Suzie Ungerleider’s gloriously emotive, crystalline voice and her bewitching performances have captivated audiences for over 25 years. A wordsmith with a keen mind for detail and a wicked sense of humour, Suzie’s songs and voice pierce the heart, inspire a knowing laugh or a welling of the eye.
Born in the USA and raised in Vancouver, Canada, this award-winning singer-songwriter began performing under the name Oh Susanna in the mid-1990s, winning instant praise for her striking voice and poetic songcraft. Her musical path has criss-crossed the mountains and valleys of Americana, folk, and roots, yet throughout her journey she has remained true to her own artistic vision.
Suzie has received many accolades for her artistry. She is the recipient of a Genie Award for Best Original Song and a Canadian Folk Music Award for English Songwriter of the Year. She has also been nominated for three Juno Awards and four Canadian Folk Music Awards.
After being a long-time member of the Toronto roots music scene, Suzie currently lives in her hometown of Vancouver with her husband, her daughter and their dog Willow.
New album AMONG THE EVERGREENS
Coming JUNE 6, 2025
“I love origin stories,” says Suzie Ungerleider. “I love finding out where people are and how they got there, so I'm constantly thinking about that. Everybody's carrying around their own narrative.”
Among the Evergreens is the revered Americana singer-songwriter's own narrative. Emerging under her own name in 2021 after retiring her long-time moniker, Oh Susanna, Among the Evergreens is Suzie’s most personal album yet and continues the thrice JUNO nominated artist’s celebrated tradition of telling stories.
“At the beginning of my musical journey, I was afraid to show myself, so I took on a persona, and I wrote songs in a fictionalised way,’ she reflects of her lifelong journey towards becoming more comfortable with the vulnerability of revealing herself. “It is this idea of trying to merge the musical person and the human being that I am, and get closer to what is important to me. And it's interesting, because the more specific I get, the more universal it is.”
Indeed, Suzie’s beautifully evocative and atmospheric songs may draw the listener into her world but they are universally relatable, traversing the typical chapters of a person’s life. These are tales about teenagehood, the loss of innocence, the breakdown of relationships, young love, marriage, motherhood, survival and second chances, fights and forgiveness. And they are utterly captivating.
Divided into two parts: “Then” and “Now” – songs inspired by the past and by the present – we listen to Suzie reflecting on what it means to be in the middle of life, seeking answers to who she was and who she is now.
“It’s about being like a tree with all those rings around you, the layers of your life telling you who you were and where you've been,” she says.
Imagery of the outdoors, of green valleys and trees shedding their leaves, infuses this new collection. It was written in America-born, Canada-raised Suzie’s hometown of Vancouver, a city among the evergreens – the cherished place to which she returned after being lured by the thrill and promise of Toronto.
Suzie had been quietly working as a clerk at a Vancouver library when in 1996 she self-released a cassette tape of seven songs recorded for just $200, and found herself in high demand with music industry executives and agents after performing a short set at a local club. She won instant praise for her debut album Johnstown in 1999, and along with her gloriously emotive vocals and folk-noir balladry, which have drawn comparisons to Gillian Welch, Neko Case, Sarah McLachlan and Tori Amos, she drew support from “Whispering” Bob Harris who raved about the “heart-tugging emotive quality” of her voice.
As depicted on the cover of Among the Evergreens, you can often find Suzie, lost in thought while walking her dog among the evergreens, on a trail near her house called the Trans Canada Trail. This trail epitomizes Vancouver, where dramatic natural scenery merges with industry, mountains, and water. Flanked by the railroad and ships entering the harbor, it provides the backdrop where the first fragments of her songs take shape, revealing the depth of her immense writing talent.
Suzie, who holds a Genie Award for Best Original Song and a Canadian Folk Music Award for Best Songwriter, shares that “A lot of obsessing and writing in my head happens there. After I've started something, I figure it out while I'm walking. I need to kind of get in the trance, and somehow walking does that. It's this meditative space.
“There’s a sense of being on the edge, watching the sun sink into the water. It invites you to dream of distant places and I wanted a different horizon. As I grew older, I realized how much I needed to return. It’s about exploring different places and identities, only to discover who you truly are when you recognize where you belong.”
Suzie hadn’t intended to make a record journeying through important moments in her life, but when she came to look at the collection she had amassed for her eleventh release, she realised that a narrative arc had formed, of songs set in the past, and moving into the present. It reflects how she sees the creative process – “that you discover at the same time as writing”.
