Mary Gauthier Announces Career Retrospective Shows 2024, with Special Guest Jaimee Harri,

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UK AND IRELAND TOUR IN APRIL/MAY

Photo credit: Alexa Kinigopoulos

Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter and accomplished author, Mary Gauthier has announced a very special tour for the UK and Ireland in April and May 2024. In these unique, career retrospective shows, Mary will perform a selection of audience favourites from all eleven of her studio records, accompanied by her partner, Jaimee Harris, who will also open the shows.

Like the troubadours of old, Mary will sing her much loved songs under the spotlight, telling stories of her thirty years of performing her own music around the world, an experience that has helped her understand and personally experience the redemptive power of songs and songwriting. The dates are as follows:

Mary Gauthier Career Retrospective Show 2024, with Special Guest Jaimee Harris

10 April 2024     Belfast                               The Mac

11 April 2024     Dún Laoghaire                 Pavilion Theatre

12 April 2024     Cork                                   Cyprus Avenue

13 April 2024     Naul                                   Séamus Ennis Centre

14 April 2024     Sligo                                   Hawk’s Well Theatre

16 April 2024     Headford                          Campbell’s Tavern

18 April 2024     Milton Keynes                 The Stables

19 April 2024     Gosforth                           Gosforth Civic Theatre

20 April 2024     Beverley                            St. Nicholas’ Church

21 April 2024     Nottingham                      Metronome

23 April 2024     Liverpool                          Philharmonic Music Room

24 April 2024     Biddulph                           St. Lawrence’s Church

25 April 2024     Glasgow                            St. Luke’s

26 April 2024     Hebden Bridge                 Trades Club – sold out

27 April 2024     Hebden Bridge                 Trades Club

28 April 2024     Birmingham                     Kitchen Garden Cafe

3 May 2024        London                             Kings Palace

Tickets on sale now: https://tix.to/mgUKTour2024ME

From a crib at St. Vincent’s Women and Infants Asylum in New Orleans to being walked onto the Grand Ole Opry stage by Marty Stuart. From spending opening night of her restaurant drunk in a Dorchester, MA. jail cell to hearing her song “I Drink” on Bob Dylan’s “Theme Time Radio Show.” From serving Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings oyster po-boys at her Cajun restaurant in Boston to sharing a booking agent and festival stages with the incredible duo. From spending her 18th birthday sitting in a Salina, KS jail cell to standing next to John Prine at the GRAMMYs. What reads as a screenplay for a Hollywood blockbuster is a life actually lived by groundbreaking troubadour Mary Gauthier.

Carrying on Woody Guthrie’s legacy, Mary continues to inspire audiences around the world with the simple idea that a guitar and a song are the strongest of steady weapons on the path to both personal and universal freedom. 

Her latest, acclaimed album Dark Enough To See The Stars was released to glowing reviews in 2022, including The Sun who said: “Navigating our complicated world is hard but made a little easier by Gauthier.”  And Entertainment Focus, who declared Mary “One of the great storytellers and songwriters of our age.” Her recent book “Saved by a Song”, excerpts from which will feature in these shows, was named as a “must read” by Rolling Stone Magazine.

For over thirty years, Mary Gauthier has turned to songs and stories to help her untangle the traumatic mysteries of her life — most notably adoption trauma and addiction. Not long after getting sober, she began to use songwriting as a superhighway to find purpose in her life. Music and song helped her heal from the wounds that made her an addict. She then used her personal experience to help wounded veterans and their families tell their stories in song. Thirty-four years sober now, Mary brings her long-term recovery to the stage in this special show to talk about alchemy, redemption, and the art of songwriting as a form of salvation.

I’m a troubadour. Troubadouring is an approach, not necessarily a genre. Inside the word “troubadour,” I hear the word “true.” Troubadours tell true stories, true to feeling, not fact. People need stories to make meaning out of their lives and songs are how most people get their stories these days. Modern-day troubadours are self-perceived outsiders who write songs about underdogs, unnoticed or marginalized folks, and struggles not often heard in mainstream music. In an age of misinformation, disinformation, and lies, we are the wandering minstrels who compose and perform songs to tell truths. And like the stories of old, songs help teach us ow to live, and why.

I’ve played in dozens of countries and listened to thousands of people’s stories, heard late-night confessions and held strangers in my arms as they wept. No matter a person’s nationality, age, race, religion, or lack of religion, human emotion is the same everywhere I go.

              People are lonely, yearning for meaningful connection.

              People need hope.

              They need to believe in something.

              People are hurting.

              Many are traumatized, afraid.

              People need love.

              But love is hard, so much harder than they expected.

I understand because I feel these things too.

              It’s why I became a troubadour.

              — Saved By A Song, Mary Gauthier

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