Mary Gauthier: Singing Her Heart Out at Nashville’s Bluebird Café on the WWW

By Georgianne Nienaber for COA NEWS

 

Audio/Text: I was at the Bluebird Café in Nashville last Thursday for my first chance to hear Lost Highway recording artist and country indie favorite Mary Gauthier live and do a proper review. Well, not exactly. The Bluebird Café recently joined virtual live-music venues and established an agreement with software developer SanSoft Inc. to produce Bluebird Café performances on the web.

For three bucks and a decent Internet connection, streaming technology has now entered the concert arena. It was a dicey proposition, since the rather spooky technology feels voyeuristic for an old time reporter and I felt obliged to drop a chagrined email to Gauthier and tell her I would “be there” for her performance. This type of venue offers a lot of promise for access to music that independent reporters don’t have the time or money to pursue. It can’t hurt the indie artists either, since press and promo budgets are obviously limited in comparison to big-name acts. It would have cost $700 and a lot of down time to get to Nashville—this review cost a few dollars, a couple of hours of some well-spent time, and two Cokes.

Getting the technical critique out of the way, the audio was great after a few minor glitches that Gauthier handled with grace, humor, and a self-confidence that proved she knows her way around sound gremlins. Gauthier is an incredibly relaxed performer, and even a booming monitor and distorted guitar failed to cause her to miss a beat on her opening numbers. The video stream left a lot to be desired, but was certainly good enough to get a good sense of the performance and audience reactions. What was obviously missing was the one-on-one interview with the artist, but that would be a profile and not a review.

In the interest of editorial honesty, Mary Gauthier’s music grabbed me by the throat when I was in working in Congo and someone emailed me a couple of her tunes. Who in the heck is this artist who is by turns, gritty, irreverent, soulful, tender, tough, and wears her heart on her sleeve for all to hear? I was reminded of Patti LaBelle’s famous comment to K.D. Lang at an awards show: “You really scare me.” Turns out there is nothing to fear.

Bob Dylan highlighted Gauthier’s song I Drink for his XM radio gig. By her own admission Mary Gauthier was “born a bastard child in New Orleans.” Forty-something and a late bloomer, she is somewhat of a surprise in a music industry dominated by glam women. Channeling Janis Joplin and Hank Williams in her smoky Louisiana drawl, Gauthier is by turns a pretty and striking woman with a tough, yet vulnerable stance. It is a stage presence that is best experienced rather than described, and one good reason why a virtual concert can add a whole new dimension to a performer who is not easy to access. Gauthier sings about being “brave enough to love and brave enough to leave” and readily admits in published interviews that she never came out as a gay woman because “I was never in.” Her biography is all over the Internet, but other than the fact that her complex past has defined the soul of the artist, what is remarkable is that Mary Gauthier delivers a great show and incredible songwriting.

Gauthier sang her heart out at the Bluebird Café for an hour and fifteen minutes to what looked like, from a desktop vantage point, a very appreciative audience of mostly women. Can Mary Gauthier be THE new voice for women of a certain age who lost Janis Joplin over thirty-five years ago? Major label Lost Highway Records thinks they have the real deal, and the label is ready to release her second CD on September 18. Her first CD with Lost Highway was the 2005 Mercy Now, which the Washington Post called “one of the year's best singer songwriter efforts; even the presence of songs by Harlan Howard and Fred Eaglesmith do nothing to eclipse the power of Gauthier's originals.”

While Joplin was all tie-dyed, feathers, rows of bracelets, and her Full Tilt Boogie Band, Gauthier took the stage in torn jeans and tinted glasses with her beat-up guitar case as a backdrop. In interviews, Joplin used to say that she kept “Janis Joplin in a box” in her dressing room. With Gauthier, you feel like she immediately invites the audience in to experience her personal reality. She may drive a Lexus now, but her soul is still back in hardscrabble Louisiana.

Gauthier is a first-class songwriting power-house and told a fine story to her Bluebird audience about how Nashville thought she was “too slow,” and would send over collaborators from time to time to force the Muse. One experience made Gauthier “want to fling myself out the window.” Whatever Gauthier is doing to collaborate with her personal Muse is working, and one hopes she keeps on doing what she is doing and ignores Nashville’s advice.

