Mary Gauthier is ready to move on from her own story. Of course, she’s not even sure the muses will allow her, but she’s bound to try anyway and hope for a lighter collection than her last album, The Foundling. Yet as tired as she is, it’s hard to deny the resonant beauty of the struggles heard on her last album — an admittedly challenging listen for both artist and audience, as she describes it, but important all the same.

In this striking conversation, Gauthier discusses the need for important art while also realizing she can’t be the one to proclaim it as such. Even in this interview, it’s easy to see why we love her music and believe she’s one of the few artists making meaningful art today.

SSv: With this bit of downtime you mentioned that you have, do you completely turn off the musical switch?

Mary Gauthier: I don’t really like downtime. Even when I’m not on the road, I try to keep myself writing or co-writing and do something musically related every single day. I’m pretty compulsive about it. It’s just a way of life more than a job for me.

SSv: That line that you’re compulsive about your music — has that always been true?

Mary: Yep. [Laughs] Even when I first started, it was true. I used to be compulsive about my restaurant, but I sold that in 1999 or 2000 and now I’m compulsive about my music.

SSv: If it’s not one, it’s the other–

Mary: Yeah, that’s just my nature. I’m overdriven and when I’m passionate about something, I just can’t stop. That tends to be the way that I function. I’m pretty single-minded and I still enjoy it. As long as I still enjoy it, I can’t stop doing it.

SSv: You mentioned earlier in our conversation that you’re teaching songwriting in Costa Rica. How does a gig like that come along?

Mary: Well, I did it with my friend Darrell Scott for two years. We just went to a yoga spa and invited students on our websites and my Facebook and we got 17 students from all over the world to sign up for the class that we were teaching there. Instead of teaching yoga, we taught songwriting. There were other teachers there who taught yoga at the spa, but we taught songwriting and it worked out really well. So we’ve done that for the last three years. I couldn’t this year because I was really busy, but it’s a matter of putting something out there and hoping people sign up.

SSv: Boy, that seems so ideal in several ways.

Mary: Yeah, it’s a perfect place and a perfect time of year. You have a lot of people like me who would trade a traditional Christmas in anytime, so it’s really becoming my traditional Christmas — to sit in a hot tub in Costa Rica. That’s nice. [Laughs]

SSv: [Laughs] Well, I want to switch gears, because I’ve been wanting to chat with you about The Foundling for some time and I’d like to get to that. What perspective do you have on that record now that you didn’t have when it was fresh?

Mary: The Foundling has been an ordeal. [Laughs] I’m really glad it’s in the rearview mirror. It was extremely challenging to write, and it’s been a challenge to perform the songs. The audience asks a lot out of people. At the end of the day, I feel as though it’s uplifting but it takes a while to get there, and I think that the material is the best that I’ve been capable of writing so far, but it’s a difficult and challenging journey for the listener. That’s because it was also a difficult and challenging journey for the artist as well.

So I’m glad I did it. I wouldn’t take it back. But I’m really looking forward to what is next for me as a writer. It’s made me want to… it’s just so hard to explain it. It made me so tired — talking about it, delivering it, playing those songs every night. When you go to the table and trigger people’s deep emotional stuff and they tell you their stories, there’s such an intensity to it that’s beautiful but exhausting. I don’t know how to put that any other way.

SSv: Too exhausting then?

Mary: Yeah, sometimes you just want to sing “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” You just want to have a good time, laugh and kick your feet up. But this has been an intense two years, so I’d like to turn that down a few notches and lighten up for a little while to be honest. But I’m not in charge of that. I don’t get to sit down and decide what I’m gonna write. It’s the other way around. The muse is the boss of me and I have to be patient with this creative force that seems to be much more intelligent than I am. I just have to do what I’m told.

SSv: Can you be your own worst enemy here? The more honest you are or you’re willing to be, then the more intense you can become. So if you’re committed to an authentic craft… I mean, are you even capable of ever singing “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah?”

Mary: No, I really don’t think so. But that’s my goal. I want to write “Love Me Do.” I don’t know how yet, but that would be really nice to come up with a series of songs that don’t wring me and the audience out. But that hasn’t been my fate. That hasn’t been what the muses have called me to do. So I just have to do what I do and unapologetically get up there and do it. But like I said, it has its price. It does exact a toll on me and I’m aware that it challenges the audience as well.

