Mary Gauthier – Between Daylight and Dark
With Between Daylight And Dark, Mary Gauthier continues to move away from biographical material drawn from her reckless youth, while retaining her empathy for down-and-outers. This time she also illuminates more of the exigencies of a committed heart, with and without the corresponding commitment of will.
Producer Joe Henry recorded these tracks in live takes, shortening the distance between Gauthier’s intent and its target. She wants us to know the people in her songs, intimately and on first listen.
The conveyances are deceptively simple: choruses that may have circled the world soul forever; offbeat characters whose pride, dread, heartache, and confusion are really not so far removed from our own; lines we may have heard in a hundred songs, hanging on a phrase that matters more than anything.
“Can’t Find The Way” and “Same Road” are instantly memorable. The former is specifically about the Katrina diaspora, but it captures the longing of people stranded everywhere, actually or figuratively. Street-wise, second-line drumming underscores the hopelessness. “Same Road”, co-written with Nashville songwriter Liz Rose, expresses conflicting motivations: “I’m brave enough to love you, brave enough to leave…The same road that brought me to you is gonna carry me away.”
The title track, co-written with Fred Eaglesmith, captures a twilight conundrum in a driveway: in for the night, or out again? “It was all for the love of a wayward girl/Who left you with a second-place smile and a broken heart,” Gauthier sings. As the mind reels, the sky changes and “you climb back in and fire the ignition.”
“The Last Of The Hobo Kings” and “Thanksgiving” are classic Gauthier vignettes, investing marginalized lives with dignity. Steam Train Maury “hopped the high irons to the by and by,” and as Gauthier tells his story, the arrangement punctuates it with a percussion sound like the brakes of a steam train. “Thanksgiving” portrays the decency of families visiting relatives in prison for the holiday, through the grim and humiliating routines of prison security.