Proud Mary keeps on burning

Mary Gauthier's latest album has been described as 'addictive', but she has had to battle addiction in her own life, she tells Joe Breen

Mary Gauthier is in a bit of a pickle. In a few hours she'll be onstage to play a concert in Dublin, and her bags have gone west. Well, actually, her problem is that her bags have not come east with her. However, Gauthier (pronounced go-shay) is not panicking, which, when one considers the vivid life she has lived, is hardly surprising.

"I started in Nashville a few days ago, then onto Toronto, then did a cross-Canadian music train trip with Tom Russell and Nanci Griffith. We played songs all the way from Toronto to Vancouver. The train only stopped once in Winnipeg. So it was four days in a moving train, then we got to Vancouver, did a show there and the next day at five in the morning caught a plane to Chicago and then got on a flight to Dublin. My soul's in my body, my bags are not in my room but the biggest surprise is that I'm here at all."

Indeed it is. But Gauthier is a remarkable survivor. A native of Thibodeaux, Louisiana, she has packed more ups and downs into her 43 years than most people endure in a lifetime. Adopted at one, she became involved in substance abuse in her teens as her adopted father fell into the arms of alcoholism. Later, she pulled herself together, went to college, moved to Boston and opened the first Cajun restaurant in that city, called Dixie Kitchen, a name inspired by the Lowell George song, Dixie Chicken. At 28, on the night she opened her second restaurant, she was arrested for drink-driving. But she hauled herself back from the edge and then in her 30s began to toy around with songwriting. The result was Dixie Kitchen and then Drag Queens in Limousines, two self-financed albums from the country fringe which set the scene for the haunting Filth and Fire in 2002 and now her major label debut with this year's compelling Mercy Now on Lost Highway Records, an album one critic justifiably described as "a work of breathtaking, addictive beauty".

Gauthier is thin, tight-skinned and gaunt, but full of southern charm. She tells her story fluently, without hesitation or a note of self-pity. She has been through the wringer, an adopted gay substance abuser chef turned confessional songwriter, and there is not much to hide, as her graphic songs show.

And so we start at the start. She had never met her birth parents but last year tracked down her mother with the help of a private detective. "I talked to my birth mother once. I don't think it went very well. I mean it was OK in a way. She is not interested in pursuing a relationship with me. I'm her only child. I found out some information but I was so nervous when I was talking to her that I never asked who my father was. I'm a secret. She never told my father and she married another man after the adoption. She never told him. And he died after 27 years. She raised two of his children and as far as what I got from her I'm just a secret. She never told it and it's too late now. She doesn't want to unwrap everything."

This was obviously very painful? "Yes, but not as bad as for her. She was crying and feeling guilty. I just wanted to thank her. I'm OK. I don't need a mother. I'm 43. It would be nice to have a new friend but the mothering opportunities are over. That's not what I was looking for. But she's in a lot of pain and I wish I could help her."

So was adoption a difficult experience? "No and yes. I was told that they picked me, that I was special. You know the adoption process is difficult. They went through two years of interviews. It was a long ordeal to adopt a child, a lot more difficult than having sex and having a baby. They emphasised that and I felt that I was special really. So the adoption thing wasn't hard for me in that way. But I think adopted kids always feel a little removed. There's just not any bloodline. I don't look like my family. I don't have the mannerisms of anybody and I'm a very different person than my family members. Obviously this can happen even if you're not adopted but you feel it more when you are adopted."

Did it impact on your childhood? "No the big problem wasn't the adoption, the big problem was alcohol, my own and my adopted father's consumption. That was the big problem, addiction not adoption - God, that's a song [ laughs] . . . This happened by the time I was eight or nine. Early on it wasn't bad but as his drinking got worse, their marriage got worse . . . it was very hard, particularly for my brother and sister. I had some years of childhood when the marriage was still good but they never had any. They came after me . . ."

Despite this ongoing trauma she still managed to get to college. "It's hard to explain. I have two very powerful forces inside of me. One is I have a very strong achievement side of me in that I accomplish a lot. I set goals and I reach them. I'm a very strong-willed person who can look at something, decide I want it and go get it.

"I'm also very self-destructive. And those forces are very, very powerful and they conflict. So I'd build myself and tear myself down, build myself up and tear myself down again. So I quit high school but found my way to college. And in college I would study, take the test and after that I would be on a tear. It was always this back and forth insanity and after a while the destructive force became dominant and I wasn't able to accomplish as much. And I think that is pretty common among people who have substance-abuse problems. I did drink and drugs, whatever was available. It's pretty much the same thing. I'm an overachiever, a workaholic, and I would over-reward myself, get wrecked for days. And then go back to work, make it happen and then binge again. In a way it makes sense if you get into the psychology of someone who lives like that."

