Top 60 Mary Gauthier Quotes

By the time I got to songwriting, I had been faced with a lot of troubles as a result of my own collective of trauma. I was someone who instinctively figured out that writing songs about the struggle helps you with the struggle.

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.

What I was told is that I was born to a mother who was a Catholic, while her boyfriend was not. They couldn’t get married unless they put me up for adoption.

I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’ll probably be in therapy all of my life.

Songs are here to help us: they build bridges from heart to heart.

Ultimately, what I want is for my songs to outlive me: I want my songs to keep being played even after I’m gone.

I think Bob Dylan showed us that songs can rise to the level of literature, and he proved it over and over again. That’s why they keep trying to get him a Nobel Prize for literature: because there is no Nobel Prize for songwriting.

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 don’t play everything I write. I mean, everything I write is not that good. I bring out into the world the ones I think that are really worthy of an audience‘s attention.

It can take me many months to write one of my own songs.

Music had always been a kind of anchor for me. But I didn’t write my first song till I was 35.

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

Art, when done well, creates empathy.

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.

Melody’s like tweezers that go into the infection and pull out the wounded part. You can almost not stay silent in the face of a melody that matches your emotion. You feel seen.

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

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.

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.

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

I came to music and knowing a little bit about life, and I came to music knowing a lot about business – and that’s a real advantage. By the time I came to music, I had purchased real estate, opened restaurants, and been in the business world, so the music business didn’t blindside me.

Music and books, I think, were the two things I trusted the most as a child – songs and books.

I got interviewed by one writer who started with the line, ‘Mary Gauthier is a woman who clearly doesn’t care how she looks.’ I do too. It’s just that I’m not very good at it.

I’ve always been drawn to the hard story, the trauma, because I think art can turn it around.

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.

I think music is the highest form of healing.

I’ve got lots of problems. Being gay isn’t one of them.

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

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.

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.

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

I don’t know who my dad is.

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 Drink‘ took me two years to write.

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

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

Being in recovery for a lot of years now, I’ve worked with a lot of people who’ve gotten sober and sat with a lot of folks who are suffering. Bearing witness is a really underrated thing; it’s a big damn deal.

I think having near-death experiences, they sure made me free.

I love SongwritingWith:Soldiers.

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.

I think it’s a stereotype that soldiers don’t talk, because my experience is that they will talk if they are met with empathy and no judgment.

I feel as though I came to music with something to say. It wasn’t like that when I was younger. I didn’t have the ability to articulate what it was I wanted to say.

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

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

There’s a lot of vulnerability in songs – I’m not talking about pop songs – from people that are in the art of songwriting more than the commercial enterprise of it.

Fundamentally, our job as songwriters is to sit down and listen.

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

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’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.

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 learn something every time I go to work with a veteran. Every single time.

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

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

In a lot of ways, songwriting helped save my life.

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

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

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

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.

If somebody in a family is in service, the whole family is in service. I didn’t know that. I didn’t know our veterans were being deployed seven, eight, nine, 10 times. It’s inhumane.

When you see validation for a life’s work and dedication, it’s a beautiful day.

I try not to eat cakes, but sugar screams my name.