Mary Gauthier and Allison Moorer
189 Public House
189 Main Street, East Aurora, NY 14052, USA
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Event Description
Mary Gauthier
In a Nashville bookstore, to the tune of steam hissing from a
latte machine and laptop taps of nearby browsers, she speaks in a low voice, yet
communicates urgently. Her voice never rises. Her music never rattles rafters or
crashes like cymbals toward the high notes in a power chorus. Her tempos shuffle
and trudge more than they dash.
And her songs? They’re about as idiosyncratic as anything in the wide world of “popular music.” They’re painfully personal, especially on Trouble and Love. Yet they somehow infiltrate the souls of her listeners, no matter how different the paths they’ve followed through their lives.
Those songs weren’t so much written as harvested by Gauthier. Though she lives not far from the hit-making mills of Music Row, she admits to knowing nothing about how to write on command. She says, “I have to be called to write. The call comes from somewhere I don’t understand, but I know it when I hear it.”
That call first came to her a long time ago. Her life to that point had led her to extremes, plenty of negatives and a few brilliant bright spots. An adopted child, who became a teenage runaway, she found her first shelter among addicts and Drag Queens. Eventually she achieved renown as a chef even while balancing the running of her restaurant with the demands of addiction to heroin.
Two more successful restaurants, an escalating addiction, and a subsequent arrest, led her into sobriety. All that was rehearsal for what to follow, when she wrote her first song in her mid-thirties.
From that point, Gauthier channeled a long line of works, almost all of them eloquent in their insight, burnished by her writing technique. A core of devotees came to await each next release. Their wait ends, for now, with Trouble and Love.
This time, Gauthier’s songs rise from what she describes as an especially dark period. “I started the process in a lot of grief,” she explains. “I’d lost a lot. So the first batch of songs was just too sad. It was like walking too close to the fire. I had to back off from it. The truth is that when you’re in the amount of grief I was in, it’s an altered state. Life is not that. You go through that. We human beings have this built-in healing mechanism that’s always pushing us toward life. I didn’t want to write just darkness, because that’s not the truth. I had to write through the darkness to get to the truth. Writing helped me back onto my feet again. This record is about getting to a new normal. It’s a transformation record.”
The heart of that transformation, beating within Trouble and Love, is love. But it’s not the kind of love that’s celebrated on pop charts. In those tunes, love is its own end; the story stops as the giddiness sets in, with no hint of what may follow. Gauthier knows better; she has the scars to prove it.
“For me, love has been a real challenge,” she admits. “Attachment has been a challenge. This record is about losing an attachment I actually made. The loss of it was devastating because I hadn’t fully attached before to anyone. The good news is that I can. The even better news is that I can, and I can lose, and live. Not only do I live, but I’ve got a strength that I never had before.”
Trouble and Love would fall or rise on the question of whether it crystalizes Gauthier’s experience and conveys it to those who want to feel it, as if the poetry of her lyric can mirror and illuminate what they too have gone through. To help make this happen, she invited a small group of singers and musicians into Nashville’s Skaggs Place Studio, each one chosen because of his or her ability to find the heart of the song. No one was given a lead sheet or an advance demo or even headphones. The backup vocals were invented on the spot. The microphones were vintage, and the songs were cut live, to tape. Everyone stood together in the room, playing to what they heard in the lyric as well as from what was going on in the moment.
“I took away everything that musicians lean on to feel invulnerable,” she explains.
All they had to work with was a brief rundown of each song from Gauthier in the control room, right before the tape rolled. “I wanted them to feel it in real time,” she continues. “You don’t want to sound real with songs like this. You want to be real. That’s what I strive for as a writer, and that’s what we got in the playing.”
Feeling their way through the process, these extraordinary participants — guitarist Guthrie Trapp, keyboardist Jimmy Wallace, bassist Viktor Krauss, drummer Lynn Williams and singers Beth Nielsen Chapman, Ashley Cleveland and Darrell Scott, Siobhan Kennedy and The McCrary Sisters — probed and then brought life to Gauthier’s compositions. In their hands, and in her fearless vocals, the songs resonate like tolling bells.
