Speaker 1: Pushkin. Mary Goshet is a folk singer songwriter whose songs
Speaker 1: have quite literally saved her life. Born a bastard child
Speaker 1: in New Orleans, it's two old woman I have never seen.
Speaker 1: I don't know if she ever held me. All I
Speaker 1: nasees she like go me. Writing music didn't come easily.
Speaker 1: To go shat. She began abusing drugs and alcohol as
Speaker 1: a young girl growing up in Louisiana. After years of
Speaker 1: struggling with addiction, Goshe got clean at age twenty seven
Speaker 1: after getting arrested for a dui. She picked up a
Speaker 1: dusty old guitar not long after and began to frequent
Speaker 1: open mics around Boston, where she eventually found the community
Speaker 1: in Connection she craved. Mary Gosche released her debut album,
Speaker 1: Dixie Kitchen in nineteen ninety seven. She moved to Nashville
Speaker 1: not long after, and a sense become known for her
Speaker 1: ability to write vivid, literary style lyrics that pull from
Speaker 1: her past trauma, loss, and heartbreak. Early this year, Goshe
Speaker 1: published the book Saved by a Song, The Art and
Speaker 1: Healing Power of Songwriting, which documents her process and inspiration.
Speaker 1: On today's episode, Bruce Heath them talks to Mary Gosche
Speaker 1: about how the same determination that once drove her to
Speaker 1: drink now powers her songwriting. She also talks about how
Speaker 1: conversations with young US veterans inspired her Grammy nominated album
Speaker 1: Rifles and Rosary Beads, and Goshe recalls seeing one particularly moving,
Speaker 1: open mic performance that inspired her to become the artist
Speaker 1: she is today. This is broken record liner notes for
Speaker 1: the digital age. I'm justin Richmond. Here's Bruce Utlam and
Speaker 1: Mary Gotchet. Your great book Saved by a Song, the
Speaker 1: art and healing power of songwriting. It is a great
Speaker 1: guide to songwriting. However, when you flip it open and
Speaker 1: you go to the epigraph, I'm going to read the epigraph.
Speaker 1: So the epigraph is from the Gospel of Thomas. If
Speaker 1: you bring forth what is within you, what you bring
Speaker 1: forth will save you. If you do not bring forth
Speaker 1: what is within you, what you do not bring forth
Speaker 1: will destroy you. I thought way to take the pressure
Speaker 1: off there. I interpret it as meaning is that music
Speaker 1: and song is this opportunity to bring forth what's very
Speaker 1: hard to articulate any other way. And a lot of
Speaker 1: these things are deeply embedded in trauma. For me, I've
Speaker 1: used music and song to move trauma through my cells
Speaker 1: and out of my body. If we carry our trauma
Speaker 1: without working through our trauma, we find often that it
Speaker 1: gets heavier, not lighter. And so I see that passage
Speaker 1: is hopeful. You didn't come to songwriting the way a
Speaker 1: lot of people I interview. D tell me a little
Speaker 1: bit about when songwriting really started for you. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: didn't start writing songs until my thirties. I went to
Speaker 1: chef's school and trained to be a better cook. While
Speaker 1: I was in the restaurant business, I had found some
Speaker 1: backers to open a place in Boston and then another
Speaker 1: place in Boston. I got sober when I was twenty seven,
Speaker 1: after getting arrested for drunk driving opening night at the
Speaker 1: second restaurant. And after I got sober, I finished chef
Speaker 1: school and I started to go to open mics. And
Speaker 1: it started with one of my waitresses at the restaurant.
Speaker 1: Had all this time on my hands. After I got sober,
Speaker 1: I didn't. It felt like a day was forty years long.
Speaker 1: Wait a second, you were running two restaurants, Yeah, but
Speaker 1: still drinking and drugs took a lot of time. What
Speaker 1: you're doing, it took it was the way I completed
Speaker 1: my day, and without that completion ritual, I needed a
Speaker 1: way to complete my day. And I was brought to
Speaker 1: an open mic and it was a lightbulb moment for me.
Speaker 1: I was like, ah, I want to do this. I
Speaker 1: want to I want to write a song and get
Speaker 1: on that stage and play here. It was at Club
Speaker 1: Pass simon Hervard Square, and so I had an old
Speaker 1: guitar that I'd been traveling around with for years, but
Speaker 1: it was dusty and old and the strings were rusty,
Speaker 1: and I needed to change the strings and rebuild callouses
Speaker 1: and like put put it in my hands and find
Speaker 1: my way to chords again. And it was homecoming of sorts,
Speaker 1: and I took to it really passionately. And what happened was,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm an addict. So I went at open
Speaker 1: mics like an attic wood and what I found there
Speaker 1: was kind of what I was looking for all along
Speaker 1: with drugs and alcohol, which is community and connection, hanging
Speaker 1: out with other songwriters and artists and performance poets and
Speaker 1: just a bunch of wackos and misfits and beautiful crazy people.
Speaker 1: I found my people. I found community, and I wasn't
Speaker 1: drunk so I connected in a way that didn't disappear
Speaker 1: the next morning. I was really rebuilding my life, and
Speaker 1: music and song became the tap root, I think, to
Speaker 1: my sobriety and recovery and to my life. And here
Speaker 1: we are thirty one years later and it still is.
