Friends of Bob April '06
There is something about Mary Gauthier-there is no better songwriter! Bold
words, obviously. FoB has presented some incredibly talented songwriters over the years [Thompson,
DeMent, Alvin, Wainwright, Brown, McGarrigles, Hitchcock, and lots more], and Mary Gauthier is as good
as any of them. If you like Lucinda Williams, John Prine, or Steve Earle, you will be bowled over my Mary's
talents. Even though her sophomore album earned 4.5 stars in its Rolling Stone review, it wasn't until her 4th
album, 2005's Mercy Now, that Mary received widespread acclaim-and the disc ended up on many, many
best-of-2005 CD lists. She is still no household name, but there's a good chance you've heard a song or two
from Mercy Now, even if you don't know Mary by name.
Mary has led a wild life and it informs some of her songs. Given up at birth, she was adopted by
Italian-Catholics and raised in Thibodoux, Louisiana. She ran away from home in the family car at age 15
and was soon in trouble with alcohol, drugs, and the law. Eventually she studied philosophy at Louisiana
State University for 5 years and then moved north to Boston where she opened that city's first Cajun
restaurant. After 12 years of culinary acclaim she decided it was time for a change, and at age 35 she
became a songwriter. That was 8 years ago and she has quickly built a collection of great, great songs.
Onstage Mary sings and plays acoustic guitar (and some harmonica); she is accompanied by the
virtuosic Thomm Jutz, who plays stunning and mood-evoking electric guitar (and adds some backing
vocals).
Her songs are often dark, though her onstage personality is a hoot (and her songs have some
laugh-out-loud moments too). She is a character and you have to suspect some of the wilder songs are
autobiographical. However, though they're often dark and gritty, there is something oddly calming about her
lyrics-maybe because her words find such poignancy and grace while describing jagged lives that are not
always under control.
Richard Fudge's personal rave: Don't miss this one! Meredith and I played Mercy Now relentlessly-just
stunned by the power of the songs and performance. We were in Austin for a conference in February and played hooky
to see Mary at a club in town. Astonishing! Hilarious and gut-wrenching both. Mary Gauthier is as good as it gets. And
opening the show will be the excellent Indianapolis songwriter Otis Gibbs (who by wonderful coincidence we ran into
at Mary's concert in Austin). Otis just got booked to open a Billy Bragg tour!
Please help us publicize this show by downloading a poster from our website:
www.friends-of-bob.org
An Evening with Lost Highway recording artist
Mary Gauthier www.marygauthier.com
(say "go-shay") + Otis Gibbs
Thursday, May 4, 2006, Duncan Hall 7:30 (doors 7:00)
$10 advance; $12 day of show from Von's Records, JL CDs, McGuire Music, and Downtown Records
[Advance by mail $11 ; checks to FoB, Box 59, Battle Ground, IN 47920; please give name, address, phone,
and email.] All-ages show. Tickets are now on sale!
Mary's album Mercy Now made #1 on LA Times writer Randy Lewis's Top Ten
Music List for 2005. "The Louisiana singer-songwriter's major-label debut
crackles with truths lifted with a surgeon's precision from the struggles of
real life. Following in the footsteps of John Prine, Gauthier exhibits a poet's
unflinching eye, a counselor's compassionate heart and a trickster's wry
spirit."
Mercy Now ranked #3 on the New York Daily News' Best Albums of 2005.
Gauthier's Mercy Now scored #12 on Harp's 50 Greatest Albums of 2005! "Nashville-based
Gauthier combines a twangy world-of-hurt voice with vivid songwriting worthy of Lucinda Williams' 'Car
Wheels on a Gravel Road.'
"Her rich, gothic country tales of broken homes and chemical abuse are easily comparable to Lucinda
Williams. It makes for a chilling ride." Interview
"Mary Gauthier's Mercy Now is a truly extraordinary
album from a critically acclaimed singer." - Vanity Fair
Mercy Now #2 Album of 2005 No Depression magazine
Read more about Mary later in this newsletter.
&
Thank you everyone that responded to our urgent need for a CPA. The situation is under control.
FoB would like to thank the Hilton Garden Inn for helping with our Mary
Gauthier / Otis Gibbs concert. Thanks also to the Lafayette Brewing Company for
providing refreshments at our Duncan Hall shows. Thanks to to Tipp-C magazine for all its
support this season. We truly appreciate local businesses who are able to help FoB make
the musical offerings in Greater Lafayette even greater!
&
&
Thanks to the volunteers for all the tasks they perform-they have given FoB another very successful season
of music. We'll take the summer off but be back in August. The one show presently booked for next season is The
Roches on April 22, '07.