We hear “a body’s but a prison when the soul’s a refugee” in Oh Soul. The last embers of affection flicker and die on When a Woman Goes Cold, (“Scorched earth cannot burn.”) “A million miles from our first kiss, how does love turn into this?” is just one of the bitter riddles posed in False From True. Irony colors the chorus of Worthy: “Worthy, worthy what a thing to claim. Worthy, worthy, ashes into flame.”
This is deep and dangerous poetry, and Gauthier leads us through it with relentless candor. Yet tenderness is always near, enough to keep us engaged through the final track, “Another Train.”
“I wrote that one in England during a long, long tour,” she remembers. There was a sign at a station: There’ll be another train at 14:02.’ So I started working with ‘another train.’ The song evolved. It doesn’t start the way it ends. It zigged and it zagged. I let it talk to me. It’s so interesting, because when I saw ‘another train,’ boom, that whole story was in there — but I had to go find it. I had to dig, like an archaeologist.”
In the very last line of the song is the benedictory thought of the entire album. “Another Train” bathes all of what preceded it in a glimmer of hope. It a fantastically concise and powerful ending — and entirely intentional– “There’ll be another train.”
“This album reflects a total human experience. Love, loss, and a life transformed.” Gauthier sums up. “It’s not a random collection of songs. This record is a story. It’s about trust and faith and believing that there’s a plan and a flow. And the flow is where the good stuff is because there’s wisdom in the flow. At the core, we’re all cut from the same cloth– the same dreams, the same brokenness, the same desire for companionship and family and home. Yeah, we all have that. And if I don’t go deep enough into that, it’s a problem. “There’s no such thing as going too deep.”
Amen to that.
And her songs? They’re about as idiosyncratic as anything in the wide world of “popular music.” They’re painfully personal, especially on Trouble and Love. Yet they somehow infiltrate the souls of her listeners, no matter how different the paths they’ve followed through their lives.
Those songs weren’t so much written as harvested by Gauthier. Though she lives not far from the hit-making mills of Music Row, she admits to knowing nothing about how to write on command. She says, “I have to be called to write. The call comes from somewhere I don’t understand, but I know it when I hear it.”
That call first came to her a long time ago. Her life to that point had led her to extremes, plenty of negatives and a few brilliant bright spots. An adopted child, who became a teenage runaway, she found her first shelter among addicts and Drag Queens. Eventually she achieved renown as a chef even while balancing the running of her restaurant with the demands of addiction to heroin.
Two more successful restaurants, an escalating addiction, and a subsequent arrest, led her into sobriety. All that was rehearsal for what to follow, when she wrote her first song in her mid-thirties.
From that point, Gauthier channeled a long line of works, almost all of them eloquent in their insight, burnished by her writing technique. A core of devotees came to await each next release. Their wait ends, for now, with Trouble and Love.
This time, Gauthier’s songs rise from what she describes as an especially dark period. “I started the process in a lot of grief,” she explains. “I’d lost a lot. So the first batch of songs was just too sad. It was like walking too close to the fire. I had to back off from it. The truth is that when you’re in the amount of grief I was in, it’s an altered state. Life is not that. You go through that. We human beings have this built-in healing mechanism that’s always pushing us toward life. I didn’t want to write just darkness, because that’s not the truth. I had to write through the darkness to get to the truth. Writing helped me back onto my feet again. This record is about getting to a new normal. It’s a transformation record.”
The heart of that transformation, beating within Trouble and Love, is love. But it’s not the kind of love that’s celebrated on pop charts. In those tunes, love is its own end; the story stops as the giddiness sets in, with no hint of what may follow. Gauthier knows better; she has the scars to prove it.
“For me, love has been a real challenge,” she admits. “Attachment has been a challenge. This record is about losing an attachment I actually made. The loss of it was devastating because I hadn’t fully attached before to anyone. The good news is that I can. The even better news is that I can, and I can lose, and live. Not only do I live, but I’ve got a strength that I never had before.”
