabulary musically really G C, D, E, E A B. I mean, there's just that one four or five chord progression over and over again and get fancy to throw a minor in. Have you pushed yourself since then? Because artists like Paul Simon, particularly in the seventies when he was suddenly by himself, he learned music theory because he thought, I just don't have enough chords for what I want to do. Has that been a kind of lifetime thing for you too? No? I can work within my limitations and musically still continue to find new melodies to wrap around where I really want to go. That challenges me the most is lyrically, the places I haven't been before. I want to articulate what I'm going through. The challenge for me is to not repeat myself. And some people will find that deepening knowledge of music helps them to do that. For me, deepening my knowledge of myself and the world and spirituality and faith and in particularly love. That is a full time job for me, as someone who has dealt with a deep seated sense of unworthiness for most of my life, learning how to love and be loved. Man, you know I'll be doing that for whatever time I have left. Is probably not enough to get real good at it. It's going to take another lifetime. Probably. Let me ask you when you say lyrics finding the right words, like, how do you find these works? Are you either kind of I've always got a notebook with me or are you the kind of sit down every day type. I'm on the computers now. Really? Yeah, I wrote on legal pads for years and I still have just huge for legal pads worth of edits that I bring sometimes to my workshops when I'm working with songwriters to go, look, this is how much I edited this song. You think you think your first past is the one like this is how much I had to get rid of to get to that. When the computers came along and I started writing on computers. Maybe some things get lost. I don't just delete it. It's a long running document, but I do cut and paste and use the laptop as I write these days. Definitely, you're a healthy consumer of Amazon Cloud Services. Is what you're telling a lot of stuff. There got a lot of words. What allows you to find those words? I have a thing in my gut that my very first producer, Chrit Harman, identified as the truth thometer. And I think if there's anything that that I could point to that says this is where your talent lies, that would be what I would claim is I have a truth thometer, and that truth thometer tells me when I'm not there yet. And so finding words is not hard. Finding truth is always hard, and that's what I challenge myself to do. And the truth I'm referencing is not the facts, it's emotional truth. Like really what we're talking about here, I'm always in this state of unknowing when I write, I don't I don't know, and I'm in a discovery process. What's that process? Like it's getting rid of bullshit, like that's just not quite true, or that sounds nice and you really want to sing it because it has a razzle dazzle, but it's a half truth. Sounds good, looks good, presents well out of party, but then you leave and realize nothing was said and nothing moved, and nothing really connected to all songs begin with a little bit of that for you. Oh yeah, I have to start with what I call the cocktail party conversation and then work my way into something deeper for me to finish the song. And I have a lot of songs I've started that I didn't finish. I have not finished. Do you think it's because those songs didn't have a truth or because you just couldn't find it didn't find it? I probably belonged to somebody else somewhere else. It wouldn't mind to write. I'm interested. You know. You say you've got a what did you say, a truth truthometer? You know, the flip side of that, and you said this would be the bullshit detector. Yep, uh. Do you have that for other singers? Do you hear songs and go, nice song, ain't true all the time? Oh wow? It really? Yeah, I don't believe even with famous songs, and yeah, I don't believe you. I guess I'm less interested in what the truth is in how they say it. You know, I like a lot of rock music where frankly I don't I don't have a clue what what the lyrics are even are about. I don't kind of care. That's not where I tend to put my ears. I want to hear some truth and that I'm not asking for facts. Fiction is awesome, that's actually a great way to get to the truth. What I mean is I want to believe the singer, and that is wrapped to me, wrapped around emotional truth. And so I think that there's a certain amount of vulnerability involved, a certain amount of taking a risk that's involved, and those twos tend to be universal and they tend to follow us through time. The song you guys warmed up on, which was the War after the War, Now, I know you co wrote that with people I believe whose spouses were, yeah, military spouses and best Nilson Chapman, and you know that line their landmines in the living room, eggshells on the floor. Well, that's I mean, those are just great lines, That's what those are. And you've got those throughout your songs. Is that something you do? You hear little phrases and go, oh that that works. Yeah, yeah, And That's what I'm looking for when I write, is visual that makes you see it and then feel it. Tell me the story about the guy you signed an open mic night. It's a story in your book, and I thought it was so instructive. Yeah, I call it the Farmer in the Hat story. When I was about a year or two into open