Friday, January 04, 2008
Check out this singer! In the case of Mary Gauthier (pronounced 'go-shay) , four words are worth a thousand pictures. "Between Daylight and Dark", her new Lost Highway album, finds her aiming her compass at sky and searching for home. It is from this longing from home that this group of songs has emerged, and they fill Gautheir's new album with both hope and anguish, with faith as well as fear.
Mary Gautheir knows these places well, having traveled through a night that had stretched into years, from a turbulent Louisiana childhoos through odd juxtapositions of accomplishment and devastation. The result is reflected in the music, starting as a trickle of songs almost from the moment of her sobriety and swelling into the stream that fed her first two self-released albums, and her stunning Lost Highway debut.
Mary Gauthier is an American folk singer-songwriter. Given up at birth by a mother she never knew, Mary was adopted by an Italian Catholic couple in Thibodaux, Louisiana. At age 15, she ran away from home and stole her parents' car, and spent the next several years in drug rehabilitation, halfway houses, and living with friends; she spent her 18th birthday in jail. These experiences provided fodder for her songwriting later on. Later on, she enrolled at Louisiana State University as a philosophy major, but after five years there, dropped out due to drug problems and moved to Boston. After working as a dishwasher and eventually being promoted to manager of the restaurant where she worked, financial backers paid her way to Cambridge School of Culinary Arts and she opened a Cajun restaurant in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood, Dixie Kitchen. She wrote her first song at age 35. After the release of her first album, she sold her share in the restaurant to finance her second album, Drag Queens in Limousines. The summer of the release of this album, she was invited to play 11 major folk festivals, including Newport Folk Festival. Her third album,"Filth and Fire" was named indie CD of the year by Jon Pareles of the New York Times. She moved to Nashville,TN and secured a record deal with Lost Highway, a division of Universal Music. She also secured a publishing deal with Harlan Howard Songs. Her first major lable release' "Mercy Now" was on the top 10 list for the year 2005 in dozens of publications, including The New York Times, The LA Times, New York Daily News, and Billboard Magazine, she was awarded New Artist of the year by The Americana Music Association. Her second Lost Highway release,"Between Daylight and Dark" came out Sept. 2007.
Great woman! Though she started late in her music career, but she's making it. Listened to some of her songs, really cool and meaningful. But right now I still prefer Melissa Etheridge. She sound almost like Melissa.
