They don’t write songs, they don’t know that songs can be used to move trauma. We have to stay focused, listen carefully, and make sure every veteran gets their own song. “Each retreat brings together a dozen or so soldiers and four songwriters, three songs each in two days. “My job as a songwriter is to find that thing a soul needs to say,” Mary says. Turns out, I was able to sit with the veterans with a sense of calmness and help them articulate their suffering without fear.
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I didn’t feel I knew how to be in the presence of that much trauma without being afraid. “I didn’t know anything about the military, I was terrified of fucking it up. From the opening “Soldiering On” (“What saves you in the battle/Can kill you at home”) to “Bullet Holes in the Sky” (“They thank me for my service/And wave their little flags/They genuflect on Sundays/And yes, they’d send us back”), to the abject horror of “Iraq,” and its quiet depiction of a female mechanic’s rape, each song tells the story of a deeply wounded veteran.ĭarrell Scott, returning from one of Smith’s first retreats, called and told Mary she needed to participate. And none are about her.Įach song on Rifles and Rosary Beads is a gut punch: deceptively simple and emotionally complex. Maybe that’s where the confessional song cycle ends, for she has midwifed these eleven new songs in careful collaboration with other souls whose struggle is urgent, immediate, and palpable. Gauthier’s first nine albums presented extraordinary confessional songs, deeply personal, profoundly emotional pieces ranging from “I Drink,” a blunt accounting of addiction, to “March 11, 1962,” the day she was born - and relinquished to an orphanage - to “Worthy,” in which the singer finally understands she is deserving of love. Something about writing that song - telling that story - is healing. None of the soldiers who have participated in the program have taken their own lives, and there’s nothing trivial about that. Eleven of the nearly four hundred songs that highly accomplished songwriters have co-written as part of Darden Smith’s five-year-old SongwritingWith:Soldiers program. By the process of writing a song.Īnd yet there is nothing trivial about Mary Gauthier’s tenth album, Rifles and Rosary Beads (Thirty Tigers), all eleven songs co-written with and for wounded veterans. It seems trivial to suggest those lives might be saved - healed, even - by a song. That number does not include drug overdoses or car wrecks or any of the more inventive ways somebody might less obviously choose to die. Each year seventy-four hundred current and former members of the United States Armed Services take their own lives. New studio album co-written with wounded combat veterans over the last four years via SongwritingWith:Soldiers.Įvery single day, which means some days are better and some much worse.Įvery day, on average, twenty-two veterans commit suicide.
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