SXSW 2005 Showcasing Artists
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Mary Gauthier
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If there were no story to tell about this remarkable artist, if there were nothing but the music that haunts every track on Mercy Now, that alone would make the case for Mary Gauthier as one of the most challenging performers to rise up from the underground in a long, long time. These past few years, people have started catching on, from grad students clustered into Boston cafes to crowds cheering before the main stages at Newport, Telluride, the Strawberry Music Festival, and in venues beyond our shore. Jon Pareles of the New York Times picked her album Filth & Fire as the top indie release of 2002. Rolling Stone acclaimed her "American Gothic tales ... delving into physical abuse, drug addiction, abject poverty, and homelessness. "Mary Gauthier's Mercy Now is a truly extraordinary album from a critically acclaimed singer." - Vanity Fair "This is an unsettling work of terrible beauty." - American Profile But there is a story here, strange and scary, as compelling as the music. Gauthier's path has wound through devastation and despair. She has beaten back demons, lived off the streets, sunk to the bottom of life, emerged from darkness, and to completely confuse things won notice as a respected restaurateur -- all before writing her first song. It can take a lifetime to write even one line like those that thread through Mercy Now. For Gauthier, that life began in a kind of prison, in which conformity was the lock in the door and each house was as much a cell as any box of steel and stone. |
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TECHNOLOGY PARTNER