mics, just very much at the beginning of learning how to write songs and play them on stage, which was for me terrifying. For quite a while. I just had serious stage fright and a sense of what am I doing up here? Every time I got up there, I was like, oh my god, well, the first time you didn't play at all? Right, the first time I couldn't even get a word out. I just completely failed. But I was brought to an open mic where it went for hours and hours and hours because it was a very popular open mic in western Massachusetts at the old Vienna Coffeehouse. One hundred and something people signed up. If you do the math at five minutes, that's a lot a lot of a lot of people and a lot of hours. And so three or four hours into this thing, waiting for our turn to play, a lot of people left, but the people that remained were steadfast and waiting for their turn on stage. And this guy gets up and he's obese, he's an overalls, he's got dirty work boots, he's wearing a straw hat, and he looks as nervous as I've felt on stage, and when they plug him in to get going, he just immediately starts strumming without finesse, and and those of us left in the audience we're like, oh, man, we're gonna have to sit through another horrible song from playing plagued by somebody who has no stage presence. And he was shaking his face, went Crimson. He was hiding under his hat, and it was not a great start. But when he got to the chorus, he's saying, I got holes I cain't fill and bills I can't pay. I'm gonna walk in the water till my hat floats away, And something went across the room. I think of it as an emotional electricity, and we all immediately let go of our judgment of this guy. And what I think occurred was empathy, which is the most powerful experience I think that art can give us, especially the art of song, is empathy. We're suddenly not only being brought to the feeling of what he's saying that we have had, but we're feeling as if we are him. We become him in that moment. And what happened was we understood instinctively he wasn't joking like he was serious, and I don't know if he was and playing suicide, but his narrator was, and we believed him, and that believing him really really moved us. When that happened, the room was his. He had us. It didn't matter that he was obese, it didn't matter that he was unwashed, it didn't matter he couldn't sing, it didn't matter he couldn't play. And he got a standing ovation from the people that were in the audience, and that burned itself into my consciousness of what I'm trying to do as a songwriter. I wanted to do what that guy did. I wanted to make people feel it and be unable to not feel it. And that's still my goal. And he gave me a way of seeing my job that wasn't contingent on music business values, which you gotta be young, you gotta be sexy, you gotta sing great, you gotta play great, you gotta be uh no, that thing there. If I can do what he did, I know I'll have a career. I know I'll have people who will want to hear what I do. But it was a great song quality, which is it was so visual. Yep. And that is what I talk about a lot, is that songs often in my way of looking at it, or like cinematic moments. There's like little films. You want to bring people into the movie so they can see themselves in your story. That's always what I'm trying to do, and then that creates emotion. Can you think of songwriters who for you always create those visual pictures? Oh god, there's so many. You talk about Sam Stone being one of your friend John always always, Now, that would be a good song, but everybody knows there's a hole in Daddy's arm where I don't think that song would be nearly as well known with that. That's the line that there's a hole in Daddy's arm where all the money goes. Yeah, oh my god, what a visual. My friend Gretchen Peters has a song called on the Us to Sink Cloud and it's about a divorce or a breakup and she she's finds herself in the church and Saint Cloud and she weeps in the arms of Jesus for the choice you made that is so much better than you broke my heart. And now I'm sad. The recitation of I'm sad in blue does nothing. It doesn't have the power. And that's just understanding how human empathy gets triggered. Give me a couple of examples from your own songwriting, where you are consciously or unconsciously thinking of that moment, the until my hat floats away, your your hat floating away moments. M Well, you know, I try to get an imagery in every song. I got one moving on through the pain. I'm waiting on another train, like we we all know, I'm not really at the train station waiting for on another train. It's a metaphor, but the tra brains always lend themselves to these, to these songs. That the train is a metaphor for so many things, the comings and goings of everything in human life. That's why there's I think, never enough trained songs. You know, working with the veterans rifles and rosary beads, you hold on to what you need, you know, I asked the young man, I wrote that with what did you see when you got off that plane? Nineteen years old kid from Austin, Texas, gone through basic and find yourself in Fallujah during the search He said, Well, there was guys holding rifles with white knuckles, and there was guys holding rosary beads and rolling them. He wasn't a Catholic, so he didn't know that that's how I was raised Catholic. You pray each bead. Each bead has a prayer attached. He said, they were rolling the beats, and so