Reckoning [CD], Mary Gauthier, CD

Reckoning is a dense, carefully nuanced, profoundly complex text, though all nine songs are presented as directly as possible: Mary's voice, her guitar, bits of harmonica. Folk music, of a kind, but not a broadside. Nothing so easy as that. Topical songs with a long view, because she's seen and lived too much of it.

Mary's most celebrated songs — “I Drink,” “Mercy Now,” “Drag Queens in Limousines” — are confessional stories, closely observed, clear-eyed and compassionate. She sings with the unmistakable languor of her native Louisiana, writes with the bluntness of Boston, where she was once a successful restauranteur, and rewrites with the fierce precision of Nashville, her home for many years. Her 2018 release, Rifles & Rosary Beads, co-written with wounded Iraq war veterans, received a Grammy nomination for Best Folk Album, and an Americana Music Association nomination for Album of the Year. During Covid she wrote and saw published (by MacMillan) Saved by a Song: The Art and Healing Power of Songwriting, part memoir, part reflection on songwriting, through the lens of her most impactful songs.

“A reckoning,” Mary Gauthier writes on the outer sleeve to her newest album, “can be personal, political, or spiritual. These songs inhabit all three realms at once.”