An evening of stories and songs with Mary Gauthier and Sam Baker.● Doors open 30 mins prior to show
● BYOB - $10 fee per group
● We sell Ramblers, sodas, coffee & Redbird Charcuterie Plates from Huisache Grill
“A reckoning,” Mary Gauthier writes on the outer sleeve to her newest album, “can be personal, political, or spiritual. These songs inhabit all three realms at once.”
Yes. Yes, they do.
Mary’s most celebrated songs — “I Drink,” “Mercy Now,” “Drag Queens in Limousines” — are confessional stories, closely observed, clear-eyed and compassionate. She sings with the unmistakable languor of her native Louisiana, writes with the bluntness of Boston, where she was once a successful restauranteur, and rewrites with the fierce precision of Nashville, her home for many years. Her 2018 release, Rifles & Rosary Beads, co-written with wounded Iraq war veterans, received a Grammy nomination for Best Folk Album, and an Americana Music Association nomination for Album of the Year. During Covid she wrote and saw published (by MacMillan) Saved by a Song: The Art and Healing Power of Songwriting, part memoir, part reflection on songwriting, through the lens of her most impactful songs.
Reckoning (Soundly, Sept 25, 2026) is a dense, carefully nuanced, profoundly complex text, though all nine songs are presented as directly as possible: Mary’s voice, her guitar, bits of harmonica. Folk music, of a kind, but not a broadside. Nothing so easy as that. Topical songs with a long view, because she’s seen and lived too much of it.
Sam Baker is a West Texas songwriter, lyric writer, and visual artist whose work is animated by a singular attention to the forgotten people of everyday life — the ditch digger, the Mennonite welder, the widow who keeps returning to the beach. His songs are sparse, unhurried, and precise, built from the same literary impulses as his influences: Faulkner, Hemingway, Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark.
Baker came to music by way of survival. In 1986, while traveling by train to Machu Picchu in Peru, a bomb planted by the Shining Path guerrilla group exploded in his compartment. Six people were killed; Baker survived with catastrophic injuries — brain damage, a severed artery, destroyed hearing, hands permanently altered by skin grafts. He endured 17 reconstructive surgeries. As part of his recovery, he taught himself to play guitar left-handed, turned upside down, with gnarled fingers. Writing helped him relearn language he had lost. The first true line he wrote was the first line of his first song.
His debut album Mercy arrived in 2004. Seven albums followed, including Say Grace, named by Rolling Stone as one of the top 10 country albums of 2013, and 2026’s Survivor, produced by Rodney Crowell and released by Crowell’s RC1 Records in collaboration with the Guy Clark Family Foundation’s Truly Handmade Records. He has performed with symphony orchestras, in listening rooms in the Netherlands, in art galleries in Santa Fe, and at songwriter retreats for combat veterans. He sat for an hour with Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air. The Wall Street Journal called him “The Bard of the Workaday World.” Lone Star Music named him “maybe the most captivating songwriter in America.” Baker is also a painter. He lives in Austin and writes every day.
Event venue
1260 S Business IH 35, New Braunfels, TX, United States, Texas 78130
Tickets
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