WMRE Executive Staff - Campus Life

“Born a bastard child in New Orleans to a woman I’ve never seen. I don’t know if she ever
held me. All I know is she let go of me.”
Louisiana’s songstress Mary Gauthier (pronounced go-Shay) is carving out a place among our
nation’s best poets and songwriters. Citing Bob Dylan, John Prine, Jim Morrison and Neil Young as
muses, listeners can hear their influences in the midst of her unique sound. As a songstress, poet
and philosopher, Mary’s led an interesting life. At fifteen she stole her adopted parents’ car, was in
detox multiple times as a teenager, and landed in jail on her eighteenth birthday. Still on drugs, she
majored in philosophy at LSU then moved to Boston, where she managed to open a restaurant called
Dixie Kitchen, also the title of her first album. Culinary success prompted her to clean herself up, and
at age thirty-five Gauthier was finally sober and wrote her first song. Of her writing she says, “I hit my
stride when I wrote this song called “Goddamn HIV”
from the perspective of a gay man who’s got the virus.
I realized that something has to happen when I write.
If it raises the hair on my arms, I know I’ve nailed
it.” Her first album was nominated for a Boston Music
Award for ‘Best New Contemporary Folk Artist.’
She soon sold her share in the restaurant to produce
her second album, Drag Queens in Limousines, which
garnered a four-star review in Rolling Stone and
won her the Independent Music Award ‘Country Artist
of the Year.’ But Mary Gauthier keeps getting better.
I saw her perform to a packed crowd at The Red
Light Café this past winter, where modest Mary thanked the audience for her first sold-out show.
“Things are looking up, boys,” she mused to her back-up band. She politely chatted with us after the
show, autographing the scores of albums she sold that night. I bought her third release, Filth & Fire,
the title referencing “Sugar Cane,” a song about burning sugar cane for harvest clouding the air black
in her bayou hometown Thibodaux, Louisiana.
Every release is personal yet relatable, and more compelling than the previous; her latest,
Mercy Now, is no exception. She conjures up incredible images in the Doors-esque “Wheel Inside
the Wheel,” like Marie Laveau (a famous voodoo queen) promenading with Oscar Wilde. And though
her songs are often love elegies, they don’t depress, but let us mourn with her about our own losses.
The title song of Mercy Now leaves this prayer:
“Every living thing could use a little mercy now
Only the hand of grace can end the race
Towards another mushroom cloud
People in power, well
They’ll do anything to keep their crown
I love life, and life itself could use some mercy now”
--Valerie Gaimon