Top 50 Mary Gauthier Quotes

I teach songwriting a lot, and I always tell my students, ‘You gotta write the little songs sometimes to get to the next big song in the chute.’ You gotta write ’em to get to it. You never know what’s going to be a little song or a big song.

Creating something beautiful out of pain helps ease the pain. So, that’s kind of how I got to songwriting – quite honestly out of desperation.

My experience is that the universal is the personal. If you can get past your navel-gazing into the deepest part of yourself as a writer, you find everyone – we’re all there.

Songs bring us into connection with each other. When they resonate, when we’re in resonance, singing together, we become one for that 3 1/2 or four minutes the song lasts. It takes away that isolated loneliness that modern life is so full of.

Songs, especially lyrics, have always been really important to me.

As a songwriter, I was always mining my own depths, which were filled with confusion and darkness.

I’m sort of stuck in adolescence in many ways, like most artists, and march to my own beat.

I always knew I was going to make a record called ‘The Foundling.’ Since I picked up a guitar, I knew it.

A lot of times, a bunch of songs have to be written to get to the next really good one.

I’m openly gay, and I’ve got a major label record deal in Nashville, and it happened when I was 42 years old. It’s not supposed to happen that way.

I’m a big fan of Lou Reed, and I do a lot of talking through songs. It’s more effective with my vocal limitations and also more powerful to slightly sing sometimes. It depends on the emotion, but I’m never going to try to compete with great singers.

Art, when done well, creates empathy.

They send women into combat without being prepared for women in combat. The men resented them being there, and it was just very, very difficult for them, and they had to fight for the respect they were earning. And that’s all they want is the respect.

I guess I find it easier to talk when I have a guitar in front of me.

I’m an old-fashioned folk singer. I stand in front of an audience with a guitar and a barstool.

When I first got sober, I hadn’t read anything for six or seven years. I didn’t have even that much focus.

The world doesn’t need any more pretty good songs.

It is a form of arrogance to assume that other people are even thinking about you.

I think each veteran’s soul has something that it needs to say. I know from my own personal traumas, it’s very hard to know what that is. But when I’m watching someone else struggle, it’s not as confusing for me, ’cause it’s not my struggle, so I can help identify that.

We can’t see ourselves very clearly. This I learned as a songwriter. I’m forever trying to figure out what my own truth is.

When I finally got sober, I moved towards what I might have been if I hadn’t been destroying myself when I was young.

A song is an emotional lightning bolt – a good one, anyway.

I got issues. Boy, have I got issues.

If I start tracing, I bet I will find a writer in my family tree.

In my early years, I couldn’t find a community. I couldn’t find anybody like me. I felt so isolated. There was nothing but shame and loneliness.

What I’m finding is there’s an awful lot about adoption and relinquishment and the complicated nature of family that we, as human beings, haven’t been able to have a real discussion about yet without a lot of censorship.

I think if people really listened to what our families who serve go through, we could have a realistic discussion of what it means to send young people to war.

I’m a traveler and a vagabond and an observer, and the songs come through that. And that’s just the way it’s going to be.

I’m grateful to songwriting and recovery to bringing me to a place of peace.

I was in the orphanage in New Orleans until I was almost a year old. I don’t think I ever got held by my mama, so that was completely and utterly traumatic. I think it was trauma from the first breath, and I think I’ve spent my whole life trying to heal from that trauma. So it shaped my brain.

I did not know that the wounds of war are often invisible.

I have such a good life. It’s something I couldn’t have imagined in my wildest dreams.

I don’t really write for catharsis; I get that kind of work done in therapy.

I don’t ever want to tie a song in a little bow. Life doesn’t work that way, and war doesn’t ever work that way.

I’ve learned our soldiers are so much like everybody else. They’re just put into an extreme situation.

Once I got my life sorted and started to get healthy, then I was able to focus on writing.

People in Ireland take in the whole song. After a long history of great singers and songwriters and poets, they are able to consume the entire song – not just the external; they go inside.

I keep seeing the headline on articles that says something like ‘Mary Gauthier Helping Our Veterans.’ It’s troubling – and it’s condescending. Whatever I’m doing as a songwriter to help them tell their stories, they’re giving it back to me double, triple, quadruple.

I don’t have the experience of being in a war.

I love SongwritingWith:Soldiers.

What I’ve found at 48 years old is that there’s nothing about me that’s unique.

I haven’t been in the military, but I’ve known my share of pain. It allows me to sit with someone who’s struggling and not be afraid.

Soldiers are trained not to be vulnerable, but when they come home, they’ve got to learn it.

There’s an ocean of misunderstanding. It’s called the civilian-military divide. I had a lot to learn about our military – who they are, what burdens they carry.

When I became a songwriter, it was out of some sort of desperation. I needed to create something. I had to latch on to something, and the guitar was what I grabbed.

What I really like is this salted calamari – with jalapenos on top.

The belief when your mother gives you away is that there’s something deeply wrong. Mothers don’t give babies away. There’s something wrong with me, something unlovable, something seriously flawed in me. It’s a fundamental thing; it’s precognitive. You feel it rather than think it. How could you not?

I think we’re very much in a mystery here in this life and that artists try to pierce the mystery with their art.

I think I’ll always draw from being a person that doesn’t know how to have a normal life, whatever a normal life is.

A lot of songwriters have written about soldiers and war, but very few have written with them.