Trouble and Love would fall or rise on the question of whether it crystalizes Gauthier’s experience and conveys it to those who want to feel it, as if the poetry of her lyric can mirror and illuminate what they too have gone through. To help make this happen, she invited a small group of singers and musicians into Nashville’s Skaggs Place Studio, each one chosen because of his or her ability to find the heart of the song. No one was given a lead sheet or an advance demo or even headphones. The backup vocals were invented on the spot. The microphones were vintage, and the songs were cut live, to tape. Everyone stood together in the room, playing to what they heard in the lyric as well as from what was going on in the moment.
“I took away everything that musicians lean on to feel invulnerable,” she explains.
All they had to work with was a brief rundown of each song from Gauthier in the control room, right before the tape rolled. “I wanted them to feel it in real time,” she continues. “You don’t want to sound real with songs like this. You want to be real. That’s what I strive for as a writer, and that’s what we got in the playing.”
Feeling their way through the process, these extraordinary participants — guitarist Guthrie Trapp, keyboardist Jimmy Wallace, bassist Viktor Krauss, drummer Lynn Williams and singers Beth Nielsen Chapman, Ashley Cleveland and Darrell Scott, Siobhan Kennedy and The McCrary Sisters — probed and then brought life to Gauthier’s compositions. In their hands, and in her fearless vocals, the songs resonate like tolling bells.
We hear “a body’s but a prison when the soul’s a refugee” in Oh Soul. The last embers of affection flicker and die on When a Woman Goes Cold, (“Scorched earth cannot burn.”) “A million miles from our first kiss, how does love turn into this?” is just one of the bitter riddles posed in False From True. Irony colors the chorus of Worthy: “Worthy, worthy what a thing to claim. Worthy, worthy, ashes into flame.”
This is deep and dangerous poetry, and Gauthier leads us through it with relentless candor. Yet tenderness is always near, enough to keep us engaged through the final track, “Another Train.”
“I wrote that one in England during a long, long tour,” she remembers. There was a sign at a station: There’ll be another train at 14:02.’ So I started working with ‘another train.’ The song evolved. It doesn’t start the way it ends. It zigged and it zagged. I let it talk to me. It’s so interesting, because when I saw ‘another train,’ boom, that whole story was in there — but I had to go find it. I had to dig, like an archaeologist.”
In the very last line of the song is the benedictory thought of the entire album. “Another Train” bathes all of what preceded it in a glimmer of hope. It a fantastically concise and powerful ending — and entirely intentional– “There’ll be another train.”
“This album reflects a total human experience. Love, loss, and a life transformed.” Gauthier sums up. “It’s not a random collection of songs. This record is a story. It’s about trust and faith and believing that there’s a plan and a flow. And the flow is where the good stuff is because there’s wisdom in the flow. At the core, we’re all cut from the same cloth– the same dreams, the same brokenness, the same desire for companionship and family and home. Yeah, we all have that. And if I don’t go deep enough into that, it’s a problem. “There’s no such thing as going too deep.”
Amen to that.
Allison Moorer
Making sense of things isn’t always easy. Singer/songwriter
Allison Moorer knows this, for sifting through life’s various complexities can
make for a good song and even better story. On “Sorrow (Don’t Come Around),” one
of the starkly candid songs on Moorer’s forthcoming effort, Crows, she hints at
a hidden optimism that sometimes is ignored or forgotten. “I gotta turn you away
so I can keep this hope alive/You’re tapping on the window but I won’t let you
inside/Maybe you’ll give up and find somebody else tonight/I draw the curtains,
say a prayer and turn out the light.”
Nearly 12 years ago, Moorer made an unforgettable introduction with her contribution of the thoughtful ballad, “A Soft Place to Fall,” to the soundtrack to Robert Redford-directed drama, 1998’s A Horse Whisperer, which later earned her an Academy Award nomination. From there, Moorer went on to carefully craft a long-lasting career with her impressive debut LP, Alabama Song, while challenging herself to always look inward for an even deeper meaning -- which she certainly explored on Miss Fortune (2002) and The Duel (2004). In 2007, Moorer received a Grammy nomination for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals for “Days Aren’t Long Enough,” a song co-written with husband, singer-songwriter Steve Earle.
