I felt my whole life like I didn't have a family, and I needed one. So I had to build one, and you build one with faith, hope, and the healing power of love - or you end up the 'Unabomber.' That's the choice.

Songs are here to help us: they build bridges from heart to heart.

I long for real and true connection. It has been the theme of all the songs in my whole life.

Music and books, I think, were the two things I trusted the most as a child - songs and books.

I think each veteran's soul has something that it needs to say. I know from my own personal traumas, it's very hard to know what that is. But when I'm watching someone else struggle, it's not as confusing for me, 'cause it's not my struggle, so I can help identify that.

'I Drink' took me two years to write.

War is hell. Sending young people to conflicts that are unwinnable and unresolvable - it puts them in a position where they're going to suffer. And yet their experience is that they're proud of their service, and they should be. Service freely rendered is a noble thing.

I think if people really listened to what our families who serve go through, we could have a realistic discussion of what it means to send young people to war.

Art, when done well, creates empathy.

I haven't been in the military, but I've known my share of pain. It allows me to sit with someone who's struggling and not be afraid.

Being in recovery for a lot of years now, I've worked with a lot of people who've gotten sober and sat with a lot of folks who are suffering. Bearing witness is a really underrated thing; it's a big damn deal.

They send women into combat without being prepared for women in combat. The men resented them being there, and it was just very, very difficult for them, and they had to fight for the respect they were earning. And that's all they want is the respect.

As a songwriter, I was always mining my own depths, which were filled with confusion and darkness.

I spent my 18th birthday in jail. Charges were dropped as long as I promised never to return to the state of Kansas. My parents took me home to Louisiana. I lasted there a week. Then I ran away.

I keep seeing the headline on articles that says something like 'Mary Gauthier Helping Our Veterans.' It's troubling - and it's condescending. Whatever I'm doing as a songwriter to help them tell their stories, they're giving it back to me double, triple, quadruple.

A lot of songwriters have written about soldiers and war, but very few have written with them.

I did not know that the wounds of war are often invisible.

We can't see ourselves very clearly. This I learned as a songwriter. I'm forever trying to figure out what my own truth is.

I love SongwritingWith:Soldiers.

I'm openly gay, and I've got a major label record deal in Nashville, and it happened when I was 42 years old. It's not supposed to happen that way.

In my early years, I couldn't find a community. I couldn't find anybody like me. I felt so isolated. There was nothing but shame and loneliness.

I've got lots of problems. Being gay isn't one of them.

I would make a terrible soldier, because I don't follow orders.

I'm sort of stuck in adolescence in many ways, like most artists, and march to my own beat.

It can take me many months to write one of my own songs.

I came to music and knowing a little bit about life, and I came to music knowing a lot about business - and that's a real advantage. By the time I came to music, I had purchased real estate, opened restaurants, and been in the business world, so the music business didn't blindside me.

The job of the artist is to go to the places where most other people are embarrassed to go to. And show it.

I'm a traveler and a vagabond and an observer, and the songs come through that. And that's just the way it's going to be.

I think I'll always draw from being a person that doesn't know how to have a normal life, whatever a normal life is.

I try not to eat cakes, but sugar screams my name.

What matters is what happens in the soul of an artist when you're playing.

If I write for beauty and truth, the songs will find their way to me. Then, it's the songs that speak to the audience, and they can become part of the tribe that is into what I do.

I feel as though I came to music with something to say. It wasn't like that when I was younger. I didn't have the ability to articulate what it was I wanted to say.

I always knew I was going to make a record called 'The Foundling.' Since I picked up a guitar, I knew it.

There's a lot of vulnerability in songs - I'm not talking about pop songs - from people that are in the art of songwriting more than the commercial enterprise of it.

By the time I got to songwriting, I had been faced with a lot of troubles as a result of my own collective of trauma. I was someone who instinctively figured out that writing songs about the struggle helps you with the struggle.

Creating something beautiful out of pain helps ease the pain. So, that's kind of how I got to songwriting - quite honestly out of desperation.

Once I got my life sorted and started to get healthy, then I was able to focus on writing.

I think, because of the kind of writer I am, I can't do it halfway. I can't do it without dedicating my entire life to it. I have to give it a hundred percent.

Songs have been my greatest teachers and continue to be really important in my life.

I got issues. Boy, have I got issues.

I guess I find it easier to talk when I have a guitar in front of me.

I've come to terms with the fact that I'll probably be in therapy all of my life.

Ultimately, what I want is for my songs to outlive me: I want my songs to keep being played even after I'm gone.

I think we're very much in a mystery here in this life and that artists try to pierce the mystery with their art.

I write to make some sense of things that confuse me. The mechanics of my own heart are the most confusing I know about - and don't know about - and other people's are a bit confusing, too.

My experience is that the universal is the personal. If you can get past your navel-gazing into the deepest part of yourself as a writer, you find everyone - we're all there.

I'm a big fan of Lou Reed, and I do a lot of talking through songs. It's more effective with my vocal limitations and also more powerful to slightly sing sometimes. It depends on the emotion, but I'm never going to try to compete with great singers.

When I became a songwriter, it was out of some sort of desperation. I needed to create something. I had to latch on to something, and the guitar was what I grabbed.

When I finally got sober, I moved towards what I might have been if I hadn't been destroying myself when I was young.