My Name is Suzie Ungerleider

Suzie Ungerleider officially opens a new chapter of her already distinguished and highly successful career with the release of her Juno-nominated album entitled My Name is Suzie Ungerleider. Bursting with her trademark evocative melodies and trenchant lyrics, it's the tenth solo studio album by the American-born, Canadian-raised artist revered for such landmark records as Johnstown, Sleepy Little Sailor and A Girl in Teen City. It's also her first since the artist formerly known as Oh Susanna announced that she would now record and perform under her birth name.

Everywhere you turn on My Name is Suzie Ungerleider, there are moments of perception and creativity that quietly insist that you stop to take them in fully. The album abounds with atmospheric references to the night, the moon and the stars, with lyrics that have the ethereal elegance and mystery of a dreamscape, but tethered to the piquant realism that has long typified Suzie's talent, all heightened by the musicianship and production of Jim Bryson.  

The new album is introduced by the first single Baby Blues, a characteristically searing song about how the traumatic events we witness when we're young can haunt and indeed shape our older selves. It's a deep subject with an upbeat punchline. “Like ghosts,” she says, “sometimes you just need to just sit with them, feel their power, and, because they feel seen, they release their hold on you for a little while.”



Elsewhere, the album depicts an older and wiser artist and mother sometimes writing for her daughter, both at the time of her dramatically premature birth and miraculous survival on the achingly pretty Summerbaby and, now a teenager herself, courageously affirming with her own identity on the intimate Hearts, on which mountains of blue watch over her.

The sparse, echoing Pumpkins is a love song to the melancholic beauty of autumn; Mount Royal reminisces romantically about the late teen years in Montreal when she was shooting for the moon and the stars. North Star Sneakers is a typically reflective nod to all the wild, spirited and independent women of the world who sometimes end up corralled by domesticity.    



The three-time Canadian Juno Award nominee has been turning heads with her singular song craft since before she released a debut EP in 1997, made back in Vancouver after her college years. She got more used to singing in public and wrote a few songs, before making a demo tape that caught the attention of the music industry. Compelled to relocate to Toronto, she met musicians who loved the Carter Family and Hank Williams as much as she did.

The EP was followed two years later by her full-length debut Johnstown. 2001's Sleepy Little Sailor stepped up the momentum, carrying her to international stages and warm new applause. That was amplified by the deliberately more band-oriented Oh Susanna in 2003, by which time her UK audience was welcoming her back regularly across the Atlantic.  

Short Stories and Soon the Birds ensued, as Ungerleider mined an Americana seam very much in keeping with her own lyrical imagery and melodic sensibility. Certainly, it chimed with the twang and heartache in her voice that she took from country, blues, old time and bluegrass music. “But then something shifted,” she says. “I began to listen less to American music and more to contemporary Canadian singer-songwriters, many of whom I knew.” The result was 2014's Namedropper, featuring not mere covers but songs written for her by fellow Canadian notables. It proved to be a route back to her own self. 

 Her 2017 album A Girl in Teen City was a song cycle about herself as a young punk rocker coming of age in Vancouver. In the making of it, something extraordinary happened. “It was at this point that I started to feel the parts of myself integrating,” she says. “My musical self, and who I am when I'm not onstage, these started to feel more one and the same. By telling my own stories, I was showing who I really was. I was lifting the veil of Oh Susanna and revealing who I was as Suzie Ungerleider.”   

Making the decision to lift the veil and finally to say “So Long” to her long-time moniker was both a personal and political one.  In the summer of 2020, when support for the Black Lives Matter movement surged as a reaction to centuries of violence and oppression of people of colour, Suzie came to the realisation that she no longer wanted to be known by a stage name with historic associations to Minstrelsy.  The song 'Oh Susanna' was published by Stephen Foster in 1848 in “plantation dialect” and contains offensive lyrics that were later changed. But its original sentiments are so deeply offensive that Ungerleider knew it was time to shed the name Oh Susanna. (Read the full story by Suzie HERE)

The desire to reflect her true self as both an artist and a person culminates in a superb new album that stands tall among Suzie Ungerleider's best work. It's not just the name change that has her feeling more like herself than ever. “So here I am, leaving behind the trappings of a persona that gave me the courage to climb up onstage and reveal what is in my heart,” she reflects. “Now that I have grown, I am ready to shed that exoskeleton,” concludes Suzie. “It once protected me, but I need to take it off so I can be all of who I am.”  

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