Of her effortlessly wide-ranging voice, Suzie says, “Vocally, I am searching to tell the story. To find a tenderness or a toughness in the delivery depending on the song's intention. It needs to be expressive above all. In fact, I decided to keep some vocals that are flawed because it felt fresh and vulnerable and raw, close to the heart instead of the head. Singing is always evolving for me; I am trying to find the best way to express the song so that it creates a world in the listener's mind.”
The first side opens with ‘The Prize’, a song that introduces the album’s sonic sphere with poetically trenchant lyrics. It blends intimate, dreamy Americana and folk, delicately arranged to complement Suzie’s bewitching, expressive voice that’s at once rich and fragile.
Lulled by finger-picked acoustic guitar and honeyed vocals, on the opener we meet a teenaged Suzie hanging out with “feral strays” and “runaways”, smoking pot and playing it cool. The imagery of a stone is a metaphor for a person’s edges worn down through the years, transforming youthful harshness into compassion and empathy, and Suzie proposes that it’s when we “lose our hearts” that we “win the prize”.
She reflects, “You realise that you gain something by losing your edge. When I was younger, I was much more black and white about things. Now I'm softer and less harsh.”
The rousing country and pedal steel guitar-fuelled ‘Cicadas’ heralds a shift into Suzie’s darker paths through teenagehood. And in the latter part of the album when we shift to the present, Suzie herself becomes a mother to a teenage daughter.
‘Sirens’, with its plaintive guitar and upright bass, tender vocals and harmonies, sees Suzie process the sadness wrought by a breakdown in communication and connection. It captures the desire to once again feel closeness to a child. ‘I’m Sorry and You’re Right’ continues to probe the challenges of motherhood – a stark contrast to the glossy Hollywood image we are fed. It’s her bravest song. Suzie sweetly sings her apology to her daughter for getting it wrong and causing wounds, as a light-hearted bossa nova rhythm and picked bass guitar, dreamy strings and electric keys add to the heartfelt confession.
After a few days of recording, Suzie’s daughter visited the studio, and while listening to a couple of the tracks, she started improvising along on the Wurlitzer electric piano – a poignant addition to ‘I’m Sorry and You’re Right’ as well as ‘Golden’.
“It was all totally by ear,” Suzie recalls. “Jim Bryson pressed record. I absolutely loved the hooky parts she created. They give such a vibey lift to the songs.”
“It was expressing a really hard moment in my relationship with my daughter, and I still get emotional about it,” Suzie says. “There’s the reality of being a parent, and there's the myth of being a parent. This is expressing the grief of being a parent – every day you're letting go of your image of yourself or the old relationship you've had with a child that may have been close, and then it shifts.”
‘The Wilds’ is a love song from a mother to her child as she launches her into the world, while asking to be remembered. Having once been the teenage girl yearning to leave home, Suzie creates a full circle to the album’s beginning. It's the bookend to a life chapter.
“In among the evergreens of your hazel eyes” she sings, painting a picture of these evergreens of the wild world being in the mind of someone who’s ready to fly the nest.
“You're being called by the external wilds, but you're also being called by the internal wilds. I used to be that. I was the one who was called and I left, and I wasn't aware of what it meant for my parents. I was just busy with my own journey. Now, I know so much more about what they lived through and about what life can be.” We can be glad for the experiences that we've accumulated, but it's also bittersweet.
“The song is so important for the whole album. It's where the title comes from. It's the next stage of life, of being a parent, where you're launching your child and you're happy and sad at the same time.”
The carefree days of young love and long-distance courtship are captured in the uplifting heartswell of ‘Juniper’. Melodic chimes of an electric 12-string and a soaring vocal melody evoke the summer joy of getting a “farmer’s tan”, listening to music, and hearts “exploding like a cherry bomb”.
It was written as a gift to Suzie’s husband on their 20th anniversary, but the other side of the romantic coin is offered in ‘Mount Shasta’, a full-frontal confrontation of the worn-out paths and negative patterns that can come with a long-term relationship. Yet all the while yearning for the love to still be there.
“It’s trying to change the conversation so that you don't have the same fight,” Suzie reflects. “When I'm in those moments, it just seems so devastating and destructive. And I can get into feeling like it's burning down and that I want to feed that fire.”
‘Golden’ declares the necessity of finding forgiveness, of shining through the bitterness and sweetness of a long relationship and contemplates mortality in our fragile, fleeting lives.
Over the gentle pulsing chords of an upright piano, ‘Real Estate’ yearns for love and old haunts, in a place where art and artists are squeezed out for the “gold” that is real estate. ‘College Street’ continues that wistful introspection. A warm and melancholy slice of Americana led by delicate arpeggiating banjo, it came to fruition on a writing retreat with Suzie’s friend Samantha Parton, of the Be Good Tanyas, on the one hand a contemplative tribute to the late-90s Toronto music scene, while painting a picture of a young musician’s dreams transformed by the advent of motherhood. *need to trim
“College Street was one of the places I would always go to play, and I would see other bands. There was this feeling of the moment of being ambitious and young, and then all of a sudden your life changes and you become a mother and everything feels so different and isolating, and your whole identity feels like it shifted. And so I'm going down the same street, but everything's different.”
