Mary Gauthier -- Reckoning
Mary Gauthier's new album reckoning is a lived-in, compassionate collection of songwriting a la Bruce's Nebraska, writes Kate Fishman.
Sometimes when you ride your local metro, looking around at who’s getting off, and who’s getting on, and who’s nodding away a bit as it rocks, you begin to believe that you could actually know your fellow passengers. What’s happening, you wonder, in their lives?
Transit and traversal criss-cross Mary Gauthier’s new album, Reckoning. On these tracks, the folk songwriting powerhouse—who once joked onstage about fancying herself “a sort of lesbian Leonard Cohen”—offers prayerful Americana, chronicling our world in several voices.
In “Some Times,” co-written with Vince Gill, the speaker sings, “I worked the Orange Blossom Special, from ’48 til ’54; Manhattan to Miami, I worked in the dining car.” Though trains like this one all but died over the speaker’s lifetime, in Gauthier’s short lines, the history reaches us where we live today. When a train arrives in the anthemic “Reckoning,” co-written with Aaron Lee Tasjan, “ain’t no way to turn it back.” Her voice stretches like canvas, wry and raw across every verse.
“Thought I Heard a Train” looks hauntingly on at the album’s close. The locomotive’s whistle and distant light echo across Reckoning and our present darkness, holding a proudly political, hopeful note: We’re all going to the same place, and we need to go forward.
Gauthier came to songwriting by way of a pivotal night in her twenties, sleeping it off in a jail cell after driving drunk. Her musical practice has kept time with her sobriety, across the subsequent decades and more than a dozen albums. Though a solo act, she doesn’t work alone. Gauthier travels, speaks before audiences seeking solace and inspiration, and writes songs with veterans to process their experiences of violence and moral injury. Perhaps we are not irredeemable, her songs dare, if only we can look one another in the eyes.
We can’t be perfect people; nor, perhaps, should we strive for technically perfect records, when “technology has made [perfection] accessible to everyone,” she attests. These new songs play that old folk music trick; they feel inevitable. She wanted Reckoning’s production to sound frayed and lived-in, mimicking Bruce Springsteen’s iconically spare Nebraska. As she reflected to Grant Alden ahead of the album’s release, “Flaws and foibles and showing your humanity, that's how we connect.”
A train rolling into town comes with an offer to get on, sure, but Gauthier also doesn’t mind leaving people behind who’d rather take us backwards. Her songwriting is marked by devotion with no patience for hate. In “Soldier of Fortune,” co-written with Eliza Gilkyson, she sings of Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, and ICE, “You’re nothing new, we know about you—you’ve been here in every age.” Gauthier’s speakers have survived more times than just ours.
Strung through Reckoning is the abiding idea that faith in people, and our capacity for goodness, is its own reward. “You can cover up the mirrors,” she sings in that titular chorus, “You can turn out all the lights. But the future walks in barefoot, in the middle of the night.”
That unguarded image lingers. If we’re in for the kind of tomorrow Reckoning envisions, who would ever want to keep it from arriving?
