Mary Gauthier - The Foundling

Compared to the like of Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle & Lucinda Williams, alt-country artist Mary Gauthier exploded onto the scene in 1999 with her album 'Drag Queens In Limousines'. Embraced by critics, folkies, and No Depression fans alike, Gauthier's warmly candid treatment of her fringe-dwelling subjects rings true, as it never verges on sentimental; her characters' downtrodden lives are never coldly exploited. Instead, these are people she knows, who she met after dropping out of her Louisiana high school and stealing the family car at the age of 15, in detox at 16 and jailed at 18. Her own wayward path led her to opening a successful restaurant in Boston's Back Bay - Dixie Kitchen - which she sold after her music career started to take off.The Foundling provides a foundation, a starting point for Mary�s peripatetic odyssey. Orphaned at the St. Vincent�s Infants Home, she was eventually adopted by a couple from Thibodaux � Italian, Catholic and doomed. The songs tell the story of a kid abandoned at birth who spent a year in an orphanage and was adopted, who ran way from the adopted home and ended up in show business, who searched for birth parents late in life and found one and was rejected, and who came through the other side of all of this still believing in love.� Mary GauthierWritten and recorded over the course of two years, The Foundling was produced in Toronto by Michael Timmins of Cowboy Junkies, using local musicians and his sister Margo Timmins on vocal harmonies. Track listing: The Foundling / Mama Here, Mama Gone / Goodbye / Sideshow / Interlude 1 / Blood Is Blood / March 11, 1962 / Walk In The Water / Interlude 2 / Sweet Words / The Orphan King / Another Day Borrowed / Coda.