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" 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. "

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" My experience is that the universal is the personal. If you can get past your navel-gazing into the deepest part of yourself as a writer, you find everyone - we're all there. "

Mary Gauthier

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You

Yourself

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

" I got issues. Boy, have I got issues. "

" 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. "

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

" 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'm an old-fashioned folk singer. I stand in front of an audience with a guitar and a barstool. "

" There's such a thing as a tribe - and family of choice. "

" 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. "

Mary Gauthier

Silent

Feel

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

" A song is an emotional lightning bolt - a good one, anyway. "

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

" 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. "

" I don't know who my dad is. "

" 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. "

" Art, when done well, creates empathy. "

" I spent my 18th birthday in jail. Charges were dropped as long as I promised never to return to the state of Kansas. My parents took me home to Louisiana. I lasted there a week. Then I ran away. "

Mary Gauthier

Long

Parents

" 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. "

" If I start tracing, I bet I will find a writer in my family tree. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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 think music is the highest form of healing. "

" I guess I find it easier to talk when I have a guitar in front of me. "

Mary Gauthier

Guitar

Find

" What matters is what happens in the soul of an artist when you're playing. "

" I'm sort of stuck in adolescence in many ways, like most artists, and march to my own beat. "

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

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

Mary Gauthier

Knew

Since

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