Also woven into the story is her breast cancer diagnosis when her daughter was eight, written as a tale of renewal through music.
“Things changed from ‘I'm going to do music, and I'm going to be a star,’ into something much more personal. I think everybody has these moments in their lives where something happens, and they lose their voice, and they have to find it and learn to sing again.”
Her long-time collaborator Jim Bryson produced the record, augmenting the atmospheric intimacy of Suzie's evocative songs. Suzie credits him with pushing her out of her sonic box when he stepped in to produce her 2014 album Namedropper. He was also the one who encouraged her to tell her own stories instead of hiding behind a character.
His studio in the suburbs of Ottawa amplified the feel of the free outdoors, the wilds.
“Jim has a cool little studio in his backyard surrounded by cedar trees. It feels like a Scandinavian cabin. Some of the bed-tracks for Among the Evergreens were recorded here with Jim on bass, my husband Cam Giroux on drums and me on guitar and vocals. We wanted to just play the songs and see how they emerged with just this simple trio sitting in a room together playing music.”
A few months later, with a few more songs written, Suzie and Jim decided it was fitting that they record them in Vancouver at Chris Woudstra’s Emerson Street Studios, another suburban studio next to conifer-lined Deer Lake. They invited renowned Vancouver musicians Jeremy Holmes to play bass and Paul Rigby to play guitar, banjo and mandolin. Suzie nestled in a little booth under the stairs to play guitar and do scratch vocals while Cam played drums in the next room. Once bedtracks were set, Suzie did her final vocals in the main room. Jim then took the tracks back to Fixed Hinge to put the finishing touches of guitar, keyboards, and percussion. Finally, Winnipeg vocalist and songwriter Keri Latimer added her signature ethereal harmonies to complete the album.
It may have taken time to reveal herself, but as she heard the Grammy-nominated American folk singer-songwriter and author Mary Gauthier say, it’s when you write something and you're not sure if you should say it, that you should.
Suzie says, “There are times when it makes you shiver, or gives you this feeling of, ‘I'm not sure if I can touch that.’ When you know you're in unknown territory or there’s some important thing you need to say, or that people need to hear, it might be hard, but that's where you have to go to make it feel powerful. The emotion is within that space of uncertainty or risk taking.”
Among the Evergreens is an ode to self-reflection and the layers of life we accrue. This deeply touching record asks who we are after the loss of innocence, the near misses, the milestones and transformations. Suzie beckons you to walk among the evergreens with her.
Saying “So Long” to Oh Susanna
By Suzie Ungerleider
In 1995, taking my stage name from the famous Stephen Foster song seemed perfect. Oh Susanna was both a play on my own real name, Suzanne, as well as a way to hearken back to the great American folk songs that were a source of inspiration for my own music. Oh Susanna was a kind of shorthand to impress upon the listener’s mind, the time and place where I wanted them to travel - along the rusty old trainyards to the fields, mines and hills of mythical America. I promised them that, if they were willing, this journey was all possible by the power of my voice singing a lonesome song.
Taking the name Oh Susanna also made me feel that, suddenly, right before my feet, a red carpet magically unfurled, leading me to a stage lined by footlights and cloaked in a red velvet curtain. There, waiting for me, would be a lone microphone on a stand under a spotlight. All I had to do was act like Dorothy and follow the path to that wonderful place I longed to be, open my mouth and sing. You see, I had been so afraid to walk up onto that stage. I had buried my childhood dream of being a singer for over a decade, but now, I was finally inching my way along that imaginary red carpet.
Wearing this mask helped me show a face that sometimes felt more like me than who I was in everyday life. I could sing about other people’s experiences and yet express my own feelings through these songs. Although not always made explicit, I set these stories on the plains, in the mountains, in cities and wilds of the country of my birth: The United States of America. A place of great promise and dreams and, on the flipside, a place of hard-luck and desperation.
From 1995 – 2011, I wrote and recorded six albums that used melodies and imagery inspired by Americana. There was a twang and a heartache contained in my voice that I took from country, blues, old time and bluegrass music. But then something shifted. I began to listen less to American music and more to contemporary Canadian singer-songwriters, many of whom I knew. Tired of singing my own words and melodies, I recorded an album called Namedropper, a collection of songs written especially for me to sing by many of my talented Canadian compatriots. I admired how these writers wrote about their own lives and their homes, about things recognizable as Canadian.