As she opened the show, Gauthier warned the audience that “If you’re feelin’ good, hold onto it, ‘cause it ain’t gonna last. Everybody has their niche and I think I found mine…there’s a niche in sad songs.”

To call Gauthier’s wrenching autobiographical songs “sad” is like calling Darfur a “conflict.” It is her bravery in the confession to her audience that she’s had to “live” what she wrote that makes the tales of heartbreak, loneliness, struggles with alcoholism, abandonment and redemption so powerful. Minnesota’s world-renowned substance abuse center, Hazelden, uses some of Gauthier’s songs in its therapy sessions.

Gauthier deftly and confidently conquered the trials of live performing and sounded as good as or better than her studio work. There is something truthful about a live performance—those instances when the voice cracks just enough to let you know that delivery is incredibly hard work and the artist is strong enough to get past the occasional falter. It is the human dimension that is so compelling, and with Gauthier’s deeply emotional content as well as her strong vocal presence, you have to wonder how she can do it for over an hour.

As she told the audience about a dangerously dark song written in the style of Flannery O’Connor, “it is deep seated southern misery.”

“Man-oh-man, this song scares me,” Gauthier half-joked.

Gauthier is no freeloader as a musician either. Her guitar work is strong—not an easy task when you have a demanding vocal to deliver. This reviewer grew up watching John Prine perform when he was still a mailman in the Chicago suburbs. He did some of his best work then and Gauthier far, far outstrips those early performances. Gauthier won’t like that sentence, but I’m leavin’ it in. She considers Prine a model and mentor.

Gauthier premiered a new song she wrote while vacationing in Provincetown. In a brief email after the show, she said “last night was the first time I payed it out, and I was hoping people would like it.”

Written after a frustrating year of months of travel in European venues—which seem to have embraced her more quickly than the American music mainstream—and not much time for songwriting, the Provincetown Song has Gauthier reclaiming her inspiration and motivation to write:

“I don’t trust my eyes anymore, they only notice what they’re looking for…I think my eyes are blinding me...some people never really love…they don’t mean the sweet words they say…other people can’t see the truth…I didn’t know I was that way.”

Gauthier wrote Prayer without Words with Tom Damphier and readers can find it on the Mercy Now CD, available on Gauthier’s website, along with a download. The studio version is wound tight, but the song has to be experienced in performance—no matter the combination of searing imagery with studio finesse, the kick-gut delivery in the virtual world makes you wonder if she sucks all the air out of the room in the real world.

For a sense of the May Gauthier experience in concert, we are streaming the audio for the Provincetown Song and Prayer without Words here, and added some FLASH so readers can get to know the performer.

Gauthier is on tour for a good part of the summer. Her schedule is posted on her website, www.marygauthier.com. Don’t rely totally on the virtual word. Technology is something else, but I would suspect she is even better in person. Go see her if you can.

Also check out Filth and Fire, which was named the Number One Independent CD of the Year in 2002 by the New York Times. Stark and downright beautiful writing dominates this album. For a singer/songwriter who describes herself as a “slow” writer, Gauthier cranks out perfect lyrics again in this, her third independently produced effort, before signing to Lost Highway. Skip right to track two, A Long Way to Fall, but go right back to Walk Through Fire, with an organ underlay that makes you feel the southern heat.

More than 2,500 songwriters appear each year at the Bluebird Café. The club is known for helping start the careers of such country artists as Garth Brooks, Kenny Chesney, Keith Urban, Trisha Yearwood and Kathy Mattea.

Gauthier’s show was sold out at 105 seats in the live venue, with 15 “virtual” visitors. Bluebird Café owner Amy Kurland said she feels the virtual audience will expand as they advertise through their email list of over 6,000.

SanSoft Inc., a virtual reality software company based in Franklin, Tennessee, has an exclusive agreement with the Bluebird Café to bring live performances to the Internet via Second Life and the World Wide Web. Second Life is a 3D virtual reality world program, but visitors to the Bluebird Café can access performances directly through their browsers at www.bluebirdcafesl.com/viewer. Second Life was created by Linden Labs. Link only works on performance days.

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Additional Flash content by Ollie Moltaji

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