Speaker 1: So tell me there are people, a lot of people
Speaker 1: probably listening that have dusty guitars at home who can
Speaker 1: play a few chords. Where did you start with writing
Speaker 1: a song? That first day? I said, Okay, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: do you remember that first day when I was like
Speaker 1: kind of I didn't have any idea what I was
Speaker 1: doing or how to do it or but I'd seen
Speaker 1: a room full of people do it. And I started
Speaker 1: going to that open mic every week, and I watched,
Speaker 1: you know, nervous people, people who really weren't very good
Speaker 1: at it, people who were just getting started, people who
Speaker 1: were older than me, which was great relief to me
Speaker 1: because I felt old at thirty one thirty two, however
Speaker 1: old I was there for me. It was a matter
Speaker 1: of finding a melody and some words and a handful
Speaker 1: of chords that my handkerd shape and saying something. And
Speaker 1: it took me quite a while to figure out what
Speaker 1: it is I wanted to be saying. I finally made
Speaker 1: up nine or ten songs and I made a little
Speaker 1: demo record. When I look back on that, I think, well,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm imitating my heroes like most people in
Speaker 1: the beginning. In retrospect, if you listen to that first
Speaker 1: Bob Dylan record, he's definitely imitating his heroes, from Dave
Speaker 1: von Ronck to Raandland Jack Elliott to What He Got.
Speaker 1: Three has one original Dylan song on that first record,
Speaker 1: and you can see the promise that he has fulfilled.
Speaker 1: And then some The beginning is I think naturally about
Speaker 1: trying to figure out what you're supposed to be talking
Speaker 1: about and what you're supposed to sound like. It's interesting
Speaker 1: because you know, we're in Nashville. In fact, we're a
Speaker 1: long music row where a lot of people, you know,
Speaker 1: they really learned not by figuring out what they had
Speaker 1: to say, but by just the craft of it. Like
Speaker 1: I got to write a song because this is how
Speaker 1: I make a living, and I'm going to try and
Speaker 1: sell it to somebody. Right, that really didn't go through
Speaker 1: that for you. It was it was the subject had
Speaker 1: to come. Yeah, Well, two things One I didn't have
Speaker 1: to make a living at it. I owned two restaurants
Speaker 1: and I made a good living, so it wasn't about
Speaker 1: money for me. And the other thing is I never
Speaker 1: played in covers bands. I didn't have a large vocabulary
Speaker 1: musically really G C, D, E, E A B. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's just that one four or five chord progression over
Speaker 1: and over again and get fancy to throw a minor in.
Speaker 1: Have you pushed yourself since then? Because artists like Paul Simon,
Speaker 1: particularly in the seventies when he was suddenly by himself,
Speaker 1: he learned music theory because he thought, I just don't
Speaker 1: have enough chords for what I want to do. Has
Speaker 1: that been a kind of lifetime thing for you too? No?
Speaker 1: I can work within my limitations and musically still continue
Speaker 1: to find new melodies to wrap around where I really
Speaker 1: want to go. That challenges me the most is lyrically,
Speaker 1: the places I haven't been before. I want to articulate
Speaker 1: what I'm going through. The challenge for me is to
Speaker 1: not repeat myself. And some people will find that deepening
Speaker 1: knowledge of music helps them to do that. For me,
Speaker 1: deepening my knowledge of myself and the world and spirituality
Speaker 1: and faith and in particularly love. That is a full
Speaker 1: time job for me, as someone who has dealt with
Speaker 1: a deep seated sense of unworthiness for most of my life,
Speaker 1: learning how to love and be loved. Man, you know
Speaker 1: I'll be doing that for whatever time I have left.
Speaker 1: Is probably not enough to get real good at it.
Speaker 1: It's going to take another lifetime. Probably. Let me ask
Speaker 1: you when you say lyrics finding the right words, like,
Speaker 1: how do you find these works? Are you either kind
Speaker 1: of I've always got a notebook with me or are
Speaker 1: you the kind of sit down every day type. I'm
Speaker 1: on the computers now. Really? Yeah, I wrote on legal
Speaker 1: pads for years and I still have just huge for
Speaker 1: legal pads worth of edits that I bring sometimes to
Speaker 1: my workshops when I'm working with songwriters to go, look,
Speaker 1: this is how much I edited this song. You think
Speaker 1: you think your first past is the one like this
Speaker 1: is how much I had to get rid of to
Speaker 1: get to that. When the computers came along and I
Speaker 1: started writing on computers. Maybe some things get lost. I
Speaker 1: don't just delete it. It's a long running document, but
Speaker 1: I do cut and paste and use the laptop as
Speaker 1: I write these days. Definitely, you're a healthy consumer of
Speaker 1: Amazon Cloud Services. Is what you're telling a lot of stuff.
Speaker 1: There got a lot of words. What allows you to
Speaker 1: find those words? I have a thing in my gut
Speaker 1: that my very first producer, Chrit Harman, identified as the
Speaker 1: truth thometer. And I think if there's anything that that
Speaker 1: I could point to that says this is where your
Speaker 1: talent lies, that would be what I would claim is
Speaker 1: I have a truth thometer, and that truth thometer tells
Speaker 1: me when I'm not there yet. And so finding words
Speaker 1: is not hard. Finding truth is always hard, and that's
Speaker 1: what I challenge myself to do. And the truth I'm
Speaker 1: referencing is not the facts, it's emotional truth. Like really
Speaker 1: what we're talking about here, I'm always in this state
Speaker 1: of unknowing when I write, I don't I don't know,
Speaker 1: and I'm in a discovery process. What's that process? Like
Speaker 1: it's getting rid of bullshit, like that's just not quite true,
Speaker 1: or that sounds nice and you really want to sing
Speaker 1: it because it has a razzle dazzle, but it's a
Speaker 1: half truth. Sounds good, looks good, presents well out of party,
Speaker 1: but then you leave and realize nothing was said and
Speaker 1: nothing moved, and nothing really connected to all songs begin
Speaker 1: with a little bit of that for you. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I have to start with what I call the cocktail
Speaker 1: party conversation and then work my way into something deeper
Speaker 1: for me to finish the song. And I have a
Speaker 1: lot of songs I've started that I didn't finish. I
Speaker 1: have not finished. Do you think it's because those songs
Speaker 1: didn't have a truth or because you just couldn't find
Speaker 1: it didn't find it? I probably belonged to somebody else
Speaker 1: somewhere else. It wouldn't mind to write. I'm interested. You know.