Venturing into a creative world beyond music was merely natural, too; that fall, Moorer went on to appear in the stage production of Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove’s “Rebel Voices,” a theatrical adaptation based on their best-selling book, Voices of a People’s History of the United States. And in late 2009, Moorer appears in The History Channel’s The People Speak, a film inspired by Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which also features Bob Dylan, Morgan Freeman, Bruce Springsteen, Danny Glover, Matt Damon, John Legend, Josh Brolin and more.
But only now does Moorer admit that she feels as if she’s figuring out what she’s doing. Such cool confidence breathes easy on her seventh studio album, Crows.
“[The process of recording Crows] surprised me every step of the way because I felt like I was writing on a level that I hadn’t before,” Moorer says. “I felt like I was being the most open I’d ever been. I don’t know if that’s age or confidence or what, but after all this time, I’m starting to feel like I know what I’m doing as a singer. Songwriting is very mysterious to me. I know how songs work but I don’t always understand how they come to be.”
Last year’s covers collection, Mockingbird -- which found Moorer covering female artists like Nina Simone, Patti Smith and Gillian Welch -- was her way of returning to a place where it all began. “I had made what felt like a lot of records in a short amount of time, and I needed to step back from the process of writing a record, recording a record, and touring a record. I needed to change it up a little bit, so I essentially sent myself back to school,” explains Moorer. “When you’re learning how to play and sing, one of the ways you do that is by learning other people’s songs. No one is born with their own songs, so that’s how you learn to write.” Thus, with that refreshing break Moorer headed into the House of David Studio in Nashville to record the 13-song Crows in just four days. Here, she’s found humor in darkness and sifts through life’s complexities for her richest, most soul-bearing effort yet.
“I’ve always been guilty of making music for myself. The older I get, the more I do it. I’m just trying to turn myself on because if I don’t do that then I certainly can’t expect to turn anyone else on,” says Moorer.
From the starkly honest title track and the sparkling acoustic guitars of “Still This Side of Gone” to the more upbeat “Just Another Fool” and “The Broken Girl,” Moorer explores the many facets of emotion without restraint. Whether she’s questioning her own moods or considering what others might be going through, Moorer’s approach is incredibly warm. And with all its intricate loveliness, Crows is a pure and natural rock & roll record.
R.S. Field, who worked on Miss Fortune, The Duel, and the live LP, Show, produced and plays drums on Crows. “I knew R.S. could appreciate the nuances in these songs, and that he could see the inside as well as the outside,” Moorer says. “I had to have someone who really understood where I was coming from, and he understood that I was pushing myself, that I was opening up again in a way that I hadn’t before.”
Other highlights include the piano-driven “Easy in the Summertime” and its perfect coda “The Stars & I (Mama’s Song).” It’s here that Moorer pays tribute to her fondest childhood days growing up with older sister, musician and singer Shelby Lynne, while honoring the memory of her Mother.
“I’ve mined the territory of my childhood several times, but I really wanted to explore some of the more sweet memories that I have because I’ve never really done that before,” she says. “It’s sort of a history lesson for myself. It has a really child-like melody intentionally. I wrote it on piano, I couldn’t have written it on anything except a piano. It was my first instrument and it’s the soundtrack to my childhood. I always had my hands on the piano, and it saved me in a lot of ways. I’ve come back to it now and I’m very thankful for it because in a way it helped me stay innocent then. It makes me feel like I did when I was a kid making up tunes.”
Also returning to the fold is guitarist Joe McMahan, a former member of Moorer’s road band for Miss Fortune, and bassist Brad Jones, who contributed to Getting Somewhere.
Crows is wholeheartedly real -- its spirit is tangible and each lyric could belong to anyone. Moorer’s look inward is pure and without hesitation, all while she’s exploring what could exist outside of one’s soul.
Nearly 12 years ago, Moorer made an unforgettable introduction with her contribution of the thoughtful ballad, “A Soft Place to Fall,” to the soundtrack to Robert Redford-directed drama, 1998’s A Horse Whisperer, which later earned her an Academy Award nomination. From there, Moorer went on to carefully craft a long-lasting career with her impressive debut LP, Alabama Song, while challenging herself to always look inward for an even deeper meaning -- which she certainly explored on Miss Fortune (2002) and The Duel (2004). In 2007, Moorer received a Grammy nomination for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals for “Days Aren’t Long Enough,” a song co-written with husband, singer-songwriter Steve Earle.