I just immediately wrote down rifles and rosary beads because that imagery is so strong, and followed it up with you hold on to what you need. And then I asked him what was it that you held on too? And there was a long pause, and I knew I had asked a hard question. Then he slowly and somewhat hesitantly said Vicadin, and I came right down into the song Vicadin, Morphine dreams, rifles and rosary beats. We'll be right back with more from Mary Goche. After a quick break, we're back with Mary Goche and Bruce had them. So how do you put it all together? Then? Like, when do you know that I've got this, I've got the order right or is it just work? It's work, yeah, and hours and hours and hours. There's a sense of rightness when it's really starting to feel done. You know. Usually I'll sleep on it and check it the next day and see if I still feel that way, and at least ninety nine percent of the time I don't. Ultimately, at the end of the day, it's a gut feeling and very hard to articulate. I was in that it took you two years to write I drink right about two years. Yeah, I had to get I had to get that bridge, and boy, that bridge took forever. The character had to say something in that bridge so that we knew the song wasn't comical, and that we knew that that character was in trouble. And it took me a while writing that song that before I realized the character wasn't me. Even though it is me, it's not me. And what I had to do is get everything out that didn't belong. Example, the first verse was about my father, but then it was just he in the end. Yeah, like you too, and you understand it as as as the narrator's father. Yeah, but you you cleared out a lot of stuff from that song. Yeah, I had to. I had to keep asking is this true? Is this true? Is this true? Is this true? And if it's not true, then get it out, make space, and try to put something more true in there. Until everything in it I could check the Yeah this is true, which again is not a reference to factual, because the song is fiction. But I believe it to be true in that I believe the narrator it rings true. Well the other thing and we haven't even talked about your music yet. We're talking so much about lyrics. Is the pause for would you mind even playing just the chorus just so people will hear what I'm talking about? Yeah, Fish swam birds fly, Daddy's you mom cry, old man something drink? Wow? Was that pause always in that song? Yeah? Yeah, that is so good. Yeah, yeah, it just makes it That delay is. Man, it's weird because in some situations it comes off as comical. Had you heard that in another song, that kind of delay or it just that just seemed to be how it fell in, Like I figured the the guy would say it in a way that was again a matter of fact. Look, here's what I am, and this is just how it is. He would probably say it a little softer. It wouldn't. He wouldn't go up on I drink. He would say it a little softer. Fish swam birds fly, daddy's yell, mom's cry, old man. They sit and think and yeah, I drink. But you could have filled it in with you know, I'm the kind of kind of drinks, or you know, you could have felled been all those missing syllables had you wanted right. But then it would have felt as though it would be less a matter of fact, if you filled it in with a bunch of mumbo jumbo's. He just has acceptance of what's happening, and then you realize in the bridge, wait a minute, he's lying to himself. The song is emotionally complicated because it is an actually it's an exploration of alcoholic denial, which is a much deeper form of denial than just knowing something to not be true, but but insisting that it is. The alcoholic denial is you have no idea of the severity of your situation. You really don't know. When he says I know what I am and I don't give a damn, the audience goes, Oh, he's in trouble and he doesn't really know how bad it is. You said that phrase, I don't give a damn it is what That was the key to the song for you. Yep. That was a key of the song. It was a two year song. Win in that two years, did you go wait a second, Well, I think I remember something happened. A parallel thing happened where I had a manager. I was over time, trusting them less and less. I had evidence that my trust might have been misplaced in this guy. And he kept saying, Hey, Mary, look trust me. I'm a good guy. And somewhere along the way, I went, wait a minute, I know zero good guys who say that. Shit, I'm gonna stop saying that. Bruce, don't tell people you're a good guy. And I realized it's the unreliable narrator thing. It's like, I know what I am. I don't give a damn. And everybody who hears an alcoholic say that says to himself, I don't believe you. Yeah, because when you shout I don't give a damn, it means you do. What interested me is is the first song you felt was your own. It was a song that was not in your voice, and it was a goddamn HIV. Can you tell me a bit about that? Yeah, thanks for asking. Yeah, that was the song that was written from the perspective of a young man with the virus in the early nineties who knew that he was probably going to die. And while it was his voice, it was actually the first experience I had of my writer's voice. That was my voice. I was speaking in first person from behind his eyes, but everything about it was me. I think that that is really an interesting thing to talk about his writer's voice. I think writer's voice can come through characters. Tooling apart. Who's the writer