Flop Eared Mule A Country Music Death Beast and Worker in the Dylan Industrial Complex | Sydney, Australia | Est. 2004

Another truly troubled troubadour
Writing songs to even up the score
A tune for every single body blow
And I sing them at the sideshow

Mary Gauthier has a new record out which I bought a few weeks ago but hadn't listened to by the time I saw her two nights ago. (My god, trying to watch all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the space of a month has been a ginormous time-suck.) The Foundling is a "song cycle" about her own experiences of being adopted, finding her birth mother at 45. I won't detail the narrative here but you can read all about it in her artist's notes (link is to a word doc). So it's an album more personal than most and also meant to be appreciated as a whole, at least at first, so when I realised the night of the concert was creeping up I decided rather than try to cram in a listening to the CD, I'd wait for the show. Thanks to Cat Politics' review I knew she was doing The Foundling in its entirety in order from beginning to end so I decided to let it hit me everything fresh and new on the night. The set list Anne has provided is essentially the same as the Newtown show. Check out the great photos there too and thelonger version at Nu Country (I know we finish with the same riff about the Hatch Show Print but I thought of mine separately, honest.)

The Foundling was bookended by some of her older songs; "Between The Daylight and the Dark" and from the album of that name "The Last of the Hobo Kings" about Don Draper Steam Train Maury - complete with a very funny spoken word introduction. "I, Drink" put in an appearance of course, which I would have loved hearing anyway but I extra loved her delivery on it. On the album (and other live versions I've heard) it's of course a melancholy number where the total unreliability of the narrator is obvious, this version was delivered with a sincerity and passion which made you think, hey she really is happy. A quite compelling direction to take the song, chilling perhaps but beautiful. This and the intro to "The Last of the Hobo Kings" were also a good in setting the stage for the extra theatricality of the The Foundling songs.

The first thing to say is to allay your understandable fears that such an emotionally weighted autobiographical project will result in songs that can't stand by their own and sacrifice musicality and craft for ripped-from-the headlines literalness. The sound is similar to her last couple of albums on Lost Highway, mixing acoustic songs with some with more dense instrumentation, gently crunching guitars mirroring the emotional crescendos. There is good variety in the songs musically and their emotional pitch. I'll single out for its melody and meaning, "Sideshow", an ironic ode to the singer-songwriter life. The heart of the project I reckon, both emotionally and being sequenced in the middle of the story, is "March 11 1962" a spoken word reconstruction of phoning her birth mother for the first time. I won't "give away" the result but it is in the artist's notes linked above. Suffice to say, wow. And: sniff.

So a really special and genuinely moving show, and a whole new album of favourite songs. I really loved also the stage persona Mary showed us here, released perhaps by the one woman show (although I don't mean to ignore Ed Romanoff who weas a great sideman on guitar) nature of the project. She is an accomplished songwriter and uber-cool presence in her glasses and velvet jackets, but you knew that. She's also very funny with great comic timing and great sense of an audience, I enjoyed finding that out.

I have all her CDs so I bought and got signed a gig poster designed by Hatch Show Print, out of Nashville makers of posters for decades. You'll recognise the style even if you don't know the name. Mary added that they used to make posters for Elvis and Johnny Cash but "the state of country music being what it is is" they now make them for her. She has no reason to be embarrassed by the comparison.