Speaker 1: You say you've got a what did you say, a
Speaker 1: truth truthometer? You know, the flip side of that, and
Speaker 1: you said this would be the bullshit detector. Yep, uh.
Speaker 1: Do you have that for other singers? Do you hear
Speaker 1: songs and go, nice song, ain't true all the time?
Speaker 1: Oh wow? It really? Yeah, I don't believe even with
Speaker 1: famous songs, and yeah, I don't believe you. I guess
Speaker 1: I'm less interested in what the truth is in how
Speaker 1: they say it. You know, I like a lot of
Speaker 1: rock music where frankly I don't I don't have a
Speaker 1: clue what what the lyrics are even are about. I
Speaker 1: don't kind of care. That's not where I tend to
Speaker 1: put my ears. I want to hear some truth and
Speaker 1: that I'm not asking for facts. Fiction is awesome, that's
Speaker 1: actually a great way to get to the truth. What
Speaker 1: I mean is I want to believe the singer, and
Speaker 1: that is wrapped to me, wrapped around emotional truth. And
Speaker 1: so I think that there's a certain amount of vulnerability involved,
Speaker 1: a certain amount of taking a risk that's involved, and
Speaker 1: those twos tend to be universal and they tend to
Speaker 1: follow us through time. The song you guys warmed up on,
Speaker 1: which was the War after the War, Now, I know
Speaker 1: you co wrote that with people I believe whose spouses were, yeah,
Speaker 1: military spouses and best Nilson Chapman, and you know that
Speaker 1: line their landmines in the living room, eggshells on the floor. Well,
Speaker 1: that's I mean, those are just great lines, That's what
Speaker 1: those are. And you've got those throughout your songs. Is
Speaker 1: that something you do? You hear little phrases and go,
Speaker 1: oh that that works. Yeah, yeah, And That's what I'm
Speaker 1: looking for when I write, is visual that makes you
Speaker 1: see it and then feel it. Tell me the story
Speaker 1: about the guy you signed an open mic night. It's
Speaker 1: a story in your book, and I thought it was
Speaker 1: so instructive. Yeah, I call it the Farmer in the
Speaker 1: Hat story. When I was about a year or two
Speaker 1: into open mics, just very much at the beginning of
Speaker 1: learning how to write songs and play them on stage,
Speaker 1: which was for me terrifying. For quite a while. I
Speaker 1: just had serious stage fright and a sense of what
Speaker 1: am I doing up here? Every time I got up there,
Speaker 1: I was like, oh my god, well, the first time
Speaker 1: you didn't play at all? Right, the first time I
Speaker 1: couldn't even get a word out. I just completely failed.
Speaker 1: But I was brought to an open mic where it
Speaker 1: went for hours and hours and hours because it was
Speaker 1: a very popular open mic in western Massachusetts at the
Speaker 1: old Vienna Coffeehouse. One hundred and something people signed up.
Speaker 1: If you do the math at five minutes, that's a
Speaker 1: lot a lot of a lot of people and a
Speaker 1: lot of hours. And so three or four hours into
Speaker 1: this thing, waiting for our turn to play, a lot
Speaker 1: of people left, but the people that remained were steadfast
Speaker 1: and waiting for their turn on stage. And this guy
Speaker 1: gets up and he's obese, he's an overalls, he's got
Speaker 1: dirty work boots, he's wearing a straw hat, and he
Speaker 1: looks as nervous as I've felt on stage, and when
Speaker 1: they plug him in to get going, he just immediately
Speaker 1: starts strumming without finesse, and and those of us left
Speaker 1: in the audience we're like, oh, man, we're gonna have
Speaker 1: to sit through another horrible song from playing plagued by
Speaker 1: somebody who has no stage presence. And he was shaking
Speaker 1: his face, went Crimson. He was hiding under his hat,
Speaker 1: and it was not a great start. But when he
Speaker 1: got to the chorus, he's saying, I got holes I
Speaker 1: cain't fill and bills I can't pay. I'm gonna walk
Speaker 1: in the water till my hat floats away, And something
Speaker 1: went across the room. I think of it as an
Speaker 1: emotional electricity, and we all immediately let go of our
Speaker 1: judgment of this guy. And what I think occurred was empathy,
Speaker 1: which is the most powerful experience I think that art
Speaker 1: can give us, especially the art of song, is empathy.
Speaker 1: We're suddenly not only being brought to the feeling of
Speaker 1: what he's saying that we have had, but we're feeling
Speaker 1: as if we are him. We become him in that moment.
Speaker 1: And what happened was we understood instinctively he wasn't joking
Speaker 1: like he was serious, and I don't know if he
Speaker 1: was and playing suicide, but his narrator was, and we
Speaker 1: believed him, and that believing him really really moved us.
Speaker 1: When that happened, the room was his. He had us.
Speaker 1: It didn't matter that he was obese, it didn't matter
Speaker 1: that he was unwashed, it didn't matter he couldn't sing,
Speaker 1: it didn't matter he couldn't play. And he got a
Speaker 1: standing ovation from the people that were in the audience,
Speaker 1: and that burned itself into my consciousness of what I'm
Speaker 1: trying to do as a songwriter. I wanted to do
Speaker 1: what that guy did. I wanted to make people feel
Speaker 1: it and be unable to not feel it. And that's
Speaker 1: still my goal. And he gave me a way of
Speaker 1: seeing my job that wasn't contingent on music business values,
Speaker 1: which you gotta be young, you gotta be sexy, you
Speaker 1: gotta sing great, you gotta play great, you gotta be
Speaker 1: uh no, that thing there. If I can do what
Speaker 1: he did, I know I'll have a career. I know
Speaker 1: I'll have people who will want to hear what I do.