and who's the character is always interesting, you know the old saying that all biographist fiction and all fictionist biography, there's a lot of me in that guy. I talk about how that song was influenced by all my heroes, but they wouldn't have written it. That one was for me to write. Interesting like so you're thinking of Dylan or other people or what he got three, but they would have written it, No, not first person. I couldn't imagine Steve roll saying I've been a queer since the day I was born. But I was gonna say that because Michael needed to say that the character, right. You know, my name is Michael Joe Alexandra. I've been a queer since the day I was born, and it's just unapologetics, a matter of fact, like, let's just get this on the table so that you can self select the hell out of here. If that's what you feel as though you need to do, and if you want to stay around for the rest of the story, I'm here to tell it to you. This is interesting because you know the two things that work for me. And one is the political part of the song. I guess it's the middle eight. It's a it's just a little couplet. I'm gonna get it wrong, but it's I don't know what it all means. I don't think it means what it seems yep. And the other part is the last first where he goes back and remember him being scared as a kid and his mother would turn on the light. When did that come to you? When you're right, that's intentional. I wanted people to envision themselves in the story. When I had Michael Joe reflect back on him being a boy being scared at night and his mama would come and turn on the light. I want every mama and daddy who heard that song to imagine their child crying and going to the room and picking him up and say it's Okay, it's okay, it's just a dream. Because back then came in with AIDS, We're we're being dehumanized. They were being treated as disposable as Pariah's. I had a friend with the virus who ended up in the Baton Rouge General Hospital with crime scene tape on his door. They wouldn't even put the meals in the room. His parents didn't even go visit him. The hope with that, with that couplet was that people could envision, Wow, this could happen to my kid. Yeah. I didn't want to go for the anger. I wanted to go for the empathy. Paul Simon said to us that a lot of his songs start out angry and he writes them until the anger is gone. I really relate to that. Really, you start with anger, I don't think anger's the I think there's a deeper emotional under anger, and it's almost always hurt or fear. Which isn't to say I don't like angry songs, but I'm trying to go underneath a lot of what might make me angry at first and see what's underneath that, And almost always it's fear or or hurt. You know it hurt me that that my friend Joey was treated like that at the hospital, and that was painful. Like I was angry, but underneath it was more like, gosh, you know, I want people not to do this, and being angry about it's not gonna change that maybe make it make them feel it like it could happen to them, to their own kids, because of course it could. Do You ever have writer's block? Oh yeah, what's that? How do you work through that? I just wait it out? Oh? Really? Does it always come back? Life will deliver something that and that brings me back. I don't force myself to the page or to the guitar. I feel it and it comes back. I don't panic. I definitely am writing less than I used to. I don't feel as though I have a lot to prove anymore. The songs still come, and every couple of years I'll keep making records. That's interesting, But you don't say you don't worry so much if you're if you're if you're away from the guitar for three weeks, ay, oh that's common. Yeah, yeah, so you're not the I gotta sit down every day with I used to be I had a lot of catching up to do because I started late. Yeah, but you know, ten records in I'm kind of like, hmm, yeah, I don't. I don't write for a publisher with with you know, you have to write twenty one songs a year to keep your publishing deal. I don't have any of that hanging over me, So all right when I have something to say. When you wrote I Think Sweet Words, for a long time, you thought you were describing the other personal relationship, and you seem to have a lot of those kind of clarifying moments you realize you were describing yourself. Yeah, and the song flipped for you. Yaha moment, that's what you want. That's why it's so connected to purpose for me, because the song always teaches me. The song is the teacher. I'm the student. Always. It doesn't make sense. It seems paradoxical. Yes I'm writing it, but it's also writing me. There's that famous Flannery O'Connor quote. It goes something like, I write so I can read it so I can make sense of what I think. Well, songs, I write so I can sing it so I can make sense of what I feel. We've talked about a lot of songs. Is that one you like to play to maybe demonstrate some of the things we've talked about. Well, I'd love to hear a new song. May Turnity hold you in the hollow of her hand. May a soft wind infold you as you travel distant lands. May the moon stars delight you as the daylight dims, to the morning sun warms your face. Till I see you again. May you lay down your struggle beneath a silver sky. May a summarine inside your jeans sang a lullabye. May that be no more sorrow, no more pain. May you sleep inside the stillness of the night, tilice you again. May you never be a stranger. May you