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December 2, 2007
Don't you cry for me
Oh Susanna is possessed by the frontier spirit of the 1800's, writes Michael Dwyer.

Suzie Ungerleider spent last winter in Deadwood. Not in the black hills town of South Dakota where Wild Bill Hickok was shot in the back while playing poker in 1876 but in an eerie state of mind conjured by the HBO TV western series of that name and the small hours delirium of a new mother.

She describes a cosy domestic picture of herself and her husband, Oh Susanna drummer Cam Giroux, barricaded against the Canadian snow as one-year-old Salvador sleeps, unable to tear themselves away from the desperate drama of the American gold rush of the 1870's.

"Deadwood is set in that environment of the Wild West but it could be set anywhere," she says. It's very Shakespearean somehow, especially with the language being so crazy, but with that North American idea of frontier and unbridled landscape.

"Really, it's sad about community. Everyone comes together to fight against whatever they see as evil. The people you hate at the beginning you start to love at the end. That complexity is real."

As a singer-songwriter, Ungerleider has had one foot in that frontier since her first album of 1996. Her pseudonym, Oh Susanna, claims sympathy with Stephen Foster's 160-year old folk standard and her latest album, Short Stories, finds the threads of banjo and balladry intact through tales seemingly brought to life from sepia photographs.

"It feels like I've always known about that tradition," she says. "My parents and relatives were interested in folk music and it was also in the public school system in Canada. What we sang at school were story songs, folk songs.

"It was only much later that I realised how the rock'n'roll that I loved came out of that, like the Stones--their music came out of country and blues and folk ballads. So it all kinda tied together."

"The final piece of the puzzle was the punk explosion she experienced as a teen in Vancouver. "They're not story songs but there is that same association between a very simple musical form expressing misery, or the point of view of the underdog; the voice of an alienated person or group.

"I think what I'm mainly interested in is how people get into trouble and how they get out of it."

Maybe as a result of her new family situation, several of her latest Short Stories songs draw on her old relatives' troubles. Pretty Face came partly from her grandparents' story and Miss Liberty was inspired by imagining her ancestors' arrival from Europe: cue more faded photos of 19th century Sunday suits and lace.

But old habits die hard. A longtime fan of the murder ballad, Ungerleider admits that Pretty Penny, with its rustic banjo and ominous mood, has some link to the funeral folk tune, Pretty Polly. And in the Wild West scenes of Three Shots and Billy 4 (a Bob Dylan obscurity), folks still get out of trouble the Wild Bill Hickok way, in a wood box.

"Isn't that the easy way?" she laughs. "Come on! There's not too much death on this one."


The Sunday Age (Melbourne, Australia)