Speaker 1: But it was a great song quality, which is it
Speaker 1: was so visual. Yep. And that is what I talk
Speaker 1: about a lot, is that songs often in my way
Speaker 1: of looking at it, or like cinematic moments. There's like
Speaker 1: little films. You want to bring people into the movie
Speaker 1: so they can see themselves in your story. That's always
Speaker 1: what I'm trying to do, and then that creates emotion.
Speaker 1: Can you think of songwriters who for you always create
Speaker 1: those visual pictures? Oh god, there's so many. You talk
Speaker 1: about Sam Stone being one of your friend John always always, Now,
Speaker 1: that would be a good song, but everybody knows there's
Speaker 1: a hole in Daddy's arm where I don't think that
Speaker 1: song would be nearly as well known with that. That's
Speaker 1: the line that there's a hole in Daddy's arm where
Speaker 1: all the money goes. Yeah, oh my god, what a visual.
Speaker 1: My friend Gretchen Peters has a song called on the
Speaker 1: Us to Sink Cloud and it's about a divorce or
Speaker 1: a breakup and she she's finds herself in the church
Speaker 1: and Saint Cloud and she weeps in the arms of
Speaker 1: Jesus for the choice you made that is so much
Speaker 1: better than you broke my heart. And now I'm sad.
Speaker 1: The recitation of I'm sad in blue does nothing. It
Speaker 1: doesn't have the power. And that's just understanding how human
Speaker 1: empathy gets triggered. Give me a couple of examples from
Speaker 1: your own songwriting, where you are consciously or unconsciously thinking
Speaker 1: of that moment, the until my hat floats away, your
Speaker 1: your hat floating away moments. M Well, you know, I
Speaker 1: try to get an imagery in every song. I got
Speaker 1: one moving on through the pain. I'm waiting on another train,
Speaker 1: like we we all know, I'm not really at the
Speaker 1: train station waiting for on another train. It's a metaphor,
Speaker 1: but the tra brains always lend themselves to these, to
Speaker 1: these songs. That the train is a metaphor for so
Speaker 1: many things, the comings and goings of everything in human life.
Speaker 1: That's why there's I think, never enough trained songs. You know,
Speaker 1: working with the veterans rifles and rosary beads, you hold
Speaker 1: on to what you need, you know, I asked the
Speaker 1: young man, I wrote that with what did you see
Speaker 1: when you got off that plane? Nineteen years old kid
Speaker 1: from Austin, Texas, gone through basic and find yourself in
Speaker 1: Fallujah during the search He said, Well, there was guys
Speaker 1: holding rifles with white knuckles, and there was guys holding
Speaker 1: rosary beads and rolling them. He wasn't a Catholic, so
Speaker 1: he didn't know that that's how I was raised Catholic.
Speaker 1: You pray each bead. Each bead has a prayer attached.
Speaker 1: He said, they were rolling the beats, and so I
Speaker 1: just immediately wrote down rifles and rosary beads because that
Speaker 1: imagery is so strong, and followed it up with you
Speaker 1: hold on to what you need. And then I asked
Speaker 1: him what was it that you held on too? And
Speaker 1: there was a long pause, and I knew I had
Speaker 1: asked a hard question. Then he slowly and somewhat hesitantly
Speaker 1: said Vicadin, and I came right down into the song Vicadin,
Speaker 1: Morphine dreams, rifles and rosary beats. We'll be right back
Speaker 1: with more from Mary Goche. After a quick break, we're
Speaker 1: back with Mary Goche and Bruce had them. So how
Speaker 1: do you put it all together? Then? Like, when do
Speaker 1: you know that I've got this, I've got the order
Speaker 1: right or is it just work? It's work, yeah, and
Speaker 1: hours and hours and hours. There's a sense of rightness
Speaker 1: when it's really starting to feel done. You know. Usually
Speaker 1: I'll sleep on it and check it the next day
Speaker 1: and see if I still feel that way, and at
Speaker 1: least ninety nine percent of the time I don't. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: at the end of the day, it's a gut feeling
Speaker 1: and very hard to articulate. I was in that it
Speaker 1: took you two years to write I drink right about
Speaker 1: two years. Yeah, I had to get I had to
Speaker 1: get that bridge, and boy, that bridge took forever. The
Speaker 1: character had to say something in that bridge so that
Speaker 1: we knew the song wasn't comical, and that we knew
Speaker 1: that that character was in trouble. And it took me
Speaker 1: a while writing that song that before I realized the
Speaker 1: character wasn't me. Even though it is me, it's not me.
Speaker 1: And what I had to do is get everything out
Speaker 1: that didn't belong. Example, the first verse was about my father,
Speaker 1: but then it was just he in the end. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like you too, and you understand it as as as
Speaker 1: the narrator's father. Yeah, but you you cleared out a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff from that song. Yeah, I had to.
Speaker 1: I had to keep asking is this true? Is this true?
Speaker 1: Is this true? Is this true? And if it's not true,
Speaker 1: then get it out, make space, and try to put
Speaker 1: something more true in there. Until everything in it I
Speaker 1: could check the Yeah this is true, which again is
Speaker 1: not a reference to factual, because the song is fiction.
