The Austin concert setting intensifies musical storyteller Mary Gauthier’s fine-grained witnessing and unaffected recitative. She finds equipoise between tough clarity and generous compassion: “Everybody says you look real good / Ah think you look stoned / Your sister cried / all the way home.” Gauthier once told me her encompassing perspective comes from being “a very androgynous person,” who finds suffering and mercy in humanity regardless of gender or race—a rare ability. She’s able to embody even “pioneer” male characters like “The Last of the Hobo Kings,” who “died last night, his wife Wanda by his side.”
