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