Speaker 1: But I believe it to be true in that I
Speaker 1: believe the narrator it rings true. Well the other thing
Speaker 1: and we haven't even talked about your music yet. We're
Speaker 1: talking so much about lyrics. Is the pause for would
Speaker 1: you mind even playing just the chorus just so people
Speaker 1: will hear what I'm talking about? Yeah, Fish swam birds fly,
Speaker 1: Daddy's you mom cry, old man something drink? Wow? Was
Speaker 1: that pause always in that song? Yeah? Yeah, that is
Speaker 1: so good. Yeah, yeah, it just makes it That delay is. Man,
Speaker 1: it's weird because in some situations it comes off as comical.
Speaker 1: Had you heard that in another song, that kind of
Speaker 1: delay or it just that just seemed to be how
Speaker 1: it fell in, Like I figured the the guy would
Speaker 1: say it in a way that was again a matter
Speaker 1: of fact. Look, here's what I am, and this is
Speaker 1: just how it is. He would probably say it a
Speaker 1: little softer. It wouldn't. He wouldn't go up on I drink.
Speaker 1: He would say it a little softer. Fish swam birds fly,
Speaker 1: daddy's yell, mom's cry, old man. They sit and think
Speaker 1: and yeah, I drink. But you could have filled it
Speaker 1: in with you know, I'm the kind of kind of drinks,
Speaker 1: or you know, you could have felled been all those
Speaker 1: missing syllables had you wanted right. But then it would
Speaker 1: have felt as though it would be less a matter
Speaker 1: of fact, if you filled it in with a bunch
Speaker 1: of mumbo jumbo's. He just has acceptance of what's happening,
Speaker 1: and then you realize in the bridge, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: he's lying to himself. The song is emotionally complicated because
Speaker 1: it is an actually it's an exploration of alcoholic denial,
Speaker 1: which is a much deeper form of denial than just
Speaker 1: knowing something to not be true, but but insisting that
Speaker 1: it is. The alcoholic denial is you have no idea
Speaker 1: of the severity of your situation. You really don't know.
Speaker 1: When he says I know what I am and I
Speaker 1: don't give a damn, the audience goes, Oh, he's in
Speaker 1: trouble and he doesn't really know how bad it is.
Speaker 1: You said that phrase, I don't give a damn it
Speaker 1: is what That was the key to the song for you. Yep.
Speaker 1: That was a key of the song. It was a
Speaker 1: two year song. Win in that two years, did you
Speaker 1: go wait a second, Well, I think I remember something happened.
Speaker 1: A parallel thing happened where I had a manager. I
Speaker 1: was over time, trusting them less and less. I had
Speaker 1: evidence that my trust might have been misplaced in this guy.
Speaker 1: And he kept saying, Hey, Mary, look trust me. I'm
Speaker 1: a good guy. And somewhere along the way, I went,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, I know zero good guys who say that. Shit,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna stop saying that. Bruce, don't tell people you're
Speaker 1: a good guy. And I realized it's the unreliable narrator thing.
Speaker 1: It's like, I know what I am. I don't give
Speaker 1: a damn. And everybody who hears an alcoholic say that
Speaker 1: says to himself, I don't believe you. Yeah, because when
Speaker 1: you shout I don't give a damn, it means you do.
Speaker 1: What interested me is is the first song you felt
Speaker 1: was your own. It was a song that was not
Speaker 1: in your voice, and it was a goddamn HIV. Can
Speaker 1: you tell me a bit about that? Yeah, thanks for asking. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was the song that was written from the perspective
Speaker 1: of a young man with the virus in the early
Speaker 1: nineties who knew that he was probably going to die.
Speaker 1: And while it was his voice, it was actually the
Speaker 1: first experience I had of my writer's voice. That was
Speaker 1: my voice. I was speaking in first person from behind
Speaker 1: his eyes, but everything about it was me. I think
Speaker 1: that that is really an interesting thing to talk about
Speaker 1: his writer's voice. I think writer's voice can come through characters.
Speaker 1: Tooling apart. Who's the writer and who's the character is
Speaker 1: always interesting, you know the old saying that all biographist
Speaker 1: fiction and all fictionist biography, there's a lot of me
Speaker 1: in that guy. I talk about how that song was
Speaker 1: influenced by all my heroes, but they wouldn't have written it.
Speaker 1: That one was for me to write. Interesting like so
Speaker 1: you're thinking of Dylan or other people or what he
Speaker 1: got three, but they would have written it, No, not
Speaker 1: first person. I couldn't imagine Steve roll saying I've been
Speaker 1: a queer since the day I was born. But I
Speaker 1: was gonna say that because Michael needed to say that
Speaker 1: the character, right. You know, my name is Michael Joe Alexandra.
Speaker 1: I've been a queer since the day I was born,
Speaker 1: and it's just unapologetics, a matter of fact, like, let's
Speaker 1: just get this on the table so that you can
Speaker 1: self select the hell out of here. If that's what
Speaker 1: you feel as though you need to do, and if
Speaker 1: you want to stay around for the rest of the story,
Speaker 1: I'm here to tell it to you. This is interesting
Speaker 1: because you know the two things that work for me.
