Mary Gauthier: Twilight & Townes

Between Daylight and Dark
Mary Gauthier
(Lost Highway)

“Mercy Now,” singer-songwriter Mary Gauthier’s breakout album from 2005, caused many critics to invoke the late, great Townes Van Zandt. To say that is high praise is of course a huge understatement. It’s the kind of comparison that never should be thrown around lightly.

But on her new disc, “Between Daylight and Dark,” Gauthier (pronounced “GO-Shay”) more than lives up to those lofty reviews. Gauthier’s half sung, half spoken songs evoke images as powerful as those on “Mercy Now.” As Van Zandt did, Gauthier writes unflinchingly about lost souls, lost causes and shattered dreams. And with the help of producer Joe Henry, a crack band and a few of talented co-writers, Gauthier exceeds the considerable quality of her previous disc. In one significant way, she even eclipses some of Van Zandt’s best work. Many of the Texas troubadour’s studio recordings were marred by unusual production choices, but Henry and the players provide restrained, note-perfect support to Gauthier’s songs. The band – Jay Bellerose, Greg Leisz, Patrick Warren and David Piltch, with guest appearances by Loudon Wainwright III and Van Dyke Parks – never gets in the way, always allowing Gauthier’s warm, weathered voice to stay front and center.

“Snakebit,” written with Hayes Carll, exemplifies the album’s sympathetic production. More than any other song on “Between Daylight and Dark,” the treatment is cinematic. Over a country blues beat and Leisz’s groaning, growling dobro, Gauthier sets a bleak scene, singing about crying children who “never got their supper.” She’s addressing someone gone into the night even though the “shadows fear to wander.” The next verse is brilliant in its vivid description, and simultaneously brimming with metaphors:

Your crucifix is broken, bloody, sharp and shattered
I smashed it to pieces on the bedroom floor
Pain and prayers and promises scattered
Then I pulled the pistol from the dresser drawer.

As Gauthier creeps into the chorus, the sense of foreboding is palpable. Then, just after she sings, “Oh Lord,” a single, subtle touch exemplifies this disc’s artistic growth and an expanded vision. One dissonant, chilling note from the piano punctuates “Oh Lord” and adds hair-raising spookiness to an already tense scene. It evokes the horror that slasher flicks strive for but only masterful directors actually reach. The rest of Gauthier’s story is ambiguous, but it can only end violently:

Oh Lord, oh Lord
Oh Lord, what have I done?
Everything worth holding slips through my fingers
Now my hands wrapped around the handle of a gun.

A different kind of isolation and helplessness pervades “Can’t Find the Way.” Finding the human element in the Hurricane Katrina disaster in a way that few songs have, Gauthier focuses on a woman displaced by the floodwaters, perhaps to Houston or beyond. She no longer feels connected to a community, and everything is gone but the story of how she and so many others were scattered in the wind. Taken by a boat to an elevated stretch of I-10, she sits for “three days, maybe four” as more refugees arrive by the hour to join the thousands already there. As they wait, “Another day, another night / Another night, another day,” Jay Bellerose plays a martial beat on the snare drum, sounding a march for an army that was agonizingly slow in arriving.

Drifting by choice is celebrated in “Last of the Hobo Kings.” Gauthier seems genuinely enamored of the free spirits who lived by their wits while hopping the rails. They didn’t need CNN, for they could tell how their nation was doing “by the length of a sidewalk cigarette butt.” But hoboing was outlawed, and by the time Gauthier bids a final farewell to Steam Train Maury on that last Westbound, it seems like we’re all a little less free than we should be.

The title of the disc, and many of its songs, suggest transition. As day passes into night, the world keeps moving. The turns are sometimes sudden and grave, as in “Snakebit.” Sometimes unexpected shifts bring natural disasters. But some of the most common transitions in life are those that affect interpersonal relationships. This is the dusk in which Gauthier works during the middle section of the disc. The album suffers slightly from a sameness of tempo and long running times on a couple of tracks, but the stories still are captivating.

In "Between the Daylight and the Dark," a waltz written with Fred Eaglesmith, the protagonist is living in that middle ground between light and dark, left in limbo by a “wayward girl,” who also left her with a “second place smile and a broken heart.” Sometimes the singer of the songs is at fault, and she knows it. Plagued by insecurity, the character in “Before You Leave” grovels for one more declaration of love, for it will be the last. Likewise, the singer of “Please” is needy and desperate for affirmation. “Same Road” sets up a tug-of-war between desire and addiction. Ultimately, the protagonists of that song and “I Ain’t Leaving” choose not to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Gauthier is a skilled lyricist, but her style is spare rather than showy. Her words bring out the humanity in her songs. That is to say that the characters in them, like life itself, are imperfect. Rarely is it really tidy. She finds heroism in those who choose to live proudly despite their struggles. The closing track, “Thanksgiving,” finds grace in a most unlikely place: Tallulah State Prison. Specifically, in the women who wait in line outside to see their men at the holidays. “It’s Thankgiving at the prison, surrounded by families / Road weary pilgrims who show up faithfully,” she sings. “Even though it ain’t easy, even though it ain’t free / Sometimes love ain’t easy, I guess love ain’t free.”

The experience shared by these women is far from universal, but in Gauthier’s hands you’re left knowing exactly what she means.