Three Women & The Truth: Mary Gauthier, Eliza Gilkyson, Gretchen Peters

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.


Eliza Gilkyson is a Grammy-nominated singer, songwriter and activist who has become one of the most respected musicians in Folk, Roots and Americana circles. The daughter of legendary songwriter Terry Gilkyson, Eliza entered the music world as a teenager, recording demos for her father. Since then she has released 20 recordings of her own, and her songs have been covered by Joan Baez, Bob Geldof, Tom Rush and Rosanne Cash and have been used in films, PBS specials and on prime-time TV.


"I get a lot of juice from the musicians in the room," says Gretchen Peters.In the case of her new album, 'Blackbirds,' "juice" is certainly understatement. Recorded in Nashville, the album features a who's who of modern American roots music: Jerry Douglas, Jason Isbell, Jimmy LaFave, Will Kimbrough, Kim Richey, Suzy Bogguss and more. But it's not the guests that make 'Blackbirds' the most poignant and moving album of Peters' storied career; it’s the impeccable craftsmanship, her ability to capture the kind of complex, conflicting, and overwhelming emotional moments we might otherwise try to hide and instead shine a light of truth and understanding onto them.

'Blackbirds' is, in many ways, an album that is unafraid to face down mortality. But rather than dwell on the pain of loss, the music finds a new appreciation for the life we're given. "During the summer of 2013 when I began writing songs for 'Blackbirds,' there was one week when I went to three memorial services and a wedding," remembers Peters. "It dawned on me that this is the way it goes as you get older - the memorial services start coming with alarming frequency and the weddings are infrequent and thus somehow more moving. You understand the fragility of life, and the beauty of two people promising to weather it together."

Peters found herself drawn to artists courageous enough to face their own aging and mortality in their work (Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, Nick Lowe), but noticed all the material was coming from a male perspective. "As brave an artistic risk as it may be for a man, it’s much riskier for a woman to speak about it," says Peters. "There’s a cultural expectation that women artists should either shut up about it or disappear entirely. Aging seems to be a taboo subject for female singer-songwriters, in part because our value has depended so much on our youth and sexuality. The depth and beauty and terror and richness of life in my fifties is obviously, to me, the deepest well of experience I can draw from as an artist. I want to write about that stuff because it’s real, it’s there, and so few women seem to be talking about it."

If anyone can open up that conversation, it's Peters. Inducted into the prestigious Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2014, she has long been one of Music City's most beloved and respected artists, known never to shy away from darkness and struggle in her writing. Martina McBride's recording of her stirring "Independence Day," a song that deals with domestic abuse, was nominated for a Grammy and took home Song of the Year honors at the CMAs, and her work has been performed by everyone from Etta James and Neil Diamond to George Strait and Trisha Yearwood. "If Peters never delivers another tune as achingly beautiful as 'On A Bus To St. Cloud,'" People Magazine wrote, "she has already earned herself a spot among country's upper echelon of contemporary composers."

'Blackbirds' follows Peters' 2012 album 'Hello Cruel World,' which NPR called "the album of her career" and Uncut said "establishes her as the natural successor to Lucinda Williams." If anything, though, 'Blackbirds' truly establishes Peters as a one-of-a-kind singer and songwriter, one in possession of a fearless and endlessly creative voice.

In an atypical and unexpectedly rewarding move, Peters teamed with frequent tourmate Ben Glover to co-write several tunes on the new album, which evokes the kind of 1970's folk rock of Neil Young, David Crosby, and Joni Mitchell that Peters grew up on, albeit with a more haunted twist.

"I haven't been a big fan of co-writing and it's not my natural M.O.," she explains, "but I feel a deep kinship with Ben. I knew before I went in to write with him that there were no depths to which he wouldn't go. I felt a certain safety."

The first song she penned with Glover, the murder ballad "Blackbirds," is set deep in southern Louisiana and opens the album with an ominous, country-noir vibe that simmers just below the surface of the entire collection. "That song just kind of came out of us," says Peters. "Writing it was a lot like investigating a crime. We were sitting in my writing room and we had some lines and the chorus and we were just talking to each other trying to figure out 'What actually happened here? What's the story?' It felt like we were following clues."

Geographically, the album leaps around the country, with particularly heartrending stops in Pelham, New York, where Peters probes the hidden darkness of the leafy suburbia in which she grew up ("The House On Auburn Street"), and the Gulf of Mexico, where a fisherman lays his wife to rest after losing everything in the BP oil spill ("Black Ribbons"). "When All You Got Is A Hammer" is the story of a veteran struggling to adjust to life at home after fighting overseas, while "The Cure For The Pain" takes place in the waning days of illness in a hospital, and "Nashville" brings us back to Peters' adopted hometown.

Despite the varied locations, the songs on 'Blackbirds' are all inextricably tied together through their characters, whom Peters paints with extraordinary empathy and vivid detail.

"These songs are stories of lost souls, people trapped in the darkness, or fighting their way out of it," she says. "I think we need to talk more about that, more honestly. We throw words like 'closure' around as if it’s a panacea, but sometimes pain outlasts us.

Sometimes it doesn’t go away. There is no way out but through."

Finding the way through is what Peters does best. The songs on 'Blackbirds' may take place in the dark night of the soul, but Peters ensures we never lose sight of the delicate beauty of the journey. Sometimes, as she sings so compassionately, "The cure for the pain is the pain."