If you’re looking for lessons in how to sit down and write a tune, Saved by a Song is not the book for you. However, if you want to read about how and why Mary Gauthier wrote a dozen songs selected from the many she’s written over the past 25 years, then you’ll enjoy Saved by a Song: The Art and Healing Power of Songwriting.
Gauthier is a singer and songwriter whose work falls into the genres of folk, country and Americana. Her music has won numerous awards around the world, she’s been nominated for a Grammy, and the Associated Press called her one of the best songwriters of her generation. Her songs have been recorded by a diverse group of other singers, including Boy George, Jimmy Buffett and Dolly Parton.
Saved by a Song is Gauthiers first book. In it, she tells the stories behind 12 of her songs. The first chapter focuses on her song I Drink, and it opens with an unflinching re-telling of her arrest for drunken driving in 1990, when she was 28. It was the culmination of a life of addiction she’d lived since she was a kid. “I have not had a drink or drug since,” Gauthier writes.
In subsequent chapters, she talks more about her sobriety; about leading songwriting workshops for and collaborating with wounded veterans; visiting the Catholic hospital in New Orleans – now a decrepit rooming house – where she was born in March 1962 and quickly placed for adoption; and making contact with her birth mother more than 40 years later....spending her 18th birthday in jail.
How does songwriting happen? For Gauthier, she hears a phrase or a snippet of a conversation and writes it down or commits it to memory. Our Lady of the Shooting Star. Drag Queens and Limousines. She knows there’s a song in there somewhere. She sits with her guitar and starts playing a melody. “The rest is hard to explain,” she writes.
I’ve read a number of memoirs by musicians over the years, both for pleasure and in preparation for a couple of classes I teach at Baylor, and Mary Gauthier’s Saved by a Song is absolutely one of my favorites. The openness and vulnerability she displays in her writing makes it feel like you’ve been let in on a friend’s deepest secrets, much like her music does as well.
And there’s a local connection to Saved by a Song. Gauthier’s partner, fellow singer- songwriter, Jaimee Harris, to whom the book is dedicated, graduated from Midway High School in 2008.
