Gauthier documents the cost with help from those who paid it

By BILL CHAISSON
editor@eagletimes
The album “Rifles and Rosary Beads” came out in January, but Mary Gauthier has been touring to support all year long, in both the U.S. and in Europe, and she will be at the Briggs Opera House tonight for one of five East Coast shows on this leg of the journey. This album is a collaboration between Gauthier and several veterans that the songwriter began working on over six years ago.

“[Singer/songwriter] Darden Smith invited me to take part in this,” she said, “and at first I felt totally inadequate to the task.” She told herself that the vets were going to hate her. Here she was was, a left-leaning gay woman without any military history herself; what did she have in common with them? “But as it turned out, I was predjudicing them in ways that were stupid. We connected immediately.”

Smith is the organizer of SongwritingWith: Soldiers, which takes the form of retreats that begin with house concerts and end with songwriting. Six years ago Gauthier and three other songwriters got together outside of Austin with 10 female veterans. After the initial performances, the veterans selected the songwriters they wanted to work with.

“All of them had seen combat,” she recalled. “They were part of the first wave in the early 2000s. I could only imagine what they had to walk into, the biases and the prejudices of the men who just didn’t want them there.”

Two of the songs on “Rifles and Rosary Beads,” come directly from that retreat. In “Got Your Six” the female narrator is telling her fellow soldier that she will die for him and knows he will do the same for her. In “Brothers,” on the other hand, a woman has been sent into battle too soon after she’s given birth and finds that she is not getting the same respect as the men give the other men.

“Rifles and Rosary Beads” is full of perspectives that most of us have not heard before. Gauthier lets the soldiers and marines tell their stories. “The collaboration is not hard,” she said. “I asked them about themselves, when and where they served, what is was like, about their backgrounds and their families. They’re not songwriters, but they are carrying the story.”

Gauthier sees her job as delivering the story in form that people can hear. “Melody can do things that words can’t reach,” she said. “If you get deep into the core, you are going to hit a universal. I could be writing about a woman in Fallujah, but I’m gonna hit a Civil War soldier. War hasn’t changed since Shakespeare. The only effective way to talk about war is to talk about a soldier.”

The songwriting process is rapid when Gauthier works with the veterans. She has labored for as long as two years on her own songs, but it wasn’t unusual for a collaboration with the veteran to come together in under an hour. “I know where to probe,” she said. “I know what their soul needs to say.”

Over the years she has kept in touch with the soldiers and marines she has worked with. She hopes the songwriting served the function of an exorcism. “They can’t articulate what they get out of it, Gauthier said. “But I can see their faces change as we talk. In the beginning I can see the lines of withheld emotion and then their faces begin to soften and by the end they start to look their age.”

Anyone who has listened to Gauthier’s previous 10 albums knows that she has been through her own struggles. Songwriting has been her way of working through them. “They held me when I’m in trouble,” she said. “They make sense of the chaos that is in your brain.”

While Gauthier remains “anti-military-industrial complex,” she now sees the soldier’s point of view and wants to share it. “The songs generate empathy,” she said. “I’ve had people tell me ‘I’ve never thought about it that way before.’”