Speaker 1: And one is the political part of the song. I
Speaker 1: guess it's the middle eight. It's a it's just a
Speaker 1: little couplet. I'm gonna get it wrong, but it's I
Speaker 1: don't know what it all means. I don't think it
Speaker 1: means what it seems yep. And the other part is
Speaker 1: the last first where he goes back and remember him
Speaker 1: being scared as a kid and his mother would turn
Speaker 1: on the light. When did that come to you? When
Speaker 1: you're right, that's intentional. I wanted people to envision themselves
Speaker 1: in the story. When I had Michael Joe reflect back
Speaker 1: on him being a boy being scared at night and
Speaker 1: his mama would come and turn on the light. I
Speaker 1: want every mama and daddy who heard that song to
Speaker 1: imagine their child crying and going to the room and
Speaker 1: picking him up and say it's Okay, it's okay, it's
Speaker 1: just a dream. Because back then came in with AIDS,
Speaker 1: We're we're being dehumanized. They were being treated as disposable
Speaker 1: as Pariah's. I had a friend with the virus who
Speaker 1: ended up in the Baton Rouge General Hospital with crime
Speaker 1: scene tape on his door. They wouldn't even put the
Speaker 1: meals in the room. His parents didn't even go visit him.
Speaker 1: The hope with that, with that couplet was that people
Speaker 1: could envision, Wow, this could happen to my kid. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I didn't want to go for the anger. I wanted
Speaker 1: to go for the empathy. Paul Simon said to us
Speaker 1: that a lot of his songs start out angry and
Speaker 1: he writes them until the anger is gone. I really
Speaker 1: relate to that. Really, you start with anger, I don't
Speaker 1: think anger's the I think there's a deeper emotional under anger,
Speaker 1: and it's almost always hurt or fear. Which isn't to
Speaker 1: say I don't like angry songs, but I'm trying to
Speaker 1: go underneath a lot of what might make me angry
Speaker 1: at first and see what's underneath that, And almost always
Speaker 1: it's fear or or hurt. You know it hurt me
Speaker 1: that that my friend Joey was treated like that at
Speaker 1: the hospital, and that was painful. Like I was angry,
Speaker 1: but underneath it was more like, gosh, you know, I
Speaker 1: want people not to do this, and being angry about
Speaker 1: it's not gonna change that maybe make it make them
Speaker 1: feel it like it could happen to them, to their
Speaker 1: own kids, because of course it could. Do You ever
Speaker 1: have writer's block? Oh yeah, what's that? How do you
Speaker 1: work through that? I just wait it out? Oh? Really?
Speaker 1: Does it always come back? Life will deliver something that
Speaker 1: and that brings me back. I don't force myself to
Speaker 1: the page or to the guitar. I feel it and
Speaker 1: it comes back. I don't panic. I definitely am writing
Speaker 1: less than I used to. I don't feel as though
Speaker 1: I have a lot to prove anymore. The songs still come,
Speaker 1: and every couple of years I'll keep making records. That's interesting,
Speaker 1: But you don't say you don't worry so much if
Speaker 1: you're if you're if you're away from the guitar for
Speaker 1: three weeks, ay, oh that's common. Yeah, yeah, so you're
Speaker 1: not the I gotta sit down every day with I
Speaker 1: used to be I had a lot of catching up
Speaker 1: to do because I started late. Yeah, but you know,
Speaker 1: ten records in I'm kind of like, hmm, yeah, I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't write for a publisher with with you know,
Speaker 1: you have to write twenty one songs a year to
Speaker 1: keep your publishing deal. I don't have any of that
Speaker 1: hanging over me, So all right when I have something
Speaker 1: to say. When you wrote I Think Sweet Words, for
Speaker 1: a long time, you thought you were describing the other
Speaker 1: personal relationship, and you seem to have a lot of
Speaker 1: those kind of clarifying moments you realize you were describing yourself. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the song flipped for you. Yaha moment, that's what
Speaker 1: you want. That's why it's so connected to purpose for me,
Speaker 1: because the song always teaches me. The song is the teacher.
Speaker 1: I'm the student. Always. It doesn't make sense. It seems paradoxical.
Speaker 1: Yes I'm writing it, but it's also writing me. There's
Speaker 1: that famous Flannery O'Connor quote. It goes something like, I
Speaker 1: write so I can read it so I can make
Speaker 1: sense of what I think. Well, songs, I write so
Speaker 1: I can sing it so I can make sense of
Speaker 1: what I feel. We've talked about a lot of songs.
Speaker 1: Is that one you like to play to maybe demonstrate
Speaker 1: some of the things we've talked about. Well, I'd love
Speaker 1: to hear a new song. May Turnity hold you in
Speaker 1: the hollow of her hand. May a soft wind infold
Speaker 1: you as you travel distant lands. May the moon stars
Speaker 1: delight you as the daylight dims, to the morning sun
Speaker 1: warms your face. Till I see you again. May you
Speaker 1: lay down your struggle beneath a silver sky. May a
Speaker 1: summarine inside your jeans sang a lullabye. May that be
Speaker 1: no more sorrow, no more pain. May you sleep inside
Speaker 1: the stillness of the night, tilice you again. May you
Speaker 1: never be a stranger. May you never feel alone. May
Speaker 1: you read unit with family and friends. May they walk
Speaker 1: you home. May love embrace you in a dance that
Speaker 1: never May you rest engine long to Lassie You again.
Speaker 1: May you rest ed? To Lassie You again. That's Mary
Speaker 1: Gochet singing till I See You Again from her upcoming
Speaker 1: album We're gonna take a quick break and then we'll
Speaker 1: be back with more. We're back with the rest of
Speaker 1: Bruce Hedlum's conversation with Mary Gochet. You are a storyteller.
Speaker 1: You're like John Prine that that you know, the sentences
Speaker 1: tend to can act. But in a couple of songs
Speaker 1: you've done this where you just use phrases. And one
Speaker 1: of my favorites is is Mommy Here, Mama Gone. It's
Speaker 1: just it's almost like like David Byrne Wright songs that way.
Speaker 1: He just they're just phrases he writes and he strings together.
