Mary Cutrufello cuts loose

Interview, Sept, 1998 by Rebecca Wallwork

Few breakout musicians actually turn out to have the major talent that justifies the hype surrounding their industry launches - but Mary Cutrufello's husky honky-tonk voice, layered songwriting, and galvanized classic-style rock is inviting valid comparisons to the likes of early Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty.

At odds with the cluttered class of self-regarding singer-songwriters who proliferate the airwaves these days, the twenty-eight-year-old Cutrufello stands out by transforming her detailed narratives of lifo in Smalltown U.S.A. into scorching live performances. Her ability to find poetry in everyday experience puts her recently released debut album, When the Night Is Through (Mercury), in the same genre as Springsteen's legendary Born to Run. Like Springsteen, Cutrufello knows exactly how to get under the skin of the characters she writes about, exposing their fears and dreams in universally identifiable stories that are a welcome reprieve from the glut of introspective pep soliloquies. From the emotionally exhausted woman at the end of her rope in the slow-burning "Tired & Thirty" to the unchecked ambition of the girl skipping town in "Tonight's the Night," Cutrufello has a way of capturing the troubles and passions of those around her, blending their spirit with her own to create a timeless exploration of what she calls "the heart of the human condition." It's the kind of music we didn't know we'd missed so much.

REBECCA WALLWORK: I believe that after you graduated from Yale you left your hometown [Fairfield, Conn.] to spend a couple of years exploring different forms of music in Texas. What did you learn from country music in particular?

MARY CUTRUFELLO: To really get a country song to work, it should tell a story. My favorite kinds of songs have so much subtext that it would take as long to explain them as it would to play them. If you give a song some meat, it holds up to repeated listenings; and when I came back to my roots, so to speak, I gravitated toward the artists and songs that have that in a rock context - Springsteen, obviously, being a big one. I still listen to Springsteen every other day, sometimes every day.

RW: Some of the stories in your songs are quite heavy - for example, the man who shoots his lover before turning the gun on himself in "Good Night Dark Angel."

MC: If you write a heavy, intense song, it doesn't mean you can't rock with it. For my money, if you take a song like that and you put it in a concert setting, it turns into this cathartic thing, where you exorcise all of the bad stuff that's going on. Then you've got songs like "Sweet Promise," which kind of say, We've had our moment of darkness, now let's just rock and have a good time. But no matter which way you are doing it, you should rock at all times. [laughs]

RW: I noticed your sister, Cecil, has a starring role in a couple of your songs. What does she think about that?

MC: She's a little nonplussed. I keep waiting for that angry phone call when she realizes I've taken a couple of scenes out of her life and she goes, "Mary! I'm your sister! How could you do this to me?" [laughs]

RW: Are all of your lyrics autobiographical or are some fictional?

MC: It's a mix. Some of my songs have been emotionally or psychically difficult to write. I often put off sitting down to write them because I know I'm going to have to walk through this really dark wood. But once they're written and worked through, they become their own thing.

RW: Are you starting to feel pressure to perform from all the buzz?

MC: Performing is never stressful for me. It's such a natural release to strap on a guitar and get up on a stage and play. I get really grumpy if I don't do it on a regular basis. It's what I love to do and it's probably what I do best. Songwriting is an equally important part of who I am and what I do - but if I'm doing my job right, I get to think and rock at the same time.