It was, she says, a very unhappy and precarious existence, and then she changed everything - but not before it all fell apart.

"Oh God, I was arrested for drunk-driving the opening night of my second restaurant and that was it. July 13, 1990. The humiliation was awful. I was taking a victory walk. You know, look at me, my new restaurant, my name is in lights, we're in the paper, I've got employees. The restaurant was a big deal for me. And it turned into a complete and utter humiliation. The night ended with me in handcuffs in jail. But just for a very brief moment, probably not even a full second, I saw myself. This is the problem for people with a drink addiction - they can't see themselves. I couldn't see myself which is different from seeing it and denying it.

"But for the briefest moment that night in jail I saw it and that was it. That was the turning point in my whole life. And at the time I thought it was the worst thing that could have happened to me. In retrospect it was the best thing. It could have gone either way. I was 28 years old and I'd reached the end.

"For the next couple of years sober I ran on adrenalin, running back and forth from restaurant to restaurant and trying to force them to work. Restaurants are crazy places to begin with and when you have a crazy person running a crazy business then you can just imagine. I was hurricane Mary. But the adrenalin eventually just wore me out and at about four years sober I just got tired. I started letting go, delegating and I picked up a guitar and started writing songs." She had always had a guitar and she was a fan but she had never tried songwriting or performing seriously.

"I was always a huge fan of lyric-based songs. I've always been a word person . . . So naturally I was a huge John Prine fan, a Nanci Griffith fan, a Kristofferson fan. Just the word people. Dylan, absolutely, Leonard Cohen, all those guys.

"And so at 35 I just found myself crashing from the adrenalin, from the absence of drugs and alcohol, and settling into my own little world in my apartment to write songs. I'd always played guitar, not very well, just a few chords. But all you really need to know is just a few chords. People understand simplicity. That was the magic of Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie. As the country adage goes, three chords and the truth.

"So I had a couple of chords and the words started coming and I just fell in love with songwriting. It was the first thing in my life that wasn't insane . . . Songwriting was for me a way of making sense of my life, of what had happened."

But she was a late starter in a world of young, brash self-confidence. Did she have any self-doubt? "So much self-doubt, so much self-doubt. And that's on top of the self-doubt that comes with being an alcoholic, a loser . . . The stunning defeat I had suffered at the hands of drugs and alcohol was pretty overwhelming, and then being 36-37 I was the old lady. But the confidence I got from the Newport gig (she was booked into the prestigious folk festival in 1999) proved to me that I was worthy of the job." So did success come a calling then? "No, it's never really happened for me. It's always been just one step, one thing leading to another. I mean I'm still not making money. That's not the goal. The goal is to get onstage and play the songs."

Ah yes, the songs. Not exactly a bundle of laughs, but imbued with as much conviction, honesty and dignity as country music will allow. Do they have a grim worldview? "Bittersweet is the word I fall on. The characters in the songs struggle greatly, but they never give up. They never say this is too hard, I can't handle it. They never choose not to love . . . So there is a bitterness but there is also a sweetness in that the characters - and the characters are me most of the time - would continue to get up in the morning and try to love in spite of the difficulties that love presents."

Which brings us neatly to the new album. Mercy Now is a "break-up record" fuelled by the ending of a relationship. The stunning Falling Out of Love opens the album. "That grief is so big but yet the character who is partially me, mostly me, chooses to let me out, set me free. This is hard but I want to love again." The title track is more a combination of the personal and the political. "My father has Alzheimer's and it's getting really bad . . . And my brother's in jail. I wrote those first two verses and I said, 'Oh my god, where do I go from here?' And then the lens which I look through as a writer started pulling back and I saw that this was not just about me. Look at what is happening in the Catholic Church - I was raised a Catholic. There are many Catholics who are in great pain at the moment. I mean not every priest who wears a collar is a paedophile. And America as a country; if we get what's coming to us we're in a lot of trouble. And then I thought, it's not just America - we're all in this position of needing mercy."

If Gauthier never records another thing, Mercy Now is good enough to justify that late start. But she is in no hurry to end her search for the essence in songwriting.

"I use the analogy of cooking. When you are making a demi-glaze sauce you start with bones and water, lots of bones and 20 gallons of water and you just boil it. A day and half later you have a half-gallon of this incredible sauce. I use that metaphor when I'm working on a song. There's all this crap. I have to get rid of it and get to what the song is trying to say. And each song has something to say and rather than me saying it I want the song to say it. It's more like a process of discovery and uncovering than actually me writing it . . . It's the old Michelangelo thing: David was always in the stone, I just had to get him out of there. A lot of the really interesting moves I've made as a songwriter came through me. The good stuff I can't take credit for. It was already there. I just uncovered it."

Mercy Now is available on Lost Highway Records