Speaker 1: Do you remember writing that? How did you choose that
Speaker 1: for that song? That was a tough one that record cycle,
Speaker 1: the songs of the Foundling, that took quite a while
Speaker 1: to execute. I don't have a great memory of writing
Speaker 1: that one. I know that the song was definitely inspired
Speaker 1: by the John Lennon song Mother. What was inspirational about
Speaker 1: that song for you? His absolute vulnerability that that song,
Speaker 1: if you really listen to it, that's a frightening song.
Speaker 1: It's an extremely unlikely single for a post Beatles record
Speaker 1: from John Lennon. He was extremely vulnerable in that song.
Speaker 1: And if you read the lyric, it's hard not to
Speaker 1: cry mother, you had me, but I never had you.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's sprutal, that's painful, and I just gotta
Speaker 1: tell you goodbye. And then in the end he's screaming, Mama,
Speaker 1: don't go, Daddy, come home. That little person inside him
Speaker 1: is traumatizing what happened to him as a boy, and
Speaker 1: he ended up in that therapy with Janov trying to
Speaker 1: scream it out. And that showed me the way and
Speaker 1: in my own work around my adoption trauma. I spent
Speaker 1: my first year in an orphanage and didn't understand I
Speaker 1: was traumatized at all until I understood in my mid
Speaker 1: forties that, oh wow, this is what drove the addiction
Speaker 1: that relinquishment. I think I'll be dealing with relinquishment my
Speaker 1: whole life and the experience of being terrified of being abandoned.
Speaker 1: And it's a gold mine for songs I've written that
Speaker 1: plays a lot. So MoMA here, Mama gone kind of
Speaker 1: encapsulates it, like, wait a minute, where are you? What
Speaker 1: do you mean? It doesn't make sense that you're never
Speaker 1: coming back. It's from the voice of an infant who
Speaker 1: can't say such things. Oh so that's like the lack
Speaker 1: of connection between it's just their little impressions. Almost. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it need to be real simple in a way. A
Speaker 1: baby is crying this. Yeah, Now, is there something wrong
Speaker 1: with me that I actually prefer John Lennon's song Julia
Speaker 1: to Mother because that's also about his mother. Well, mother's
Speaker 1: painful song to listen to. It's a painful song to listen.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's not. Maybe I find it almost a little embarrassing.
Speaker 1: It's a little too painful for me. It's a lot.
Speaker 1: I understand what he was doing. He wasn't doing the
Speaker 1: music business in that song. He was trying not to drown,
Speaker 1: and I get that. And it's a serious song. It's
Speaker 1: not oh blade, oh blah da. It is help and
Speaker 1: I love that he had the courage to do it,
Speaker 1: and it's a roadmap for people who want to use
Speaker 1: songs and music for more than entertainment. There's not a
Speaker 1: lot of entertainment in that song, but I think that
Speaker 1: the song is a manual to articulating things through song
Speaker 1: that need to be said or they could kill you.
Speaker 1: Back to the beginning of my book, which you do
Speaker 1: not bring forth will kill you. He had to write it,
Speaker 1: and I deeply respect it, and it gave me permission
Speaker 1: to do the work I needed to do. You've mentioned
Speaker 1: permission a couple of times even during your career. Have
Speaker 1: you felt I don't have permission to do that. Do
Speaker 1: you still feel that with songs? I think permission is nice.
Speaker 1: I think having people come before me and point to
Speaker 1: what's possible and show me the way is I think
Speaker 1: that I'm I'm in a tradition. I follow in the
Speaker 1: inside a tradition. One of the greats I think Nancy Griffith,
Speaker 1: you know she, she I think was a trailblazer in
Speaker 1: many ways. She followed behind a lot of men, Texas men.
Speaker 1: The permission was granted sometimes in permission denied other times,
Speaker 1: but her work gives young women permission to go places
Speaker 1: where where they might not have gone before her. And
Speaker 1: Loretta Lens music gave Nancy permission, I mean, think of
Speaker 1: it in country music. There the women often were singers
Speaker 1: and the songwriters wrote the songs. But Loretta wrote her
Speaker 1: own songs. And I would venture to say Nancy would
Speaker 1: say that gave me permission, like in a metaphorical way,
Speaker 1: like like oh, we can do this. Are there other
Speaker 1: songwriters that you feel gave you permission? You mentioned John Pryn,
Speaker 1: John Lennon, Oh yeah, John Pryn, John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen,
Speaker 1: Woody Gosh Yeah, Woody and Bruce and Leonard and Patti
Speaker 1: Smith and Lucien to Steve Earle, still is is writing
Speaker 1: at the top of his game. Um, you know, I
Speaker 1: think something really happened when the Nobel Committee gave Dylan
Speaker 1: the Nobel Prize for Literature. I know one thing that
Speaker 1: happened is it made a lot of writers authors very angry.
Speaker 1: But it also, I think acknowledged that songwriting can be literature.
Speaker 1: I would argue maybe there needs to be a category
Speaker 1: for songwriting because songwriters can be can be the author's
Speaker 1: hands down over and over, because we have melody, and
Speaker 1: melody is a highway to the heart. But I think
Speaker 1: that there's a permission in that that yeah, yeah, right,
Speaker 1: at a very high level, it is. It is, um
Speaker 1: a form of literature. You actually had a great quote
Speaker 1: in your book about songs, which I wrote down. The
Speaker 1: songs were the most distilled of the arts, the most clarified.
