OH SUSANNA at the Great Hall (1087 Queen West), Saturday (October 25), 8 pm. $25. RTH.
When we meet for coffee in her neighbourhood, the Junction, Oh Susanna is cheery. But it’s been a tough one and a half years for Suzie Ungerleider. Her adventurous, crowd-funded sixth album, Namedropper, was put on hold in May 2013 after the singer/songwriter learned she had breast cancer. (She was in treatment until February.)
“We were going to release the record at exactly the same time last year,” she says. “So it’s almost like we did this time warp where I had to go down a portal and do weird treatment. But actually it was beautiful, because I had to tell all these people who supported the album during the Kickstarter campaign, ‘I can’t deliver this to you,’ and I got this amazing outpouring of love from family and friends.”
The extra time also allowed Ungerleider to hook up with a new label – Hamilton’s Sonic Unyon.
Originally conceived by Ungerleider as a traditional covers album, the concept changed over the course of a phone call with her old friend, producer and multi-instrumentalist Jim Bryson, who suggested getting artists to write original material for it.
The rule? It had to be people Ungerleider knew, and she encouraged her friends to submit tunes they wouldn’t normally associate with her music.
Songs poured in. Two days after an email to Ron Sexsmith, he delivered instant classic Wait Until The Sun Comes Up Joel Plaskett sent in a demo for Into My Arms complete with sung hooks. Meanwhile, Melissa McClelland surprised her with a pop/rock tune called Mozart For The Cat, inspired by Ungerleider’s son Sal, who was born nearly three months early.
“She was saying if you don’t have any expectations of life, you’ll do much better than if you have a certain idea of how things should go,” explains Ungerleider, who says she tapped into her inner Pat Benatar for the song’s fierce, tough vocal.
For her, Namedropper was about freedom: breaking out of the cocoon of her solo career and giving up some control to Bryson so she could move in new musical directions.
“We have this brother/sister chemistry,” she says. “He deliberately subverts everything I’m more traditional. I like things pretty and beautiful, maybe intense but melodic, and he says, ‘Let’s throw a little dissonance in here.'”
Her love of music, she says, goes much further than her own catalog.
“I wanted to express my admiration for these writers, get into their heads, have fun, be a singer and interpreter and get a range of expression that I wouldn’t have if I wrote my own script.”
Interview Clip
Oh Susanna recites the lyrics to part of Old Man Luedecke’s song Provincial Parks:
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