A life lost and found
The Age
Friday March 12, 2010
The emptiness in the life of Nashville's Mary Gauthier takes centre stage on The Foundling, writes Michael Dwyer. WHEN it comes to the art of storytelling, there's nothing more powerful than what's missing. It flitted like a ghost through Mary Gauthier's previous five albums: a profound absence that hounded every lost and melancholy drunk and wanderer that sprang from her pen.With her sixth, an autobiographical song cycle titled The Foundling, the emptiness takes centre stage."I was born to an unwed mother in 1962 and surrendered to St Vincent's Women and Infants Asylum on Magazine Street in New Orleans," writes Gauthier (pronounced Go-Shay) in the notes of the album, a fragile alt-country affair produced by the Cowboy Junkies' Michael Timmins."I searched for, found and was denied a meeting with my birth mother when I was 45 years old. She couldn't afford to reopen the wound she'd carried her whole life, the wound of surrendering a baby. The Foundling is my story."Much of the intervening detail in Gauthier's remarkable life story is on the record: the dysfunctional step-parents, the car she stole, the jail cell where she spent her 18th birthday, the years of addiction, the salvation of a Cajun restaurant and her late blossoming as a singer-songwriter admired by Joe Henry, Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson. But The Foundling is the volume that illuminates all the rest: an open-veined portrait of "a truly troubled troubadour/writing songs to even up the score", as she describes herself in Sideshow. The album's filmic, three-act structure follows an arc of desolation, devastation and ultimate affirmation of the gift of life, broken by interludes of poignant solo accordion. "It's a gypsy sound I was going for," she says, "sort of like Jacques Brel, Leonard Cohen, Edith Piaf ... all those great orphans, the great French troubadours. That tradition felt like the right place for this record, emotionally."The heart of it is March 11, 1962, a one-sided reconstruction of the conversation Gauthier had with her mother eight years ago. "It's totally verbatim," she says. "Literally. No changes. I wrote it about two years after I spoke to her but I wrote it in about five minutes. Hard to live, easy to write."Although the song omits the mother's side of the conversation, it's here that the missing party becomes an overwhelmingly powerful presence. While the foundling emerges stronger for pursuing the truth and telling her story, what haunts the listener is the eternal despair of the mother who can never confide."Yeah, me, too," Gauthier whispers. "But see, this is adoption. This is the truth about adoption in my experience. The truth is that it's very, very painful. There's a trauma that happens when you separate a baby from a mother. Both parties are deeply traumatised."Ultimately, she says, "the idea of the record is that you can come through almost anything if you still believe in love. The epitaph is we're on borrowed time €” all of us. If you can find your way to humbly being grateful for another day borrowed, I think that's a really good place to be, no matter what your backstory is."Mary Gauthier plays the Mossvale Park Festival tomorrow, Brunswick Town Hall on Sunday, the East Brunswick Club on March 26 and The Palais, Daylesford, on March 27.
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