Thirty years and almost a dozen albums on from her debut Dixie Kitchen, named after the restaurant she set up in Boston’s Back Bay Area, Mary Gauthier offers up what may be her rawest album yet, a mix of the personal and the political that draws its sonic inspiration from Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. It is sparse, direct; at times intimate, just voice, guitar and occasional harmonica. As to its title: “A reckoning can be personal, political, or spiritual,” she writes. “These songs inhabit all three realms at once.”
Gauthier is no stranger to reckonings, a survivor whose many battles have been chronicled in brave and powerful songs that have won her numerous accolades. Her lived-in voice – unique, instantly recognizable – isn’t beautiful, but it is beautifully expressive. From the get-go, you are pulled in, Gauthier’s storytelling hooking you with “Alcohol and Adderall”, co-written with Ben Roberts and Jaimee Harris, her life partner whom she met as a songwriting student and with whom she shares a journey of sobriety, trauma, healing, and recovery transformed into compassionate songwriting
The title track, co-written with Aaron Lee Tasjan, a member of Nashville’s queer indie-glamrock-Americana scene, is powerful, urgent – and it seems to offer a sliver of hope:
You can cut down all the flowers, but you cannot stop the spring
There’s a pendulum in motion, and you can’t outrun the swing
Push too far in one direction, a force will push right back in kind
Voices shoved into the shadows, will join and rise in time
A reckoning is breaking through, a hidden hand is moving by design
“Solder of Fortune”, in which she shares the writing credits with Eliza Gilkyson, is imbued with religious imagery – while Gauthier was brought up a strict Roman Catholic, Gilykson’s roots are Episcopalian – takes its cue from the Stations of the Cross and draws a direct line from Pontius Pilate’s washing his hands but allowing Jesus to be crucified through the Gestapo driving the trains and the white-hooded Klansmen to the black-masked men of ICE in Minnesota:
You’re nothing but a gun for hire, hiding behind a mask
You didn’t care that she was somebody’s mother
When you shot her in the face through the window glass
A VA nurse on a city street, full of the courage you lack
A beacon of mercy, helping a stranger and you fired ten bullets into his back
Unlike Springsteen, Gauthier is not a mainstream musician but in a week that’s seen the shaming of Ed Sheeran she stands – like the unstoppable Joan Baez – as an exemplar of the great Paul Robeson’s dictum that “Artists are the gatekeepers of truth. We are civilization’s radical voice.”
The album closes on a note of biblical optimism with “I Thought I Heard a Train” by Tom Mason and Billy Alcorn:
I thought I heard a train, off somewhere in the night
Through the darkness, through the pain, I can almost see the light
Like the sweet sound of salvation come to carry me away
To an unknown destination, I thought I heard a train
Gauthier took her first steps as a singer-songwriter at Club Passim in Cambridge, successor to the legendary Club 47 where Baez and so many others began their careers in the late 1950s and ‘60s. There she was mentored by Betsy Siggins, den mother to the Cambridge folk scene who had just returned from working in New York City’s homeless shelters to take up the reins as Passim’s Executive Director. Unformed as Gauthier was that first night, Siggins recognised her raw storytelling talent and began mentoring her, their shared belief in the power of music harnessed to social justice. As America stands at a perilous crossroads, Gauthier’s is a vital voice.
“My sense is that we're going to get through this,” she has said “The snake is going to eat its tail. We make decisions, and 25-30 years later, they come to their conclusion, and there's that moment of reckoning.” Let’s hope she's right.
