Mary Gauthier

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

“War is hell. Sending young people to conflicts that are unwinnable and unresolvable - it puts them in a position where they're going to suffer. And yet their experience is that they're proud of their service, and they should be. Service freely rendered is a noble thing.”

“The world doesn't need any more pretty good songs.”

“I knew I had that Cajun heritage, that Acadian heritage; I just feel it. And my gut says Irish on the other side. Irish and French, that's what I feel. When you're young, it doesn't matter so much, but as you get older, I would suspect part of the ageing process is to wonder about your ancestors - who were they? What were their lives like?”

“I got issues. Boy, have I got issues.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“Songs, especially lyrics, have always been really important to me.”

“I think music is the highest form of healing.”

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

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

“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.”

“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 I was told is that I was born to a mother who was a Catholic, while her boyfriend was not. They couldn't get married unless they put me up for adoption.”