Mary Gauthier
Trouble and Love
In The Black #1007

www.marygauthier.com
 

“The body’s just a prison and the soul’s a refugee,” Gauthier (pronounced go-shay) quietly sings in her emotionally riveting portrait of at last daring to give her heart to someone, losing the relationship and then finding strength to move on.

“It’s been years since your house felt like a home,” she writes amid songs of jagged edges and broken parts where the heart can no longer distinguish false from true. Like the late German New Wave film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, she can present a gay relationship in such a way that gender preference is utterly irrelevant to the tale.

Gauthier’s powerful concept CD The Foundling (2010) addressed her alienation and identity quest due to being left in a New Orleans orphanage. (“I’ve got a hole in me like I was never born.”) Does her hesitation to deeply bond in Trouble & Love stem from abandonment by her birth mother? As she stumbled in emotional darkness, did she ever even feel worthy of being loved until she realized that, beneath the hurt, she just might be a diamond in the dirt?

Spare arrangements keep our attention on the lyrics. The dirge tempos get an uplift on “Oh Soul,” where Darrell Scott’s deep counterpoint harmonies well up behind Gauthier as she journeys to Greenwood, MS, to pray at Robert Johnson’s grave for the return of her own soul. Ultimately her prayers are answered.

In the end, there’s healing for herself and maybe some of us too as she comes to realize, “We’re all just walking each other home.”

— Bruce Sylvester