never feel alone. May you read unit with family and friends. May they walk you home. May love embrace you in a dance that never May you rest engine long to Lassie You again. May you rest ed? To Lassie You again. That's Mary Gochet singing till I See You Again from her upcoming album We're gonna take a quick break and then we'll be back with more. We're back with the rest of Bruce Hedlum's conversation with Mary Gochet. You are a storyteller. You're like John Prine that that you know, the sentences tend to can act. But in a couple of songs you've done this where you just use phrases. And one of my favorites is is Mommy Here, Mama Gone. It's just it's almost like like David Byrne Wright songs that way. He just they're just phrases he writes and he strings together. Do you remember writing that? How did you choose that for that song? That was a tough one that record cycle, the songs of the Foundling, that took quite a while to execute. I don't have a great memory of writing that one. I know that the song was definitely inspired by the John Lennon song Mother. What was inspirational about that song for you? His absolute vulnerability that that song, if you really listen to it, that's a frightening song. It's an extremely unlikely single for a post Beatles record from John Lennon. He was extremely vulnerable in that song. And if you read the lyric, it's hard not to cry mother, you had me, but I never had you. I mean, that's sprutal, that's painful, and I just gotta tell you goodbye. And then in the end he's screaming, Mama, don't go, Daddy, come home. That little person inside him is traumatizing what happened to him as a boy, and he ended up in that therapy with Janov trying to scream it out. And that showed me the way and in my own work around my adoption trauma. I spent my first year in an orphanage and didn't understand I was traumatized at all until I understood in my mid forties that, oh wow, this is what drove the addiction that relinquishment. I think I'll be dealing with relinquishment my whole life and the experience of being terrified of being abandoned. And it's a gold mine for songs I've written that plays a lot. So MoMA here, Mama gone kind of encapsulates it, like, wait a minute, where are you? What do you mean? It doesn't make sense that you're never coming back. It's from the voice of an infant who can't say such things. Oh so that's like the lack of connection between it's just their little impressions. Almost. Yeah, it need to be real simple in a way. A baby is crying this. Yeah, Now, is there something wrong with me that I actually prefer John Lennon's song Julia to Mother because that's also about his mother. Well, mother's painful song to listen to. It's a painful song to listen. Maybe it's not. Maybe I find it almost a little embarrassing. It's a little too painful for me. It's a lot. I understand what he was doing. He wasn't doing the music business in that song. He was trying not to drown, and I get that. And it's a serious song. It's not oh blade, oh blah da. It is help and I love that he had the courage to do it, and it's a roadmap for people who want to use songs and music for more than entertainment. There's not a lot of entertainment in that song, but I think that the song is a manual to articulating things through song that need to be said or they could kill you. Back to the beginning of my book, which you do not bring forth will kill you. He had to write it, and I deeply respect it, and it gave me permission to do the work I needed to do. You've mentioned permission a couple of times even during your career. Have you felt I don't have permission to do that. Do you still feel that with songs? I think permission is nice. I think having people come before me and point to what's possible and show me the way is I think that I'm I'm in a tradition. I follow in the inside a tradition. One of the greats I think Nancy Griffith, you know she, she I think was a trailblazer in many ways. She followed behind a lot of men, Texas men. The permission was granted sometimes in permission denied other times, but her work gives young women permission to go places where where they might not have gone before her. And Loretta Lens music gave Nancy permission, I mean, think of it in country music. There the women often were singers and the songwriters wrote the songs. But Loretta wrote her own songs. And I would venture to say Nancy would say that gave me permission, like in a metaphorical way, like like oh, we can do this. Are there other songwriters that you feel gave you permission? You mentioned John Pryn, John Lennon, Oh yeah, John Pryn, John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, Woody Gosh Yeah, Woody and Bruce and Leonard and Patti Smith and Lucien to Steve Earle, still is is writing at the top of his game. Um, you know, I think something really happened when the Nobel Committee gave Dylan the Nobel Prize for Literature. I know one thing that happened is it made a lot of writers authors very angry. But it also, I think acknowledged that songwriting can be literature. I would argue maybe there needs to be a category for songwriting because songwriters can be can be the author's hands down over and over, because we have melody, and melody is a highway to the heart. But I think that there's a permission in that that yeah, yeah, right, at a very high level, it is. It is, um a form of literature. You actually had a great quote in your book about songs, which