Once your life is taken over by music, there really is no choice how it's lived. The songs you hear and the music you see become the stepping stones from childhood to older age, and the journey feels like one that will never end. Music becomes the one thing that can always be counted on to move forward and never disappear. It is not an obsession. It is a life.

When I was very young and growing up in Houston in the early 1950s, Elvis Presley appeared almost as an apparition. His first RCA Records single in 1956, "Heartbreak Hotel," came across as a scary soundtrack to a semi-darkness. Released after the earlier Presley 45s on Sun Records, this new song had the heart of a ghost at its center. There was a haunting loneliness to it, like it came from a place where no light was allowed inside and danger might lurk around every corner. There is an unhinged guitar solo by Scotty Moore that announces the sound of a new era. The throbbing standup bass line by Bill Black that has the beat of a broken heart fills up the bottom, and Floyd Cramer’s piano takes the sound to a outdoor tent revival. Elvis Presley's last line in the song--"They'll be so lonely they could die"--isn't exactly the announcement of a new love affair. Presley's echo-laden vocal throughout has the touch of a youthful Grim Reaper. A few months later, the "Hound Dog" single came roaring onto the pop charts and really kick-started the young Memphis man's method of operation for rock & roll nirvanaville. Life as we know it would never be the same.

"Hound Dog" was my ground zero for a musical fanaticism that set in then and has continued at warp speed until today. My key to this eternal quest is that all music matters. It really does. The trick is to find what hits your monkey nerve the hardest and seek it out. And to let other styles that aren't as personally compelling go their own way, but not to get caught up in putting them down. There is no value in letting the negatives find a voice in your own hit parade. There's plenty of ears on the planet for every style of music to find a home in a heart.

All these years later it's still a thrill to seek out those musical devastation specialists and savor their sound. Hearing a song or maybe even a whole album that zeroes in on the deepest recesses of the human spirit and finds a way to make that soul burn brighter still feels like a magic trick, and is something that isn't remotely replaceable. It's what gives my life a joyous expanse which is as close to a religious reverie as I've found. It's something that calls us to a higher presence, and surely solves the riddle of how to survive in a world that doesn't always seem so capable of surviving. Maybe that power comes from music being something that exists, really, in the air. It doesn't need a wall or a screen or even a visual. It is not a painting or a movie or book. It is forever ethereal. Searching for great music is like a holy pastime that is beyond words. It is life itself.

Thinking of the millions of songs I've heard in the past seventy years is no doubt a key to survival. Because life without music would be a permanent existence of solitude. The greatest sound is that which draws people together into a shared consciousness of mystery. No one really knows how it works, but when musicians play those listening are pulled into a gathering. The notes and beats and vibrations that come to life are a calling to an elevated altitude. It’s that way since humans danced around fires and sang in unison, and is an elemental magic that can't be defined, but can surely always be felt.

Finding a musician who can fulfill all these gifts is like coming across a brand new vista, and extends a hand of experience in living that can jar the spirit into feeling an energized life. It doesn't happen that frequently, maybe, but when it does the earth shakes a bit and the soul takes on a revved-up reverberation. Singer-songwriter Mary Gauthier first did that for me 25 years ago, when she released her debut album DIXIE KITCHEN. At the time, the Louisiana woman had moved to Boston to help open a New Orleans-inspired restaurant, and from a deep-seated desire to express her inner feelings began teaching herself to write songs. Not to be denied, Gauthier's devotion to music started to take shape as a new career and she left the food business and jumped all the way into music.

It took a few years on the learning curve, but by her second album, DRAG QUEENS AND LIMOUSINES in 1999 the songwriting was on the wall and the woman had found her truest calling. To hear how she wrapped up all the hardest life experiences into songs and slowly but surely became an onstage presence capable of electrifying an audience was like watching a small miracle in action. Audiences began to respond and as Mary Gauthier started to slowly climb the show business ladder it was obvious this was an all-timer, someone who could take words from her own life and form all the heartache and happiness into the kind of songs capable of knocking listeners back in their seats and let them know a newcomer had arrived who meant to turn their ears around. Her third album, FILTH & FIRE, also found her opening shows for Willie Nelson and the like. There would be no more professional jambalaya and shrimp etouffee cooking for her. Music would be it.

