Stories & Songs with Mary Gauthier and Jaimee Harris

Week of April 26, 2025

MARY GAUTHIER (Songwriter, guitarist, vocalist, author, activist) “Writing helps me sort out confusion, untangle powerful emotions, and ward off desperation. It helps me navigate the powerful emotional weather systems of life.”– Mary Gauthier, Saved by a Song. As she has so eloquently accomplished over the past 25 years, Mary Gauthier has used her art once again to traverse the uncharted waters of the past few years. “I’m the kind of songwriter who writes what I see in the world right now,” she affirms. Thankfully, amid dark storms of pandemic loss, she found and followed the beacon of new love. Her gift to us, the powerful Dark Enough to See the Stars, collects ten sparkling jewels of Gauthier songcraft reflecting both love and loss. Her eleventh album, Dark Enough to See the Stars, follows the profound antidote to trauma, Rifles & Rosary Beads, her 2018 collaborative work with wounded Iraq war veterans. It garnered a Grammy nomination for Best Folk Album, as well as a nomination for Album of the Year by the Americana Music Association. Publication of her first book, the illuminating Saved by a Song: The Art and Healing Power of Songwriting, in 2021, brought her more praise. Brandi Carlile has said, “Mary’s songwriting speaks to the tender aspects of our humanness. We need her voice in times like these more than we ever have.” The Associated Press called Gauthier “one of the best songwriters of her generation.”

 

JAIMEE HARRIS (Guitarist, vocalist, songwriter, storyteller) When Jaimee Harris alighted upon the scene in Austin, TX, the jaded music city, replete with (and weary of) singer-songwriters, woke up and took notice. Here, finally, was a new voice. Her singing voice is noteworthy: rich, sonorous, and full, delivering a uniquely stylized, throaty tone; the voice of a writer and performer. When you watch her sing, she’ll break, cradle, and win your heart, then break it all over again. Harris turned 30 during the pandemic. It’s a milestone that is a rite of passage even during normal times. But for this Texas-born singer-songwriter, it came in the midst of one of the strangest and most tumultuous periods in American history. When the world stopped during lockdown, Harris, like many others, found herself gazing back into the past, ruminating on the nature of her hometown and family origins, and reckoning with their imprint on her. The term ‘nostalgia’ derives from the Greek words nostos (return) and algos (pain), and if Harris’s new album Boomerang Town can be regarded as a nostalgic album, it is only nostalgic in the sense that the longing for home is a desire to return to the past and heal old wounds. A poet and stunning vocalist, Harris has created an arresting, ambitious song-cycle that explores the generational arc of family, the stranglehold of addiction, and the fragile ties that bind us together as Americans.