Between Daylight and Dark

Mary Gauthier | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (September 18, 2007)
• Original Release Date: 2007
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Lost Highway
• ASIN: B000TWKUNG
• Also Available in: Vinyl  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #41,852 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

In an era when too many youthful singer-songwriters earn critical plaudits too easily, the more mature Mary Gauthier's track record has been a heartening exception to that rule. Her difficult early life and ability to create soulful, in-your-face poetry from harsh reality, occasional brutality, and hope set her apart. If anything, she surpasses her past work with this stunning live-in-the-studio effort that captures a wide range of scenarios. There's the needy desperation of the love songs "Please" and "Before You Leave" and her brilliant conjuring of the raw displacement, rage, and grief of her fellow New Orleanians in the Hurricane Katrina-inspired "Can't Find the Way" (with a cameo from the legendary Van Dyke Parks). The atmospheric title song, penned by Gauthier and Fred Eaglesmith, teems with the angst of lost love. As the hard-hitting scenario of "Snakebit" carries the tension of classic film noir, "Thanksgiving" captures a bleak holiday prison visit. "The Last of the Hobo Kings" stands as a 21st-century requiem to the vanishing transients of the past, decades before they were renamed "homeless." Joe Henry's spare, understated production only enhances the wallop of these performances. In a world glutted with Americana singer-songwriters, many plagued by a dilettantism that prevents them from plowing too deeply into the dark side of the human condition, Gauthier reaffirms--magnificently--her ability to do that and much more. --Rich Kienzle

Product Description

Between Daylight And Dark is Gauthier's fifth album and the follow up to her 2005 breakthrough Mercy Now, which garnered high praise in the media including Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, NPR Fresh Air, CBS News Sunday Morning, Reader's Digest, No Depression, Harp, Paste and so many others. Gauthier was named 2005 NEW/EMERGING ARTIST OF THE YEAR by the Americana Music Association.

Between Daylight And Dark was cut live, with minimal overdubs, and produced by Joe Henry. The album features guest appearances by Van Dyke Parks (piano on "Can't Find The Way") and Loudon Wainwright (backing vocals on "Soft Place To Land" and "I Ain't Leaving").

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Another winner from Mary, September 22, 2007

By 

B.A. (NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Between Daylight and Dark (Audio CD)

This is yet another amazing, dark, moving album from Mary Gauthier, whose consistency has led to five great albums. Needless to say, I am already a big fan of Mary's.

Upon first listen, this album is more sparse, having been recorded live, lacking the smooth production of her other albums which have collaborated with Gurf Morlix in Nashville. But the intensity begins from the beginning notes. Her singing is a bit rough, less polished, but just as moving. Sometimes I think her music is like a female Bob Dylan, Blood on the Tracks, with a southern drawl and an older-person's edge. Her "Can't Find the Way," about the flood in her native New Orleans, is gripping. Another standout for me is "Soft Place to Land." If you get interested in Mary through this album, please go back and enjoy, in turn, each of her other four gems.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stark, Human, and Glorious, November 5, 2007

By 

James Carragher (New York) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Between Daylight and Dark (Audio CD)

At Joe's Pub in NYC last Friday night, Mary Gauthier told a largely gray head audience that she doesn't write happy songs. I suppose that is strictly true, but, with apologies to her and her understanding of what she writes, I don't think it's enough to leave it at that. Good things do not often happen in her songs, it is true. But the circumstances of those bad things lead sometimes to acts of love, kindness and, most importantly, carrying on. Her subjects are battered, but not beaten by what life deals them. This has been a constant in her work from the beginning. Check out, for example, the parents in Skeleton Town from her very first CD, the optimistic-despite-it-all Christmas in Paradise from Filth and Fire and the title cut from her last, Mercy Now (an even more moving acoustic, violin-accompanied version of MN closed out Friday's set).

But she has never pulled everything together as well as she does on Between Daylight and Dark. With quiet and unadorned production from Joe Henry, Mary Gauthier has stepped out of whatever shadow Lucinda Williams was still casting over her with her own Car Wheels on a Gravel Road -- a CD stuffed with one great song after another that captures where we are as individuals in and out of love (Before You Leave, Please, and I Ain't Leaving) and as a country grapping with violence and the end of frontiers (Snakebit and Last of the Hobo Kings).

Five stars is way too few for this CD.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mary Gauthier, Brilliant, October 13, 2007

By 

R. W. Twinney "Music Collector" (Cornwall UK) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Between Daylight and Dark (Audio CD)

This lady can do no wrong. As a singer/songwriter she knocks the 'fluffy' new country bimbo's for six, male and female! If she had been around at the time she could have fitted in, no trouble, as a woman, with the original Nashville outlaws, Cash. Kristofferson, Nelson and co. Her music goes from strength to strength and I recommend anyone who has not heard her and likes their country,folk, americana music, call it what you will, with an 'edge' to listen, really listen, to this singer songwriter. She is brillient.