In 2005 Mary Gauthier's fourth album, MERCY NOW, was released, and it was the kind of collection when listened to closely could make it hard to breathe. The songs had a hard-scrapple style that spoke to a life roughly-lived, but at the same time pointed to the sky as an inspiration to find a new way to move upward. In so many ways it sounded like a career-maker set, and as I sometimes do I got caught up in the overwhelming otherness of the songs and decided I had to try to find a home for them that could really get it all across. And when I think of albums like that, I think of my former boss when he was president of Warner Bros. Records, Lenny Waronker. Lenny is someone who knows immediately when he hears greatness, and isn’t afraid to become a part of getting that greatness heard by others. By then, the music executive was helping run Dreamworks Records, so off I went with a copy of MERCY NOW to play him.

As we sat in Lenny's beautiful office in Beverly Hills, which I noticed had a white couch and white carpet that made the room feel downright heavenly, and listened to the album I could tell he was totally taken. But also I could see that small wrinkle of doubt in his eyes that he wasn't going to be able to help Mary Gauthier take over the world. The record business is a peculiar affair, and not one to second-guess. Lenny was profusive in his praise, but with his permanent honesty said it just didn't feel like a Dreamworks release. Fair enough, and back I went to my cubbyhole at Warner Bros.Records to think of Plan B. Which I didn't have, and had to move on from my Mary Gauthier crusade. But that's life in show business, and as they said in THE GODFATHER 2 film, "This is the business we chose to be in."

Fast-forward 17 years and Mary Gauthier released her recent album DARK ENOUGH TO SEE THE STARS in 2022. It is a full-on knock-out. She had gotten to that timeless place in music that everything she writes and sings seems to float in an ethos of her own making, pulling the heartstrings in directions they've never been pulled. Warming joy bumped up next to bottomless sorrow in a way which seemed to call for a new world to be invented just to feel that way in. The music pushed the unmistakable power of the lyrics to such a soulful scenario that it was not a choice to be given a higher level of emotional twang, but rather it was a duty to be delivered to such an exalted state. That's what the truly greats accomplish when they line everything up into a diamond-sharp world which borders right on eternity itself. Gauthier's new songs "Fall Apart World," "Amsterdam," "Thank God for You" and every other one on the new album have such a ring of glorious realness in them that time stops. Or seems to. Only feelings exist and the body floats off into the ozone. Once again, music takes over reality for moments of a clarity that doesn't exist anywhere else. The profound gratefulness which rushes in chisels a place inside us that I pray lasts forever. A place where a higher world has a chance of wrapping itself around us for now and whatever comes later. That's where this woman takes me. Not even tears touch the depth of sharing Mary Gauthier offers here. Neurons themselves start sparkling.

A month ago, the singer-songwriter-soothsayer stood on the small stage at McCabe's at the outer limit of Santa Monica and told the audience tonight would be different. She was going to read from her recent heart-stopping autobiography SAVED BY A SONG. and tell us how her life came to be. And sing selections from her quarter-century career that might help to explain how a New Orleans orphan, former drug addict, wayward wanderer but, yes, always a child of God found a place to stand and touch us all. It was the kind of night that not only would never be forgotten, but maybe even more was capable of changing everyone sitting in front of Mary Gauthier.

Because this was a night of true transformation for those open to it. Like always, the music and the person who created it had a light shining from within them that might shine now in us. The holiest gift in existence, which is the gift of sharing one's own soul with another to take with them what they need, occurred this shimmering night at the edge of America. When the person born and given up for adoption in New Orleans at the St. Vincent de Paul's Woman's and Infant Asylum gave to us of herself that treasure, there are no more words to say. They had all been said when Mary Gauthier sang, "May you never be a stranger, may you never feel alone / May you reunite with family and friends, may they walk you home / May love embrace you in a dance that never ends / may you rest in gentle arms till I see you again…" And as she said in the last words of her last song, "And try not to think about time…"

Bill Bentley