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MARY Gauthier remembers the exact day her life changed.
"July 13, 1990," she says without hesitation. "I got arrested for drunk driving." It wasn't her first time in custody but she'd had her last drink, touch wood.
The 28-year-old runaway was yet to write her first song, so it her lyrics to the world. "Fish swim/ Birds fly/ Lovers leave/ By and by/ Old men/ Sit and think/ I drink," he intoned, with a peer poet's air of appreciation.
Australia, Gauthier is still groping for words to describe that experience.
"When Bob Dylan played me on his radio show, I thought I would die," she says, Louisiana twang in full effect after 30 years on the run across the US.
"I couldn't believe it. That he even knew about me was something, to be honest, I couldn't quite comprehend.
Bob taught us all how to do it. He was the great teacher and he continues to be, for me."
"At 15, she stole her parents' car and ran away from home.
Spent her 18th birthday in the Kansas City Jail. Finally made her way to Kitchen."
in Baton Rouge.
That pain, subsequent struggle and deliverance drip from her albums, not least her latest, Mercy Now. It strives for a quality of redemption, she says, that she learned from records in the first place.
"When I was a kid, my (adoptive) parents had a very rocky relationship.
I just would close the door and put the headphones on. This is gonna sound weird, but I could trust some songs more than I could trust what my parents were trying to tell me. I just anything my parents were even capable of understanding.
"
life of addiction and her late-flowering gift as a songwriter. The restaurant was unlicensed, the work was hard and, sober for the first time, she found a guitar to fill her empty hours.
"When I became a songwriter, it was out of some sort of desperation.
I needed to create something," she says. "I had to latch on to something and the guitar was what I grabbed. I haven't let go yet and I don't think I'm gonna let go.
"It was probably my destiny all along, but my destiny was altered by chemical addiction. When I finally got sober I moved when I was young."
- really scary", she says.
Most of her peers were 15 years younger, older. One of them, Willie Nelson, recently took her on tour to Europe.
"People like Willie make me seem like a child," she says, "and you look in his eyes, you can tell that guy is still on fire with it.
He ain't done. Certainly Dylan just proved he ain't done. I younger artists," she says.
"Now I focus on what's possible."
Mercy Now is out on Lost Highway/UMG.
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