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Colleen Thomson

Mary Gauthier

Mercy Now

(Lost Highway)

It's people like Mary Gauthier who give country music a good name.

More fare like this and before you know it, pedal steel guitars and lonesome refrains will be the staple of CD racks from Nashville to Nanjing.

The troubadour from Thibodaux, Louisiana, has come up trumps with her fourth album, and in just a few short years is being mentioned in the same breath as such towering talents as Lucinda Williams and Mary  Chapin Carpenter.

No small achievement considering Gauthier didn't get around to writing her first song until she'd packed a lot of hard living into 35 years. She has said the world doesn't need any more pretty good songs, it needs great songs. And that's what she dishes  up here.

It opens with the mournful Falling Out of Love, with its growling desperation and plaintive harmonica that wouldn't be out of place on a Johnny Cash album.

Then the title track  comes like a prayer for the world that is strangely uplifting amid the cracks that threaten to  swallow all hope.

But it's the dry wit of I Drink, which Gauthier had to sober up for before she could nail, that has critics and fans alike raving. It's one of those great songs to which she was referring.

Little wonder she's found herself opening for singer-songwriters John Prine and Guy Clark. Gauthier laments in Falling Out of Love that she's just a blues traveller heading down.

That's not the direction she's headed now.



Mary Gauthier