Mary Halvorson Code Girl
WEXNER CENTER FOR THE ARTS, 1871 N. HIGH ST.
614-292-3535, www.wexarts.org
The avant-garde guitarist intended to pursue a career in biology until she took a class with saxophonist Anthony Braxton in college. Her unconventional style includes playing as a trio, a quintet, a septet, an octet and with group Code Girl.
8 p.m. Thursday $22, or $19 for members and $13 for students
On her latest album, during the course of its 44 minutes, Mary Gauthier endures the shame of being female on the battlefield, the blunt force of post-traumatic stress disorder and the struggle of re-entry into civilian life.
She has never served in the military, but the 55-year-old (who turns 56 on Sunday) fights to express the stories of real-life servicemen and women on her 10th record, “Rifles and Rosary Beads.”
Nearly five years ago, Gauthier attended her first session of SongwritingWith:Soldiers, a nonprofit group that pairs accomplished musicians with military veterans in workshops designed to parse the soldiers’ service-based traumas.
“A lot of our veterans feel very alone. They feel unseen, unheard, unknown. It’s a crisis,” said Gauthier, who will perform Friday at the Columbus Performing Arts Center. “I know for a fact that songs can do something about this because when a person feels seen and heard and known they’re not alone anymore.”
The numbers reflect a cry for help: According to the United States Department of Veterans Affairs, an average of 20 veterans commit suicide in the United States each day.
In 2014, the most recent year with available data, 244 veterans committed suicide in Ohio.
Before her first SongwritingWith:Soldiers session, Gauthier carried a load of military stereotypes: straight white male, Republican, pro-gun.
After sitting in many circles with pain-ridden soldiers, her preconceptions vaporized.
“The soldiers I’ve written with, it’s like walking down
a street in New York City,” she said. “It’s like the League of Nations. Our military reflects America.”
The stories they told were equally diverse.
The rumbling “Got Your Six” — a military idiom for “got your back” — with its message of comradeship, is one of the more positive tracks despite its slow, growling electric-guitar-led melody.
It transitions into “The War After the War,” a gentle acoustic ballad about a significant other’s effort to support a veteran spouse, even when everything has changed.
“I get no basic training; I get no Purple Heart,” Gauthier sings over a trembling violin. “I’m supposed to carry on; I can’t fall apart.”
Gauthier can’t claim wartime experience, but she does know how to work through a horrific past.
Adopted as a baby, the deep-throated folk singer left home in her early teens, dabbled in drug use and landed in jail for a brief period.
She cleaned up enough to enroll in culinary school and open a restaurant in Boston before relapsing. After sobering up again, Gauthier started writing songs in 1997, co-opting the writing process as therapy to process her unstable early years.
Gauthier doesn’t pretend to understand the obstacles that military personnel face, whether harassment from other soldiers or an inability to integrate into society after being discharged, but she does know music’s restorative properties.
“I know that going to the pain is like a fireman going to the fire,” she said. “It’s how we put the fire out.”
She’s attended two or three songwriting retreats a year during the past four years and signed up for one this summer around her 150 tour dates for “Rifles and Rosary Beads.”
A dozen or so veterans and four songwriters meet for two to three days while working on the music. On the first night, they gather for dinner, followed by a brief concert during which each artist showcases his or her style. The military members then choose which songwriter to work with one-on-one.
Gauthier always begins with basic questions: What branch were you in? Where did you serve, and when was that?
As the conversation deepens, she strums softly on her guitar, matching the tune to the emotion in the room. She starts to add words, condensing each soldier’s story into dense stanzas.
Each song on the album took fewer than two hours to write, a testament to the power of listening over speaking. Multiple veterans have told her that their song kept them from ending their lives.
“The beauty of doing this as songwriter is that I am not a therapist," Gauthier said. “When it gets to be where I need to cry, I put the guitar down and I cry. I’m allowed to be fully human in this experience.”
No matter how tumultuous a song’s subject matter, Gauthier said that each track