By Isaac Hamlet
Many have found this past week depressing. Even on the sunniest, most daisy-adorned of metaphorical green pastures, it’s become starkly apparent that Americans today are more deeply divided than any of us wanted.
At 8 p.m. Friday, Mary Gauthier, Eliza Gilkyson, and Gretchen Peters will attempt to soothe this melancholy through song. The trio of folksingers will appear at the Mill, 120 E. Burlington St., to perform as Three Women and the Truth.
“When I’m touring on my own, I often have to really put on my soldier suit to get through it,” Gilkyson said. “When it’s all three of us, I enjoy it. After this past week especially, I look forward to shows and the community there.”
The three women — all seasoned folk artists — are typically solo acts. But as friends and fans of one another’s work, they decided to collaborate.
Gauthier describes it as “an old-fashioned song swap,” pulling from their decades-spanning collective works. This means that each night on tour, one of the musicians will play a song she feels like playing and the others will join in.
“We’re quite familiar with each other’s work,” Gauthier said. “When we get on stage, we don’t have a plan, we want to have spontaneity and flexibility. The audience members contribute with their presence and energy — we’re responding to the audience and current events. The show is a living, breathing thing.”
Over the years, the women have developed a great degree of respect and admiration for one another as artists. They remain unique in style, however, and though they’re all drawing from the same relative genre, their work highlights different strengths for each.
“[Peters’] last record was the record of the year in the UK; she’s a master writer,” Gilkyson said. “When I’m teaching songwriting, I’ll often use her songs as a jumping-off point,”
All three women were emphatic about the others’ abilities as musicians.
“They’re both fearless,” Peters said. “None of us are afraid to say the things that are hard to say. Listen to any of Mary’s songs, and you’ll hear [hard truths]. Eliza writes with a sensuality and political awareness, which are not two words you’d often hear together, but that’s really what it is.”
As Gauthier put it: “The genre pulls from where we’ve been to talk about where we are.” That’s why she feels the form can be so powerful and offer such a range of approaches.
“It’s a challenge to tap into the specifics of now while also finding something that will ring true through time,” she said. “Artists like Hank Williams, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen — their songs are true now, and they’ll be true 100 years from now.”
As the title of the show says, “truth” is exactly what the three are trying to achieve with their songs. Not a ubiquitous truth but a sort of plurality that applies to them — and hopefully their audience — as individuals.
“We’re all wondering what is happening, and we need each other’s truths to figure it out,” Gauthier said. “This is a show that’s more than a show — it’s a conversation about the world as we see it.”
