Event
MARY GAUTHIER Sunday June 21, East Rock Concert Series - Cafe Nine, New Haven
Fernando Pinto Presents: An Evening with Mary Gauthier,
performing as a duo with violin player, Michele Gazich.
Sunday June 21, at Cafe Nine, New Haven
Tickets $20. Adv. $25. DOS
Doors 7pm - Showtime 7:30pm
Mary Gauthier
https://www.marygauthier.com
Every day, on average, twenty-two veterans commit suicide. Each year seventy-four hundred current and former members of the United States Armed Services take their own lives. Every day. That number does not include drug overdoses or car wrecks or any of the more inventive ways somebody might less obviously choose to die. It seems trivial to suggest those lives might be saved healed, even by a song. By the process of writing a song.
And yet.
And yet there is nothing trivial about Mary Gauthiers tenth album, Rifles and Rosary Beads (Thirty Tigers), all eleven songs co-written with and for wounded veterans. Eleven of the nearly four hundred songs that highly accomplished songwriters have co-written as part of Darden Smiths five-year-old SongwritingWith:Soldiers program.
None of the soldiers who have participated in the program have taken their own lives, and theres nothing trivial about that. Something about writing that song telling that story is healing. What Smith calls post-traumatic-growth.
Gauthiers first nine albums presented extraordinary confessional songs, deeply personal, profoundly emotional pieces ranging from I Drink, a blunt accounting of addiction, to March 11, 1962, the day she was born and relinquished to an orphanage to Worthy, in which the singer finally understands she is deserving of love. Maybe thats where the confessional song cycle ends, for she has midwifed these eleven new songs in careful collaboration with other souls whose struggle is urgent, immediate, and palpable. And none are about her.
Each song on Rifles and Rosary Beads is a gut punch: deceptively simple and emotionally complex. From the opening Soldiering On (What saves you in the battle/Can kill you at home) to Bullet Holes in the Sky (They thank me for my service/And wave their little flags/They genuflect on Sundays/And yes, theyd send us back), to the abject horror of Iraq, and its quiet depiction of a female mechanics rape, each song tells the story of a deeply wounded veteran.
Rifles and rosary beads Mary Gauthier New album; https://youtu.be/We4vcg2p0L8
Michele Gazich
www.michelegazich.it
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LocationCafe Nine (View)
250 State St
New Haven, CT 06510
United States
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