Speaker 1: That's your cooking background right there. Accessible and democratic. I
Speaker 1: think you don't need a college education to go to
Speaker 1: a show and listen to music, whereas walking into art
Speaker 1: museum is a little intimidating. But with music, man, you
Speaker 1: just put your money down and go to the show
Speaker 1: and you get it because you feel it It's always
Speaker 1: a little alarming when you go to a show and
Speaker 1: you realize how many other people are reacting to the
Speaker 1: song because you thought it was yours and it's everybody's thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you mentioned listen to Williams and you talk about taking
Speaker 1: a trick from her from her song change the Lots. Yeah,
Speaker 1: in I think it's me now. Yeah, tell me about
Speaker 1: tell me about that. Yeah. It was stuck with Mercy
Speaker 1: now and I didn't know where to go from my
Speaker 1: own sort of life. How did I how do I
Speaker 1: move this song forward? I'm talking about my father, I'm
Speaker 1: talking about my brother, I'm trying to work in my
Speaker 1: mother and my sister, and they just kept bucking out.
Speaker 1: It's like they don't really belong here. And I didn't
Speaker 1: quite know where to go. So I went to lunch
Speaker 1: and I thought, wait a minute, Lou has this song
Speaker 1: Change the Locks, and I have my laptop with me,
Speaker 1: so I look at it. I'm like, oh man, her
Speaker 1: camera lens is on a dolly and it gets surreal.
Speaker 1: Towards the end, she's going to change the name of
Speaker 1: the town. She starts, I'm gonna change the locks on
Speaker 1: the door so you can't come here. Anymore. And the
Speaker 1: next thing you know, she's changing the tracks on the
Speaker 1: train and the name of the town. And I realized
Speaker 1: that camera lens backs up further and further, and the
Speaker 1: perspective becomes wider and wider. It's like, that's what I
Speaker 1: need to do. And so I went from my father
Speaker 1: and brother, to my church, my country, to all of life,
Speaker 1: every living thing, and then everyone the camera's on a dolly.
Speaker 1: It backs up and it worked, And I want to
Speaker 1: thank Lucy to Williams for that, who probably got that
Speaker 1: technique from Robert Johnson or some bluesman because she's an
Speaker 1: expert on the blues. Yeah. Oh, that's amazing. So it's
Speaker 1: the same shot, if you're talking about just broadening it out, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the same, the same shot, getting wider and wider. You
Speaker 1: use another technique, and it does come out of folk music,
Speaker 1: which is you'll repeat a single line. You don't do
Speaker 1: it a lot, you do it beautifully in The Orphan King,
Speaker 1: which is just a series of misfortunes that the orphan
Speaker 1: goes through. And then I think every does every line
Speaker 1: finish with Hail, Hail the Orphan King. Yeah, yeah, it
Speaker 1: still ends, but it ends with but I still believe
Speaker 1: in love. I still believe in love. Yeah, And I
Speaker 1: think in that song, I was trying to convince myself.
Speaker 1: Oh that's the need for repetition was because I was
Speaker 1: trying to really convince myself. Yeah. I think that was
Speaker 1: a motive for June, and I knew that it was.
Speaker 1: It was needed. The records so intense and the songs
Speaker 1: are so laced with trauma, like mother like, it's like
Speaker 1: this is almost unlistenable. We need something that ends this
Speaker 1: thing with faith. And so what am I going to
Speaker 1: believe in? Well, I'm going to believe in love, I think. Okay.
Speaker 1: So we talked a lot about your techniques, which I'm
Speaker 1: fascinated by because I love that stuff, the healing power.
Speaker 1: I mean you when you say saved by a song
Speaker 1: that's the title of your book, you mean that, yes? Literally? Yeah.
Speaker 1: Where would you have been if you didn't go to
Speaker 1: that open mic night? I don't know, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I know this that when you get sober, it becomes
Speaker 1: harder and harder to stay sober. If you don't have purpose,
Speaker 1: you gotta get sober and then fine purpose. You had
Speaker 1: two restaurants, you were successful. Money didn't do it and
Speaker 1: Jambalaia didn't do it. My purpose wasn't ever going to
Speaker 1: be restaurant tour. I wasn't emotionally, it didn't go deep
Speaker 1: enough for me. For a lot of people, it's it's
Speaker 1: their purpose, and they have a great life owning running
Speaker 1: restaurants and that's what they were put here to do.
Speaker 1: And for me, it just wasn't going to be. It
Speaker 1: didn't It didn't feel deep enough for me. Also, I
Speaker 1: didn't like having a big, large staff that I had
Speaker 1: to take care of. I wasn't a great boss, and
Speaker 1: I'm still not a great boss. And I really am
Speaker 1: better with fewer people. And so I like the independence
Speaker 1: and the constant challenge of being a troubadour and always, always,
Speaker 1: always the blank page. It's not like this job ever
Speaker 1: gets done. My recovery is deeply attached to writing songs
Speaker 1: and to writing and that is my purpose. My purposes
Speaker 1: to tell stories and sing to people and make these
Speaker 1: connections and so save by a song. I think also
Speaker 1: the music has been therapeutic for me quite frankly. It's
Speaker 1: given me ways to work through really hard and complex
Speaker 1: trauma and emotion. It's a great book. Everybody read from
Speaker 1: the start Yeah's just been wonderful. Thanks to Mary Gasche
Speaker 1: for graciously talking us through her songwriting technique and inspiration.
Speaker 1: You can check out a playlist of all the songs
Speaker 1: mentioned in this episode at broken Record podcast dot com.
Speaker 1: You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record broken Record.
Speaker 1: It is produced with help from Leah Rose, Jason Gambrell,
Speaker 1: Martin Gonzalez, Eric Sandler, and Jennifer Sanchez, with engineering help
Speaker 1: from Nick Chafey. Our executive producer is Maio LaBelle Broken
Speaker 1: Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love
Speaker 1: this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus.
Speaker 1: Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content
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Speaker 1: To aff our theme musics by Kenny Beats, I'm Just
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