Mary Gauthier at City Vineyard

Mary Gauthier was born to a mother she never knew in New Orleans, Louisiana, and adopted when she was a year old by a couple from Thibodaux, Louisiana. At age 15, she ran away from home, and spent the next several years in drug rehabilitation, halfway houses, and living with friends; she spent her 18th birthday in a jail cell. Eventually she opened a Cajun restaurant in Boston, Massachusetts, but was arrested for drunk driving on opening night. Achieving sobriety, she dedicated herself to full-time songwriting, performing and recording. She wrote her first song at age 35, and sold her share in the restaurant to finance her second album in 1998. In 2001, she relocated to Nashville, Tennessee, and since then her songs have been recorded by Jimmy Buffett, Tim McGraw, Blake Shelton, Bobby Bare, Bill Chambers, Mike Farris & Candi Staton, Amy Helm and Bettye Lavette. Her eighth studio album, Rifles & Rosary Beads, was released on January 26, 2018.

Mary Gauthier's two-night engagement at City Vineyard was a bit different from previous area performances in that her current album is a departure from form. Rifles & Rosary Beads is a collection of songs that were written on retreats with veterans, in which Gauthier set to music and rhythm the struggles that the veterans relayed to her. Accompanied by a violinist, Michele Gazich, Gauthier opened and closed her set with some of her older songs; these were panoramic and pastoral perspectives on the hardships of life, sung in a melancholy voice that oozed hopefulness and thankfulness more than despair or yearning. The newer songs were equally emotional, but in these cases were the emotions of others who had touched her life. Gauthier introduced each song in a sense by introducing the audience to the veteran and his post traumatic disorder symptoms. The songs were tragic narratives of open wounds redressed as therapeutic healing. While these songs demonstrated the width of Gauthier's dauntless songwriting ability, they were also disturbing and not designed for easy listening. Gauthier merited her applause, but her audience may want her to move on from this episode quickly.

Visit Mary Gauthier at www.marygauthier.com.