Oh
Susanna – A Girl in Teen City
(Stella)
For songwriters, the teenage years
serve as raw material for decades worth of lyrics: the emotional volatility,
the wonder of the new, the assertion of self, the possibilities that stand
before you. It never gets old, no matter how old you may be.
Oh Susanna, a.k.a. Susie Ungerleider,
is far from her teenage years in Vancouver; she lives in Toronto with a drummer
husband and a son approaching teen years himself (he gets a co-writing credit
on one song). On her first album of original material since surviving a bout of
breast cancer, she revisits her younger self in vivid detail. As she describes
in the liner notes, the protagonist is “trying to find out who she is by trying
to be something she isn’t, falling in love, getting drunk, having her heart
broken, sneaking into shows in burnt-out warehouses, watching the waves,
tasting the salt in the air, walking home over bridges and railroad tracks in
all that endless rain.”
Those liner notes might well be direct
quotes from the lyrics themselves. A Girl
in Teen City doesn’t couch its setting or intent in oblique poetry:
Ungerleider writes wistfully and directly about the awe and adventure of the
time. You may as well be sitting next to her as she goes through a box of
teenage mementoes. The charm is in all the details: geographic and historic
specifics, certainly, but also the feeling of sensing a kindred spirit in a
dark movie theatre, of having a lover who questions gender roles, of getting
busted for trying to get into a licensed show. On one of the best tracks here,
she recalls watching a boyfriend attempt to front a band just because he looks
the part; he’s a terrible singer, however, and as she watches him she realizes
that she “can sing circles around him” and deserves to be on the stage instead.
Producer Jim Bryson keeps the
arrangements spare and focused on the narrative; guitarist Gord Tough and
drummer Cam Giroux (both formerly of Sarah Harmer’s Weeping Tile) are key
players in the supporting cast. Full marks also go to designer Catherine
Lepage, whose packaging—including pics of Ungerleider’s teenage Siouxie Sioux
phase, and illustrations of Vancouver’s neon history—enhances the entire
experience. (May 25, 2017)
Stream: “My Boyfriend,” “Lucky Star,”
“My Old Vancouver”
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