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Oh Susannah (Page 2)
So, from 'Carrie Lee' to 'Billy' and ten songs in between, this is Oh Susanna retaining the observational, often bare style that first marked her card, but this time, as a delightful and moreish surprise, steeped more than occasionally in some cask-matured rock spirit. It's the same sterling team that fashioned Sleepy Little Sailor, on a new set recorded last December in Ontario with producer Colin Cripps and the same team of musicians, augmented by one new player, Travis Good, guitarist with Toronto's alternative country-pop outfit the Sadies.
"I don¹t know what to call it," she smiles. "Some people say it's more like classic rock. All the people I work with musically, we all have these '70s rock records embedded in our heads, and whenever we do something, we go back to our youth and think of those records as being the pinnacle." They inform tracks like 'Carrie Lee', 'Right By Your Side' and the positively funky 'Cain Is Rising', but this is no sellout of Suzie's earlier passions, especially with the inclusion of such unvarnished, delicate pieces as 'Little White Lie' and 'The Fall'.
"The really rootsy, Appalachian, Hank Williams-tinged stuff I did at the start, I loved that and it was in my soul. After a while you get tired of your obsessions in a certain way, and it propels you forward to become obsessed with something else. But there's a scary meantime in between those two obsessions, like "where am I going to go from here?" That's how it was after Sleepy Little Sailor, and I guess I just came up with these songs.
"You don¹t want it to be a museum piece, you want to take the great things of music history and fuse your own stuff with it, and you hope it comes out. I wanted to have the music be not quite so introverted anymore. Some of the songs, like 'Cain Is Rising', are about some heavy subjects, but they're dressed up in music that doesn't sound depressing or moody. I didn't deliberately do that, it somehow happened."
Oh Susanna is a worthy addition to an increasingly distinctive body of work that always carried an unusual watermark. Suzie first performed under the name in 1995, and soon after that EP on her own Stella imprint in '97, she was being hailed as Canada's best unsigned artist. Here, the early support of BBC broadcaster Bob Harris started a momentum that has ensured the UK's continuing status as a second home that welcomes her back often.
"I was lucky," she says. "When I started, I wasn¹t really paying attention to what was current at all. Ever since I was a teenager [even before she studied history and hosted a radio show at Montreal's Concordia University], I would listen to music that people would say "why are you listening to this old music?" It was an advantage, frankly, because I wasn't necessarily concerned with being trendy or doing what other people were doing at the time. I'm more up to date now than probably I've ever been.
" Oh Susanna will positively seduce new listeners, but for those who've travelled with her from one album touchstone to the next, there's a continuity here that's fascinating to map. "All the albums are linked, they match my emotional state at the time," she says. "Sleepy Little Sailor was very magical to make, very smooth and easy and it has a certain kind of spell. The music was very much reflecting the heartbroken, soulsearching thing I was going through. I thought, I love that but I can't do that again. I'm not there, I don't feel the same way and it would be false to replicate that.
" Thus the downbeat mood has been succeeded by a new spirit. "There's this other thing I've always been drawn to in music," says Suzie, "which is theatricality. The Rolling Stones are like the archetype in my head of what rock stars are, and how exciting that is. I started to play the songs live and not that differently, but just maybe feeling like it's fun to have a bit of rock and roll in there. That was the thing with this record, to have a great band but to have that earthy feel to it."
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