“The main theme of Gauthier’s brilliant 2018 album Rifles and Rosary Beads, written with veterans and their spouses as part of the Songwriting With Soldiers project, is, as one title puts it, ‘The War After the War.’ The lived details of memoir are embellished here with phrases as plain-spoken as ‘My service was not a sacrifice’ and as grand as a vision of ‘Heaven shining down on us/ Through bullet holes in the sky.’ These songs aren’t polemics or apologies, and they’re not (at least not just) therapy. They’re expressions of an honest working-class realism, with sharp insight how the intense bonding of battle nurtures a desire for new forms of peacetime solidarity that the permanent wounds a soldier brings home make a necessity. With Jaimee Harris. 8 p.m. $30. 408 St. Peter St., St. Paul. More info HERE.—Keith Harris
We learned Friday that Vieux Carré is closing in a few weeks. If you’d like to visit the St. Paul club before it shuts down, you have a good excuse to this Wednesday.”
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