The thing is that Mary Gauthier knows what she’s talking about on the latest single from her upcoming album Reckoning, which is released September 25th on Soundly/Thirty Tigers. Not that this song, which those who caught her last UK tour will already be familiar with, is autobiographical as such as Gauthier explains: “My friend Ben and I were talking about a friend of his who was having major trouble with alcohol and pills. People all around were trying to help, trying to pull him back toward the life he could have. And he just kept screwing it up. As we talked, our conversation turned to what it feels like to love someone who is sinking in self-destruction. The helplessness. The sadness. The fear. The anger. The wrenching ache. This is where the song began.”
She adds that her own perspective is strong when thinking about this personal disaster: “Ben and I are both in recovery – we know what it feels like to be that person spiraling downward. But being on the other side of that struggle, loving someone who can’t seem to stop hurting themselves, is a different kind of heartbreak, reaching for someone who keeps building walls between themselves and the people who love them is a hard place to be. Sometimes all you can do is step back and watch them disappear.”
And whilst the song is definitely about this, there’s a subtext as well – you’d expect that from a writer as skilled as Mary Gauthier. When she sings “matches and gasoline, trip wire broken things, wars that can’t be won, got to tell you hun’, like a bullet from a gun, some things can’t be outrun,” it’s easy to imagine that the song speaks more broadly to the times we are living through.
