Mary Gauthier - Rifles & Rosary Beads

 

Award-winning singer-songwriter Mary Gauthier co-writes with and for wounded veterans

Eleven songs sharing untold stories and confessing powerful emotions

150-gram vinyl plated and pressed at Quality Record Pressings!

There's nothing trivial about Mary Gauthier's tenth album, Rifles & Rosary Beads. The Louisiana-born award-winning singer-songwriter was indelibly moved by the stories she heard as part of a group of songwriters working with the SongwritingWith:Soldiers program.

Gauthier was one of four songwriters invited to a veteran's retreat by the program's founder, Austin, Texas singer-songwriter Darden Smith. SongwritingWith:Soldiers operates from a simple principle — pair veterans and active-duty service members with professional songwriters to craft songs about their military experiences.

The program offers a unique path to helping soldiers, their families, communities and our nation cope with the aftermath of combat duty and the challenges in returning home. It offers participants a unique way to tell their stories, rebuild trust, release pain, and forge new bonds.

The result is 11 deeply personal songs on her new album, revealing untold stories and powerful struggles that these veterans and their spouses deal with abroad and after returning home.

"I think it's a record about the power of song to tell a story that's almost impossible to tell without melody," Gauthier says. "It gets the stories from people who served, and puts them in a way that everyone can understand and then serves them back. So that we can see what these men and women have sacrificed and what their service means."

More than 300 military service men and women and their family members have co-written more than 300 songs with award-winning professional songwriters to date as part of the five-year-old program. More than 28 events have been held at locations in Texas, New York, California, Maryland, Florida, Virginia and Michigan.

Members of all military branches are referred to SW:S through contacts with VA Hospitals, Veterans Centers, and Mental Health professionals.

Gauthier relates to the tumultuous and stressful past her veteran co-writers have experienced. Orphaned in New Orleans after her birth, she grew up with adopted parents in Baton Rouge. As a teen she experienced bouts with addiction and petty theft (she spent her 18th birthday in a jail cell in Salina, Kansas), and eventually, recovery. In Boston she picked up a guitar and made her way to open mic nights on the coffeehouse circuit. And in 1997 at age 35, she released her debut album, titled Dixie Kitchen.

Her 2014 album Trouble and Love was named one of the Best 40 Country Albums of 2014 by Rolling Stone. In 2015 she was nominated for GLADD Outstanding Music Artist of the Year at the 26th Annual GLADD Media Awards. Her albums contain songs that shine a light on some of the darkest corners of the human heart, but in a way that ultimately uplifts listeners.

 

 

Soldiering On

I Got Your Six

The War After The War

Still On The Ride

Bullet Holes In The Sky

Brothers

Rifles And Rosary Beads

Morphine 1-2

It’s Her Love

Iraq

Stronger Together

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