The Art of Getting Broken

Mary Cutrufello wanted to be a rock star. For a moment she was.

A A A Comments By Brad Tyer Thursday, May 17 2001

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After a year and a half of laying low, in Minneapolis and Houston, watching baseball, digging the cold weather, making some kind of sense of the wild ride in her head, Mary started thinking about that guitar again. She is 31 now.

She's started writing songs again, and has "the nucleus" of an album completed. She's booked a series of solo acoustic dates around Texas (including Saturday, June 23, at Rudyard's) to ease herself back in, and because "I want people to meet the new characters in the songs," she says. "They've been kind of living with me in my house for a year, and I want them to meet my friends, you know?"

Deron Neblett

Alone on a launchpad, upstairs at Rudz.

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And yes, she says, if she had it all to do over again, major-label dance and all, she would. "That," she says, "is the next step."

This is not the common response to "being spit out the back end." For most artists, one grind through the mill is enough to convince them to think small, to scale back, to avoid the machinery.

"And I know why," she laughs.

"I think I see the nature of it more clearly than I did three years ago, but it hasn't dissuaded me from the good things that it can bring. Everything's different now, but it's good. And it puts me in a really good position this time out, because I know all that stuff now….For all the things that didn't break the way I wanted them to break on the last record, the randomness of that is equaled by the randomness with which something cool might break. You work hard and that helps. A good setup helps. And a good team and a great contract helps. But random stuff good or bad can happen, and I think it's important to understand. It's not always your fault. It's not always your fault that you sell ten million records, either. There's a lot of serendipity involved, on either side."