SSv: I’m not trying to bait you to sounding self-important or anything, so I want to be clear from the outset. But do you feel an artistic responsibility to some degree to challenge the audience? In other words, in an easy-on-the-ears mainstream music culture, do you feel a need to go where others don’t? And again, I don’t mean to make this about how important you are or some sort of musical martyr.

Mary: I really appreciate you saying that and if I said it myself, I would sound like a jerk.

SSv: Well, yes, that’s why I wanted to make that disclaimer. Plus, the only answer I would get would be along the lines of, ‘No, I don’t think I’m that important.’

Mary: Yeah, but that’s the only way I could answer something like that. But there’s a lot to what you just said. If I were to be totally honest, I think that’s probably why these songs are coming through me — to present an alternative to what’s currently in fashion. But nobody wants to present things that are out of fashion, so there’s a toll exacted on the artist that goes out and challenges the audience. Do you ever get that Bob Lefsetz newsletter?

SSv: Absolutely. It’s essential reading.

Mary: Yeah, Lefsetz went on a diatribe recently about how you know who the artists are today, because they’re the ones who are poor. He talked about the artists were the ones in high school sitting alone drawing or they were the anti-thesis of the popular ones and that continues to be true. For a while there, the artist rose and became the Springsteens and Neil Youngs and Joni Mitchells and even the Ryan Adams, Lucinda Williams and Steve Earles.

But now we’re in a place where there’s a definite poverty all around with the writers that I know. It’s just the way it is and I don’t know why or if that will change. I don’t understand the bigger picture of art and why it does or doesn’t work. But I do know that it’s a fairly difficult thing. People are having a hard time connecting with this type of work right now. Maybe it’s just a phase, I don’t know. I’m just not sure.

SSv: Do you discuss this ever with others going through the same struggle?

Mary: I never talk about it, because it sounds like what I’m saying is self-congratulatory. It also sounds like it’s putting down the audience, so those two things are obnoxious. I don’t want to be obnoxious. It’s dangerous territory to even go here, because there’s very intelligent listeners out there looking for art and looking to be challenged. It’s just that for some reason, the cacophony of noise out there has a lot of artists not getting heard.

SSv: Yes, but it seems from my end that these types of conversations are necessary to bring things into the light. Maybe not. But I think of other artists like Ron Sexsmith who continues to put out great album after great album, or even younger friends of mine trying to break in along those same lines who just can’t get noticed on a grander scale.

Mary: I know. Ron has been a genius for a really long time, and yet my default is always to acknowledge that Vincent Van Gogh never sold a painting. In his lifetime, it never happened. There’s such a thing as being way ahead of your time, and maybe Ron is one of those artists who will have a profound effect on artists down the line and will be discovered at some point. I just don’t get to decide when or if their work will be appreciated.

There’s something I have to tell myself and that’s the point of the work is the work. You’re the right person to have this discussion with at the public level, because this is the type of conversation that artists can’t have out loud. Every other train of thought leads you to a dangerous place.

SSv: So maybe that is the proper role of the critic is to live in this middle ground calling artists to create something more meaningful and to call the audience to not settle for what so easily comes through the speakers?

Mary: I think it is. The critics or the journalists are the ones who say, ‘These are the artists we feel are speaking someething important in this time.’ It’s about guiding the people to the voices they believe should be heard. Every artist believes they should be heard, or otherwise they wouldn’t be writing. So we can’t be the ones who has to decide it. So if there’s any filter left — and let’s be honest, there’s not much of anything left there — it would be through the music writers and journalists, yes.

SSv: Well, if you’re ready to rinse your hands of The Foundling, what are you passionate about now?

Mary: I’m actually trying to reset right now. I’m reading a lot of books, listening to a lot of music and kicking my feet up as much as possible. I’m trying to find my way into the next chain of goals. I’m looking for that myself. But I’m tired, so I need some rest first. Lately, I’ve been listening to Josh Ritter’s older records and I can’t believe how good he is. He’s a friend, but I’m surprised by how much of his work escapes me. I’m just now getting into it. I’m finding my way into records I’ve skipped over, so I’m enjoying the hell out of this.