I wrote down. The songs were the most distilled of the arts, the most clarified. That's your cooking background right there. Accessible and democratic. I think you don't need a college education to go to a show and listen to music, whereas walking into art museum is a little intimidating. But with music, man, you just put your money down and go to the show and you get it because you feel it It's always a little alarming when you go to a show and you realize how many other people are reacting to the song because you thought it was yours and it's everybody's thing. Yeah, you mentioned listen to Williams and you talk about taking a trick from her from her song change the Lots. Yeah, in I think it's me now. Yeah, tell me about tell me about that. Yeah. It was stuck with Mercy now and I didn't know where to go from my own sort of life. How did I how do I move this song forward? I'm talking about my father, I'm talking about my brother, I'm trying to work in my mother and my sister, and they just kept bucking out. It's like they don't really belong here. And I didn't quite know where to go. So I went to lunch and I thought, wait a minute, Lou has this song Change the Locks, and I have my laptop with me, so I look at it. I'm like, oh man, her camera lens is on a dolly and it gets surreal. Towards the end, she's going to change the name of the town. She starts, I'm gonna change the locks on the door so you can't come here. Anymore. And the next thing you know, she's changing the tracks on the train and the name of the town. And I realized that camera lens backs up further and further, and the perspective becomes wider and wider. It's like, that's what I need to do. And so I went from my father and brother, to my church, my country, to all of life, every living thing, and then everyone the camera's on a dolly. It backs up and it worked, And I want to thank Lucy to Williams for that, who probably got that technique from Robert Johnson or some bluesman because she's an expert on the blues. Yeah. Oh, that's amazing. So it's the same shot, if you're talking about just broadening it out, Yeah, the same, the same shot, getting wider and wider. You use another technique, and it does come out of folk music, which is you'll repeat a single line. You don't do it a lot, you do it beautifully in The Orphan King, which is just a series of misfortunes that the orphan goes through. And then I think every does every line finish with Hail, Hail the Orphan King. Yeah, yeah, it still ends, but it ends with but I still believe in love. I still believe in love. Yeah, And I think in that song, I was trying to convince myself. Oh that's the need for repetition was because I was trying to really convince myself. Yeah. I think that was a motive for June, and I knew that it was. It was needed. The records so intense and the songs are so laced with trauma, like mother like, it's like this is almost unlistenable. We need something that ends this thing with faith. And so what am I going to believe in? Well, I'm going to believe in love, I think. Okay. So we talked a lot about your techniques, which I'm fascinated by because I love that stuff, the healing power. I mean you when you say saved by a song that's the title of your book, you mean that, yes? Literally? Yeah. Where would you have been if you didn't go to that open mic night? I don't know, I don't know. I know this that when you get sober, it becomes harder and harder to stay sober. If you don't have purpose, you gotta get sober and then fine purpose. You had two restaurants, you were successful. Money didn't do it and Jambalaia didn't do it. My purpose wasn't ever going to be restaurant tour. I wasn't emotionally, it didn't go deep enough for me. For a lot of people, it's it's their purpose, and they have a great life owning running restaurants and that's what they were put here to do. And for me, it just wasn't going to be. It didn't It didn't feel deep enough for me. Also, I didn't like having a big, large staff that I had to take care of. I wasn't a great boss, and I'm still not a great boss. And I really am better with fewer people. And so I like the independence and the constant challenge of being a troubadour and always, always, always the blank page. It's not like this job ever gets done. My recovery is deeply attached to writing songs and to writing and that is my purpose. My purposes to tell stories and sing to people and make these connections and so save by a song. I think also the music has been therapeutic for me quite frankly. It's given me ways to work through really hard and complex trauma and emotion. It's a great book. Everybody read from the start Yeah's just been wonderful. Thanks to Mary Gasche for graciously talking us through her songwriting technique and inspiration. You can check out a playlist of all the songs mentioned in this episode at broken Record podcast dot com. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record broken Record. It is produced with help from Leah Rose, Jason Gambrell, Martin Gonzalez, Eric Sandler, and Jennifer Sanchez, with engineering help from Nick Chafey. Our executive producer is Maio LaBelle Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and uninterrupted ad free listening for fourning on a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcasts subscriptions, and please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast. To aff our theme musics by Kenny Beats, I'm Just Image