Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" I think Bob Dylan showed us that songs can rise to the level of literature, and he proved it over and over again. That's why they keep trying to get him a Nobel Prize for literature: because there is no Nobel Prize for songwriting. "

Mary Gauthier

Think

Trying

Literature

Related Quotes:

" I think we're very much in a mystery here in this life and that artists try to pierce the mystery with their art. "

" 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. "

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

" The belief when your mother gives you away is that there's something deeply wrong. Mothers don't give babies away. There's something wrong with me, something unlovable, something seriously flawed in me. It's a fundamental thing; it's precognitive. You feel it rather than think it. How could you not? "

" I got interviewed by one writer who started with the line, 'Mary Gauthier is a woman who clearly doesn't care how she looks.' I do too. It's just that I'm not very good at it. "

" 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. "

" As a songwriter, I was always mining my own depths, which were filled with confusion and darkness. "

" 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

" I felt my whole life like I didn't have a family, and I needed one. So I had to build one, and you build one with faith, hope, and the healing power of love - or you end up the 'Unabomber.' That's the choice. "

" 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. "

" There's a lot of vulnerability in songs - I'm not talking about pop songs - from people that are in the art of songwriting more than the commercial enterprise of it. "

Mary Gauthier

Art

People

" I long for real and true connection. It has been the theme of all the songs in my whole life. "

" I did not know that if a member of a family serves, the whole family serves. I did not know that the spouses of our service members carry such a heavy load. "

" I have got my story. Adoptees rarely get our stories. We only know what we are told. I don't even have my story, really. My mother won't tell me. She won't tell me who my father is. She won't tell me the story of my birth. "

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

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

" Fundamentally, our job as songwriters is to sit down and listen. "

" I got sober at 27 and started writing around 30 and started playing music in public around 32, 33. "

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

" Music and books, I think, were the two things I trusted the most as a child - songs and books. "

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

" 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

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

" A lot of time, if you spend too much time in Nashville, songwriters get caught up in charts and numbers and the music business politics. "

Mary Gauthier

You

Time

" 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. "

" I have such a good life. It's something I couldn't have imagined in my wildest dreams. "

" What I really like is this salted calamari - with jalapenos on top. "

Mary Gauthier

Top

Really

" I haven't been in the military, but I've known my share of pain. It allows me to sit with someone who's struggling and not be afraid. "

Mary Gauthier

Afraid

Someone

" 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. "

" People who have been through trauma, their souls are hurting. "