Mary Gauthier has been through the ringer and survived to sing about it. She brings her songs of experience to the Iron Horse this Tuesday.

Okay, the story starts out a little rough. Louisiana born Mary Gauthier ("go-shay”) was adopted after being given up at birth by a mother she never knew. "I was adopted when I was about a year old. My adopted parents tried, but their marriage was doomed. They ended up like zombies. Music saved my life." At age 15, she stole her parents' car and ran away from home, spent the next several years in drug rehab, halfway houses, and living with friends; and spent her 18th birthday in jail. She enrolled at Louisiana State University as a philosophy major but dropped out due to drug problems and moved to Boston. After working waitress jobs and eventually being promoted to manager of the restaurant where she worked, financial backers paid her way to attend the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts and she opened a Cajun restaurant in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood, Dixie Kitchen (also the title of her first album). She wrote her first song at age 35. After the release of her first album, she sold her share in the restaurant to finance her second album, Drag Queens in Limousines. Her new album, her 5^th, Between Daylight and Dark, is filled with both hope and anguish, with faith as well as fear. Mary Gauthier knows these places well, and this reflected in the music, starting as a trickle of songs almost from the moment of her sobriety and swelling into the stream that fed her first two self-released albums, an indie-label release; Filth and Fire, and her stunning Lost Highway debut Mercy Now. Buy tickets for Mary's show HERE.