A Conversation with Mary Gauthier (continued)

MG: And I learned how to do it, and I can handle it. Things are coming to a point where I'm going to need a band. But if I find it as difficult as I did the first time, I know I can just say, "You know, I'll handle this myself."

PM: Right.

MG: I think there's a lot of confidence that comes from knowing you can do it without them. That's kind of why I went to chef school early on in the restaurant business. I didn't really want to be a chef, but I knew that as the owner of a restaurant, if I couldn't jump in and do what the chef did, I would be at a disadvantage.

PM: Right. That's an interesting analogy. How do you characterize your spiritual life and how it shows up in the material?

MG: Well, it's an interesting journey for me. When I first quit drinking 14 years ago, I didn't believe in anything or anybody. I had no spiritual life. I was dead. For all intents and purposes, I was dead. The only thing I really believed is that you can't trust anybody. I believed negative things. And at some point in my sobriety I realized believing negative things is a belief system, because you're believing in something that you don't actually know is going to happen. Believing in negative things is actually more difficult than believing in positive things, and they're actually both belief systems. It's not atheism to believe in negative things. You're believing in something.

PM: You're creating it, yeah.

MG: Yeah. [laughs] That belief system creates this negative person. And that's how I used to be. So as more time goes by and I start to understand myself better, and I start to understand what believing in things does to a person, my negative beliefs have slowly been replaced by positive beliefs. My belief system now is much more positive. I'll never be one for any organized religion whatsoever. I don't think you can put into dogma what I believe. It's way too ever-changing. As soon as I articulate it it's changed again. So trying to put it in writing is absurd.

PM: Would it be fair to say that you tend to believe in something greater than yourself?

MG: Absolutely. I believe in the Creator. And I believe that the source of creativity is the Creator. I believe more and more that thing that Harlan Howard used to say when people asked him about songwriting. He'd tell them, "Man, I just hold the pen."

PM: Right. That's how I've always felt. I didn't know Harlan was that way.

MG: Oh, yeah. And more and more and more as I go forward, I can see that to be true. It'd be really cool to take credit and say, "You know, I work so hard that I wrote that sucker." But I know deep down in my heart, the lines that I wrote, those are the ones that are okay, and the great lines, well, those came through me. I was holding the pen, and there it was.

And whether or not that's true doesn't matter to me anymore. My ability to believe that it's true changes my life. So I choose to believe that it's true. And if it's proven false, well, I suppose that I'll deal with that then. But for now, I don't care if it's true or not. I believe that it's true. And that's what belief is. That's what faith is. It's not actually knowing, it's just choosing to believe. I believe that I'm being taken care of. I believe that I'm here for a reason. I don't know what the reason is. I just try to do my best with what I've got in front of me. And slowly but surely my negative beliefs are exposed to me, and slowly but surely they get replaced with positive beliefs. And it's made all the difference for me.

PM: Wow. How's your love life? Is there somebody special?

MG: Yeah, yeah. That's going great.

PM: Good for you.

MG: Yeah. I spent my first year in Nashville wondering what the hell I was doing here? It was a tough transition from Boston to Nashville. But I love the small town thing. In Boston, I loved the big city thing. And I left just about the time it was starting to really get on my nerves. But I loved it for the most part. And now the small town is just right. Whether or not the music business was here, I would like it. Being around the other songwriters is just an added plus, but I like the life in Nashville.

PM: Me too, yeah.

MG: It's cool to just get in your car and go where you're going and park your car and go inside--I mean, you can do that in Boston.

PM: And everything is ten minutes away.

MG: Yeah, everything. It's a ten-minute town.

PM: Yeah.

[laughter]

PM: So since I haven't heard the tunes from the upcoming fourth record, do you find your subject matter is changing as you roll on, or are you just going deeper into the themes for which you have become known?

MG: There are only so many things you can write about. But I find as I change internally and spiritually, and just as I get older, that things strike me differently because I'm different. So I'll revisit the same subjects with a different perspective.

PM: Right.

MG: I really am not going into any uncharted areas. I'm still straddling a lot of the same things, but maybe with a little bit of a different point of view.

PM: That makes sense to me.

MG: Yeah.   continue

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