Mary Gauthier
Mercy Now
Mary Gauthier is a fast rising
star in what she calls “American music”. She’s
been hailed by publications as diverse as No Depression
and the New York Times. Even the Reader’s Digest
has named her the best about-to-hit country artists.
A latecomer to music, she started
writing songs at the age of 35 after going into rehab
and managing to stay sober for ten years. That’s no
small feat, but then neither is making music this
honest and authentic.
She writes with a straight ahead
approach that emphasizes the songs themselves and she sings those songs stripped
down to the bare essence with her voice right out in
front of a basic, no-frills country music backdrop.
Her fourth release, Mercy Now (Lost
Highway Records), also
her biggest label release to date, sort of sneaks up on
you and gets stronger with each subsequent listen. Full of heartbreak and irony, played over acoustic and pedal steel guitar with little
dashes of banjo, harmonica and an occasional very Dylan-esque organ, it displays a keen sense for matching
words to emotions and emotions to melody and melody to
arrangement.
She sets the tone of the album
nicely with the very first track, "Falling Out Of Love."
Boldly using a prison metaphor . . .
“Falling out of love is a tedious
thing,
With its jailhouse smirk and its chain gang swing “
. . . coupled with the chorus
- refrain- chant of . . .
“Let me out, set me free”
. . . she could just as easily be
pacing the floor of a 6 X 8 cell as driving down the
open highway. But you get the idea.
The title cut follows and it’s a
deceptively simple little number that expands a message
of hope out exponentially from family to church to
country to every living thing on the entire planet.
It’s a beautiful sentiment, delivered without a trace
of pretense, and comes across as a plea for reason that
displays sharp skill in touching on the topical issues
of the day. Without getting preachy, she skillfully
makes the case for abandoning the course toward
destruction that the country and, consequently, the
entire world, is on:
“My church and my country
Could use a little mercy now.
As they sink into a poisoned pit
That's gonna take forever to climb out.”
In
“Wheel Inside the Wheel,” she conjures up
a celestial Mardi Gras parade where:
"Satchmo takes a solo,
And he
flashes his million dollar smile.
Marie Laveau promenades with Oscar Wilde."
Half spoken, half sung with a
bluesy delivery in a heavy Louisiana drawl, it’s full
of evocative imagery. You can almost feel the steamy heat and
sense the voodoo in the music.
“I Drink” is another almost
perfectly written song with a simple melody that
completely catches you off guard. Sung in a voice that
immediately recalls Loretta by way of Lucinda Williams
- there’s no bitterness and she’s not making any
apologies, rather putting it as simply as:
“I know what I am- and I don’t
give a damn.”
It’s the very kind of thing that
sets her apart from contemporary country music while
being more country than anything coming out of
Nashville.
The rocking, defiant “It Ain't The
Wind, It's The Rain” is a promise of bad things to
come for a lover who’s jilted her. Loaded with Old
Testament-style retribution, she growls out a sentiment
as familiar as it is foreboding. And did I mention it
rocks?
“Prayer Without Words” - a song
about life on the road - demonstrates just how good a
writer she really is; clever word-play over guitar,
organ, and fiddle drive an up-tempo, Dylan-like
arrangement with great lines like:
“Chains on the mast pull the
past,
Nothing lasts but nothing ever ends.
I leave town, break new ground, Break down, leave
town again”
She closes with “Drop in a
Bucket”- another classic-country style song about
living with the heartache while time stands still. It’s
a timeless sentiment that crosses all lines
and serves as a great example of music that’s direct
and connects with the listener on a visceral level.
How often do you hear that on a
mainstream country record?
There’s only ten songs on this
disc, a pretty small selection as far as modern CDs go. But there’s no throw-away filler
material here. Ten well-written, well-delivered songs
is really not so bad a deal when all the songs are of
this caliber - especially when you just want to keep
playing it again.
This is what country music should
sound like.
-jitter
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