After the Battle

TWO OF THIS year’s most compelling music releases so far give a deeply personal voice to the moral, emotional, and psychological struggles of the men and women who have waged our long-term “war on terror.” Healing Tide by The War and Treaty is the first full-length recording from this husband-and-wife team; the husband, Michael Trotter Jr., became a musician during his time in Iraq and has since struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder. Meanwhile, Mary Gauthier’s Rifles and Rosary Beads features 11 songs co-written with Iraq and Afghanistan vets through the SongwritingWith:Soldiers (SW:S) project.

Trotter, the songwriter and keyboardist in The War and Treaty, enlisted in the Army in 2003 simply to provide health insurance and a steady paycheck for his daughter and first wife. Within six months he was in Iraq, stationed in the remains of one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces. One day, a captain who had taken Trotter under his wing and knew that he could sing took him into a rubble-strewn room that held a piano. Trotter had never played in his life, but in his downtime he taught himself and started writing songs.

Then that captain was killed in action. Trotter wrote a song and performed it at the captain’s memorial. The song was “Dear Martha,” which the band still performs, and it made such an impression on all the soldiers at the memorial that Trotter’s colonel tasked him to write and perform a song for the memorial services of soldiers who died in action.

Trotter kept performing after leaving the Army, and that’s how he met Tanya Blount, who already had something of a career going. She had a small part singing “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” with Lauryn Hill in the Whoopi Goldberg movie Sister Act 2. Trotter and Blount quickly became partners in music and everything else.

Together on stage and on their new Buddy Miller-produced album, The War and Treaty exorcise the demons of war and home-front violence, pushing Trotter’s songs to their absolute limit with the power of love and the soaring, wrenching harmonies of gospel. They’re being marketed in the “Americana” category, which suits their guitar-heavy backing tracks and mostly secular lyrics, but The War and Treaty are dishing out a distinctly sanctified brand of roots rock.

WHILE THE LYRICAL subject matter is different from her usual autobiography, Rifles and Rosary Beads is definitely a Mary Gauthier album. There’s no mistaking its rough-edged acoustic guitar and drums sound, or the folk singer-songwriter’s plainspoken twangy delivery. And Gauthier is right to have noted that these are some of the best songs she’s written. Still she’s also careful to keep the spotlight on the Iraq and Afghanistan vets who co-wrote them. Gauthier is one of a couple of dozen professional songwriters who participate in SW:S. The songwriters and vets meet, typically at a retreat center, pair off, and try to write songs that will allow the soldiers to constructively process their pain.

I have no idea how songs such as “Brothers” (the plea of a female soldier who wants to be one) or “Iraq” (the story of another female soldier sexually assaulted by male peers) have worked as therapy for their co-writers, but for the audience they plumb the ambivalent depths of the contemporary experience of women at war, a side of the story not often heard.

In a brief essay on the SW:S website, Gauthier writes, “At their best, songs are not products for a market place. They are spiritual medicine for a world gone wrong.” A lot has gone wrong in America’s 17-year-old war on terror, and we are going to need a whole lot of musical medicine in the years ahead. These two records are a start.