Venturing into a creative world beyond music was merely natural, too; that fall, Moorer went on to appear in the stage production of Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove’s “Rebel Voices,” a theatrical adaptation based on their best-selling book, Voices of a People’s History of the United States. And in late 2009, Moorer appears in The History Channel’s The People Speak, a film inspired by Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which also features Bob Dylan, Morgan Freeman, Bruce Springsteen, Danny Glover, Matt Damon, John Legend, Josh Brolin and more.
But only now does Moorer admit that she feels as if she’s figuring out what she’s doing. Such cool confidence breathes easy on her seventh studio album, Crows.
“[The process of recording Crows] surprised me every step of the way because I felt like I was writing on a level that I hadn’t before,” Moorer says. “I felt like I was being the most open I’d ever been. I don’t know if that’s age or confidence or what, but after all this time, I’m starting to feel like I know what I’m doing as a singer. Songwriting is very mysterious to me. I know how songs work but I don’t always understand how they come to be.”
Last year’s covers collection, Mockingbird -- which found Moorer covering female artists like Nina Simone, Patti Smith and Gillian Welch -- was her way of returning to a place where it all began. “I had made what felt like a lot of records in a short amount of time, and I needed to step back from the process of writing a record, recording a record, and touring a record. I needed to change it up a little bit, so I essentially sent myself back to school,” explains Moorer. “When you’re learning how to play and sing, one of the ways you do that is by learning other people’s songs. No one is born with their own songs, so that’s how you learn to write.” Thus, with that refreshing break Moorer headed into the House of David Studio in Nashville to record the 13-song Crows in just four days. Here, she’s found humor in darkness and sifts through life’s complexities for her richest, most soul-bearing effort yet.
“I’ve always been guilty of making music for myself. The older I get, the more I do it. I’m just trying to turn myself on because if I don’t do that then I certainly can’t expect to turn anyone else on,” says Moorer.
From the starkly honest title track and the sparkling acoustic guitars of “Still This Side of Gone” to the more upbeat “Just Another Fool” and “The Broken Girl,” Moorer explores the many facets of emotion without restraint. Whether she’s questioning her own moods or considering what others might be going through, Moorer’s approach is incredibly warm. And with all its intricate loveliness, Crows is a pure and natural rock & roll record.
R.S. Field, who worked on Miss Fortune, The Duel, and the live LP, Show, produced and plays drums on Crows. “I knew R.S. could appreciate the nuances in these songs, and that he could see the inside as well as the outside,” Moorer says. “I had to have someone who really understood where I was coming from, and he understood that I was pushing myself, that I was opening up again in a way that I hadn’t before.”
Other highlights include the piano-driven “Easy in the Summertime” and its perfect coda “The Stars & I (Mama’s Song).” It’s here that Moorer pays tribute to her fondest childhood days growing up with older sister, musician and singer Shelby Lynne, while honoring the memory of her Mother.
“I’ve mined the territory of my childhood several times, but I really wanted to explore some of the more sweet memories that I have because I’ve never really done that before,” she says. “It’s sort of a history lesson for myself. It has a really child-like melody intentionally. I wrote it on piano, I couldn’t have written it on anything except a piano. It was my first instrument and it’s the soundtrack to my childhood. I always had my hands on the piano, and it saved me in a lot of ways. I’ve come back to it now and I’m very thankful for it because in a way it helped me stay innocent then. It makes me feel like I did when I was a kid making up tunes.”
Also returning to the fold is guitarist Joe McMahan, a former member of Moorer’s road band for Miss Fortune, and bassist Brad Jones, who contributed to Getting Somewhere.
Crows is wholeheartedly real -- its spirit is tangible and each lyric could belong to anyone. Moorer’s look inward is pure and without hesitation, all while she’s exploring what could exist outside of one’s soul.
Thursday, March 26th, 2015 8:00 pm – 10:00 pm
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