From the Georgia Straight magazine(March '97)
City Songwriter Mines Country Gold
BY MIKE USINGER
In the tradition of masters such as Hank Williams and the Louvin Brothers, Oh Susanna writes country songs so authentic you can almost taste the spilled whiskey and burnt gunpowder. If that sounds like high praise, it's meant to- the 27 year old songwriter may be based in Vancouver, but her roots seem to lie in the soil of the American frontier. Like Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch and Cormack McCarthy's All The Pretty Horses, her eponymous, seven-song debut CD harkens back to a time when gunslingers settled their arguments at high noon and settlers buried their dead in unfinished pine boxes.
Settling into the Georgia Straight boardroom, Oh Susanna- aka Suzie Ungerleider- attempts to explain where the inspiration for her haunting work comes from. Whereas most country songwriters never get beyond honky-tonk bars and two-timing spouses, Oh Susanna explores the dark side of life, coming up with lyrics like "The deathyard's callin' Me/Rumblin' round the track/So I'll make the rails my wire/And my pillow iron black."
"Sometimes I don't like to think too hard about where my songs come from," she says. "But obviously I have a fascination with death and things that are morbid." Moments later, she launches into a story that confirms her claim: "I heard about this woman whose husband had left her. They had been high-school sweethearts, and then one morning she woke up to find him gone. So she climbed up to the top of this hill which bad a river running down it. She got into a little boat, and then basically committed suicide by letting the boat drift down the river and over a waterfall into the rapids. You'll read about Bruce Springsteen using Steinbeck or articles about migrant workers for inspiration. I'll use something like the story about the woman in the raft."
Born in Massachusetts, Oh Susanna moved to Vancouver as a youngster when her father landed a job at the University of British Columbia. As far back as her grade-school years she dreamed of becoming a rock star- in Grade 7 she even skipped school to attend the Seattle leg of what was then being billed as the Rolling Stones' farewell tour. For a while she wanted to be Mick Jagger, but then she discovered bombastic blues descendants such as Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, and The Who. By the mid '80s, Oh Susanna was raiding her older sister's record collection, learning to love the over-amped protest music of D.O.A., the Dead Kennedys, and the Subhumans.
Her love for roots music began to blossom while she was attending university in Montreal; hosting a campus radio show helped turn her on to Bob Wills, Bill Monroe, and John Henry. But it wasn't until she returned to Vancouver in the early '90s and joined up with guitarist Scott Chernoff that she began to seriously think about performing. The two formed a band, sequestered themselves in the garage, and then hit the studio to record covers of songs by Hank Williams and Robert Johnson.
"I remember the first time I played the tape for my parents-I was embarrassed to be there while they listened to it," she says. "I had all these qualms about it even though the musicianship was fine, I thought the mix on it was really awful. That didn't bother my parents though- they loved it."
When the two songwriters split over artistic differences, Oh Susanna knew she wanted to keep performing. Rather than wasting her time with the musicians' classifieds, she decided to go it alone. It wasn't an easy decision. 'Singing is a very personal thing. It's just you up there-there's no hiding behind an instrument. And there's the fact that a part of me is really shy, which made things even harder. But I did it-when I made my first tape, I knew that the songs kind of worked. Before I knew it, I had a body of work, however small it happened to be."
The buzz has been growing steadily since then. Along with Holly McNarland, Kinnie Starr, and Bif Naked, Oh Susanna is considered one of Vancouver's hottest up-and-coming artists. She's been profiled in Billboard and featured on the cover of Toronto's Now magazine. And, on the strength of Oh Susanna, she's fielding offers from record labels on both sides of the border. Unaffected by the hype, she continues to write songs in her bedroom and to mesmerize audiences when she plays live- a few weeks back, at the Niagara, Oh Susanna clocked in with a set almost as perfect as Hank Williams's "There's a Tear in My Beer". Like the Gun Club's Jeffrey Lee Pierce, she writes dust-bowl lyrics that can make the most hardened of drunks cry; like pioneering cow-punker Maria McKee, she's got a voice Nashville's reigning divas would die for.
With enough street credibility for the alternative crowd, and accessible enough for the mainstream, Oh Susanna seems bound for something big. It's getting harder, but she tries not to think about what's ahead. She knows she's onto something special, and she doesn't want to do anything to jinx that.
"I think if I had a band behind me, it would be much easier for me to be into the rock-star thing," she says. "You have allies in a group situation. For now, the biggest challenge for me is to maintain my integrity and not be distracted by what's going on around me. I want to he recognized for doing something that is special, but at the same time I don't want that recognition to change me and what I do."
