Event

An Evening with Mary Gauthier

Known for her painfully honest lyrics and tender melodies, folk artist Mary Gauthier has found songwriting to be a source of healing and strength, helping her to move beyond her troubled past. Dealing with issues of abandonment and adoption, Gauthier began abusing drugs and alcohol at a young age and continued to struggle with substance abuse until she was arrested for drunk driving in 1990. She has been sober ever since. She wrote her first song at age 35, driven to the art by her sobriety, releasing her first album in 1997, and then fully devoting herself to music in 1998. After twenty years of successfully attracting audiences with her award-winning music and relatable candor and poeticism, Gauthier will be performing in support of one of her most important albums to date. All eleven songs on the forthcoming Rifles and Rosary Beads (scheduled for release in January 2018) have been co-written with and for wounded veterans as part of Darden Smiths five-year-old SongwritingWith:Soldiers program eleven of the nearly 400 songs that have been written through the program. While twenty-two veterans commit suicide each day, none of the soldiers who have participated in the program have taken their own lives, and there's nothing trivial about that. Something about writing that song telling that story is healing. And though she may not be familiar with the trauma of combat, one thing that Mary Gauthier knows is how to heal through music. I felt unqualified, she says. But as an addict, I know addiction is self-medication because of suffering, and beneath that pain is always traumaMy job as a songwriter is to find that thing a soul needs to say.

This show will take place at Common Fence Music's Portsmouth Mainstage, an intimate 200 seat listening room located at Common Fence Point Hall, 933 Anthony Road, Portsmouth, RI. Doors open at 7pm, the show begins at 8pm. All Portsmouth shows are BYOB & picnic.