With a sound somewhere between alt-country and traditional folk and a perspective informed by her hardscrabble youth, Louisiana-born Mary Gauthier started earning plaudits for her sharp-eyed songwriting in the late '90s. Gauthier's uncompromising lyrical approach wastes no words and sidesteps no uncomfortable emotions, whether she's delivering wry observations about her alcoholic past in "I Drink," delivering an unsentimental-yet-compassionate portrait of an American soldier on "Brothers," or touching on the universal truths of the human condition on the empathetic "Mercy Now."