Just one listen to most of Mary Gauthier's songs and you know this lady has lived a life.
Mary Gauthier is a throwback, she is a real story teller.
The sadness and poignancy of these songs cannot fail to move you.
And the great news, Mary has a new album on release called The Foundling Alone.
Check out a few of the songs from it right here.
The Foundling
Mama Here Mama Gone
Now if you follow Mary at all you know that "The Foundling" was one of the best albums of 2010.
But as Mary explains here, after they released the album she had the original tapes and .....
We felt as though there was something worth keeping here, so I took the files to Ray Kennedy (4-time Grammy Award winning producer, engineer and musician) and had him master the original tracks in his studio in Nashville. He did a gorgeous job, and the result is what we’re calling The Foundling Alone. The songs are captured in their early development; many of them went through more changes as they revealed themselves further, and in sharing them, I’m revealing to you part of my creative process – a sort of behind-the-scenes look at “Mary and the Muse”.
Her Last.FM bio reads like this:
Mary Gauthier (born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1962) is an American folk singer/songwriter. Given up at birth by a mother she never knew, Mary was adopted. At age 15, she ran away from home and stole her parents’ car, and spent the next several years in detox, halfway houses, and living with friends; she spent her 18th birthday in jail. These experiences provided fodder for her songwriting later on (particularly her song “Drag Queens in Limousines”). 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 waitress jobs and eventually being promoted to manager of the restaurant where she worked, financial backers paid her way to attend the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts and she opened a Cajun restaurant in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood, “Dixie Kitchen” (also the title of her first album). 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. Gauthier is an out lesbian and two of the songs on her first album, “Goddamn HIV” and “Skeleton Town”, dealt with AIDS.
Her surname is pronounced “go-chay.”
In case you really did miss The Foundling in 2010.
