Events

[FOLK] Mary Gauthier wasn’t looking to get into a political discussion with her new disc, Rifles & Rosary Beads. If anything, her intentions were to transcend our petty bickering—maybe even unify some listeners—while staying true to her craft of storytelling in song.

“The politics of it all will just lead to division and arguments,” she said over the phone from Nashville, which the 56-year-old former Bostonian now calls home. “But the stories are where we can find each other again. I don’t have big answers to the complex questions about military service, but the nobility of service is one of the things I would honor as a songwriter and as someone who cares about nobility on the whole. I have my beliefs, of course. It’s not a big secret: I’m an unabashed, out, leftist lesbian. But I don’t want that to get in the way of how I understand the suffering of our soldiers and my ability to tell their stories.”

Gauthier (go-shay) has released a string of dark, hard-hitting Americana collections that’ve consistently earned her gads of critical accolades, but the narratives can be tough to take – this is not the stuff of passive listening and there isn’t much ear candy to be had. Rifles & Rosary Beads, which she self-released in January and brings her to Sportsmens Tavern on April 23, takes a unique, approach to telling some of our veteran’s stories at the intersections of service, faith, mental health and loss. At the urging of a friend, she attended a retreat focused on songwriting with soldiers. It was something she approached fearfully, and she admits that she really didn’t know much about the military prior to this experience.

“So I went and I did it and I fell in love with it,” she said. “Now I’ve been at it for five years, so I’ve accumulated a big pile of songs. A year ago I realized I had to make a record of some of them. In the end, they’re soldiers, not songwriters… I sit with my guitar and ask them questions, they tell me their stories. We give them a co-write because it’s their story, their experience, their heart and soul.”

There’s some fictionalizing that goes into the process as well, which Gauthier says allows her to better access  emotional truths that work to elicit empathy. But the results aren’t terribly sentimental, either, which is a thread running through all of her work.

“We’re not doing journalism.” she said. “The desired result is a great song, and the soldiers understand that. They know that it doesn’t have to be a factual narrative in order to portray an emotional truth. It’s an artist’s distinction.”

Though she shares the wisdom she’s gathered over the years by teaching at numerous songwriting workshops throughout the year, Gauthier herself remains teachable, both in music and elsewhere in her life. It’s an important ingredient in what makes the stories she tells so consistently high-impact, and Rifles & Rosary Beads is no exception.

“We have a lot of people who have served that are suffering, and we should help them,” she said. “Whether we agree on the politics is something we must put to the side. We lost our unified front with Vietnam. Our soldiers fucking need us, and if we can help them, we should. That whole concept of ‘you support a soldier, you support a war’ is false logic. We all have stereotypes about who our soldiers are, but a lot of these folks joined up because they needed a job, it’s not patriotism that drew them in. So, we don’t really know who they are anymore, we just think we do. The truth is that our nation is actually being served by a very diverse military. All of those stereotypes are useless. I had them too, and I was ignorant… kinda dumb. Because I didn’t find that guy I was looking for when I went there.”

Mary Gauthier comes to the Sportsmens Tavern on Monday, April 23.