&
Our next ORGANIZATIONAL MEETING is our ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING. It will be on
Monday, May 1, 7:30, at the Lafayette Brewing Co. Everyone is welcome (though you must be a member to
participate in the election of directors). Please come and get more involved.
&
Do the Dues!!! Membership dues are by the calendar year-2006 dues are now
due!
Dues pay for this newsletter and provide a safety net for when admission charges don't
cover expenses. Please help us keep the music coming. Become a Friend of Bob! Dues
are $10 per person. If you can make a donation above the $10 we would greatly
appreciate it, and since we are a 501[c][3] not-for-profit organization, donations above
the dues are tax-deductible. If you have an asterisk by your name on the label of this
newsletter, you have already paid your 2006 dues. The following people have recently
sent in their 2006 dues. Thanks from us all!
Bob Andres
Steve Borghi
Nancy DiMartino
The Eberts Family
Phil Hess
John S. Jones
Nancy Kauper
Dave Kurtz
Randy & Karla Ross
Dave Samuelson
Tina Summerfield
Like to join?
Go to How Can I Help? at
www.friends-of-bob.org
Please consider a tax-deductible gift to FoB.
Other dates for your calendar:
www.lafayettebrewingco.com : 4/28 Hot Buttered Rum String Band; 4/29 Michael Kelsey; 5/6 Oteil & the
Peacemakers
www.tippecanoechambermusic.org: 4/30, Duncan Hall, 3:00 p.m. Mariah Wind Quartet
www.knickerbockersaloon.com: 4/28 Chester Brown; 4/29 Gene Deer
www.indianafiddlersgathering.org June 23-25, Tippecanoe Battlefield, Battle Ground
www.tasteoftippecanoe.org: Saturday, June 17; downtown Lafayette
local music news at www.lafayettemusicleague.com
FoB Annual General Meeting: Monday, May 1, 7:30 @ LBC
downstairs. All welcome
Mary Gauthier Mercy Now (Lost Highway)
Some say an artist can't produce much of worth unless they've really lived. And
preferably suffered. Mary Gauthier is one of those artists responsible for that myth. She
didn't write her first song until she was 35, after chequered years of addiction, running
away and runaway success as a Cajun restaurateur. Gauthier (pronounced 'Go-Shay' if her
Baton Rouge roots are showing) says she 'turned eighteen behind bars'. OK, she was in
prison just for the night, but that puts her in the same league as Johnny Cash. And so does
her searing honesty, gift for gritty stories and willingness to acknowledge the darker side
of life, without fear.
This new album wholly fulfils expectations created by 2002's excellent Filth And Fire,
with more of what Rolling Stone called 'American Gothic tales'. It's hard to say whether
she's a blues singer into country, or a country singer turned blue, but her sharp poetic
words ring with truth, whether she's telling others' stories or her own. "Everybody said
you looked real good / But I think you looked stoned / Your sister cried all the way
home," she sings on tragicomic wedding song "Your Sister Cried". She makes rhyme
seem less of a crime than it often is in lesser writers' hands, and her voice cracks tenderly
without affectation; the million-dollar catch many singers strive for is all her own, like
Rosalie Sorrels' younger, slightly wilder sister.
The highlight is the bleakly cinematic resignation of "I Drink", her (autobiographical?)
account of inherited ways: "Fish swim / Birds fly / Daddies yell / mamas cry /old men /
sit and think / I drink" she moans, with a glimmer of Hammond organ, a slumping snare
and tendrils of steel guitar framing her words.
If there's one thing that slightly disappoints, it's the lack of a live feel to the arrangements.
But if you can play and produce as sensitively as Gurf Morlix (who once again provides
most of the instrumentation), why bother hiring many other musicians for the sessions?
Likewise, it's hard to imagine Gauthier doing covers when she writes this well. It makes
you want to see her onstage, cooking up something deep fried which you know is bad for
you, but tastes real good.
Reviewer: Jon Lusk BBC.co.uk
Chicago Sun-Times listed Mercy Now as one of the top albums of 2005.
"Gauthier continues to write provocative songs that have a weary wise edge
that's perfect for her rich smoky vocals. Due to the darkly noirish lyrics, these
aren't pretty songs. Instead, they have a soulful, aching grace that pulls no
punches."
No Depression 3rd Annual Critics' Poll Top 40 Albums of 2005: #2 Mary
Gauthier - Mercy Now
"(Gauthier) didn't even get started writing songs until she was in her 30s. This year, on
her first CD for Lost Highway Records, she delivered some tunes that look at addiction
and loss with such intensity they can make you wince. There's enough craft, conviction
and honesty in her "Mercy Now" album to remind you of Kris Kristofferson and John
Prine in their prime." Los Angeles Times
Mary Gauthier was named NEW/EMERGING ARTIST OF THE YEAR at the
2005 Americana Music Awards.
"Her bayou laments are sparse and simple, but her artistry is pure and
absolute." Playboy
"Mary Gauthier has distilled the bitter aftertaste of the booze and drugs and bad
relationships that long ruled her life into the in tense and haunting Mercy Now."
US News & World Report
As a singer, Mary Gauthier could pass for Lucinda Williams' twin sister: Gauthier's
voice, like Williams', is a chewy Dixie drawl scarred with experience. And as a
songwriter, Gauthier, like Williams, has bloomed in adulthood. She wrote her first song
at thirty-five, after a long trip up from rock bottom. Now, at forty-two, after a run of
acclaimed independent albums, Gauthier makes her major-label debut with the countrygothic suspense of Mercy Now. She's brought some vintage darkness: "I Drink," which
she first cut in 1999, is about the bottle the way Lou Reed's "Heroin" is about the needle:
precise and moving in its emotional journalism. She also puts the same care into the
leaving and being left behind detailed in newer songs like "Falling Out of Love" and
"Drop in a Bucket." Sustained despair is an acquired taste, and Mercy Now rarely moves
at more than funeral-ballad speed. Yet the life and longing in Gauthier's voice puts color
in these shadows. "I was born lonesome, and I'm lonesome still," she sings at the end,
with the true grit of one still not ready to give in.
DAVID FRICKE Rolling Stone
Mercy Now, a work of breathtaking, addictive beauty, compelling in its simplicity - the best record I have heard this year. As support to Willie Nelson on his
European tour, she is worth the price of admission on her own. Live, she is
mesmerising. Her songs are a strange mix of half-spoken, half-sung talking
blues: clever, often laugh-out-loud tales of addicts, victims and losers, of cheap
motels and failed love affairs. The London Times
"...this late-blooming Louisiana singer-songwriter brings dignity, a degree of
muscle and the measured view of a survivor to her tales of working class life."
(Five Stars) Irish Times
"...this weathered country singer and storyteller unfurls one lovely narrative after
another, chronicling a merciless world in which it's always a little bit too late to
change your mind." New York Times
Mary Gauthier Comfort In Knowing
Thibodaux, La., native Mary Gauthier's song "Wheel Inside the Wheel"-from her new
album Mercy Now-is rich with references to the colorful lifestyle of her home state's most
famous city, New Orleans. In Gauthier's version of the Big Easy, where fantasy and
reality become one, "Marie Laveau promenades with Oscar Wilde and big funky Stella
Twirls her little red umbrella." The song-reminiscent of Mule Variations-era Tom Waitswafts like smoke from the dingy doorway of a New Orleans cocktail lounge.
"In 'Wheel Inside The Wheel,' I wanted to write about the way people in New Orleans
treat death," Gauthier (pronounced Go-Shay) says. "I love the way they handle it down
there, from the perspective of the passage in Ezekiel-that part about the wheel inside the
wheel, and how death is not the end or beginning of anything, that life is just this big
thing that swirls and whirls. I love the idea of them throwing a parade when someone dies
and celebrating the release of the pain in this life and celebrating the spirit entering into a
new phase, whatever it is. We can't possibly know, of course. Some people call it Heaven
or have other names for it, but there is a mutually agreed presumption down there, deep
in the culture, and the people believe it absolutely. I think it's beautiful and I wanted to
try and tell people about it."
Mercy Now, Gauthier's fourth release, is inhabited by hard-living characters akin
to those of her earlier work. The album abounds with vivid descriptions of the
disappointment and pain of lost love, but-even if her creations can't-Gauthier has found a
way to make sense of the dilemmas in her own life.
"You can count on spiritual principles," she says. "That's what I count on. And
they won't let you down because they are absolutes-not in me, or in you or us, but in
themselves. And that's where I hang my hat. People [will] let you down, and you'll let
them down, because we're human. 'When you wake up with that ache before you've even
opened your eyes,'" she says, quoting her song "Drop In The Bucket," "you have to find
comfort in knowing that the love that is killing you right now is going to be able to save
you when you find someplace to put it." Paste Magazine
"Otis (Gibbs) was definitely Americana before Americana was cool" Steve Hayes,
INDIANAPOLISMUSIC.NET
"His strong lyrics are one of the album's many selling points, creating some vivid
imagery with simple words."
Jason MacNeil, All Music
Guide
"The music, in fact, is as unpretentious and authentic as the overalls and ball caps Gibbs
often wears. It's as graceful and full of political statement as a horse-drawn Amish
carriage in rural Indiana." Steve Hammer, NUVO
"Level-headed yet skewed-view storyteller Otis Gibbs explains it all on this unplugged
masterpiece" Dave Lindquist, INDY STAR
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