Inspired, I embarked on writing a song cycle about myself as a young punk rocker coming of age in Vancouver. A Girl in Teen City, for me, was unique in that I was channeling my teenaged self and yet also looking back at it all from the place I am now. It was at this point that I started to feel the parts of myself integrating, my musical self and who I am when I am 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. Pretty soon Oh Susanna started to feel like a costume that no longer fit but that I had sewn myself into. Instead of being liberating, the name Oh Susanna started to feel like a constraint.
The song Oh Susanna was first published in 1848, when its author Stephen Foster was just 21. The United States of America was less than a hundred years old. The story of America is rife with turbulent contradiction: it is a land striving toward the ideal of freedom yet built on the backs of slaves. A country created by stealing land from the Indigenous peoples. So, in the land of the free, freedom is for some but not all. Justifying this subjugation of non-white people is an elaborate theory of Racism and White Supremacy. A product of its time and place, the threads of these wrongful beliefs are woven through the lines of the song Oh Susanna.
The song Oh Susanna is part of Minstrelsy, a tradition in which (usually) white actors perform as characters that are demeaning and dehumanizing to black people. Foster wrote the original lyrics in “plantation dialect” meaning in the manner of how Foster (a white person) thought a black person from the American South would speak. The racist nature of the song is most explicit, however, when a verse makes a joke of the death by electrocution of “five-hundred n-----“. This verse, of course, is rarely sung today and therefore not widely known. After the Civil War, Stephen Foster himself changed many of his “plantation dialect” songs into standard English.
Of course, when I decided to use song as my namesake, the words had long been changed and verses eliminated in order to “whitewash” its racism. Because of this, the song had no racist connotations for me. The song was just an American folksong that I learned in public school with sweet, longing, playful lyrics.
I don’t remember the exact time when I became aware of the original lyrics of the song Oh Susanna. I do remember that when I did I thought it was an ugly relic of the past, that it was what people used to think – like the changing of the lyrics, things had changed for the better, right? This past summer, after the killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and people rightly took to the streets to express their outrage at this happening again and again, it really became so obvious that we have a long way to go, that racism is still strongly embedded in our minds and our institutions and that it is only privileged white folks like me who can be blind to it even though we benefit from it and perpetuate it through our acceptance and silence.
Suddenly those racist lyrics felt absolutely current. Right here and right now, the lyrics conjure and make present violence against black people. This is the power of language. By saying something, you make it happen in the listener’s mind. It didn’t matter to me that not very many people know that the original lyrics to the song Oh Susanna are racist. I felt that if I were to continue to use the name Oh Susanna I would be passively accepting and perpetuating its racism.
In 2017, after writing a whole album of songs as a love letter to my home town Vancouver, I started realize how homesick I was. As a youth I wanted to leave that city so badly. Because my parents were from California and New York I never really thought I belonged in Vancouver. It was just a place I happened to land along with my parents. I believed I was to do what they did, go elsewhere and discover myself. I moved to Montreal to go to college and it was there that I started to unearth my dreams of being a singer. Scared shitless, I stepped onstage for the first time to sing covers at a coffee house at Gertrude’s, the basement bar located in the McGill Student Union building. The small crowd went wild and I was ecstatic. I started to dream again.
After college, back in Vancouver, I sang a few more times in public and wrote a few songs. Then I made a little demo tape that caught the attention of the music industry. I was lured to Toronto and met musicians who loved the Carter Family and Hank Williams as much as I did. They understood this music I loved and made it a living thing by playing their own version of it. So in 1997, I decided to move to the big smoke where live roots music was oozing out of the doorways of The Horseshoe Tavern, Ted’s Wrecking Yard, The El Mocambo, C’est What, Holy Joe’s and The Rivoli (just to name a few). In that city, I felt seen as a fully-fledged singer-songwriter, I was a young upstart, but a serious one who went by the name Oh Susanna.
For the next twenty years, I made so many friends and connections from living a musical life. I gained a husband and a child all by being in the community of Canadian musicians. I was lucky to finally be what I had dreamed of as a kid, someone whose life centred around music and musical expression.
Then all of a sudden it was music, specifically A Girl in Teen City, that made me look closely at who I was before that musical life. Music led me to re-visit and reflect upon the place that made me who I was. Vancouver. Writing those songs allowed me feel how much that salt water was in my blood and how those mountains that watch over you no matter where you go were my protectors. I was a prodigal daughter, who had lived and learned and grown through her travels and trials, and I had to come home.
I have now been back in Vancouver for a year and a half. I am still following my path but this time it is one where I am truly integrating my musical being with who I am, finally seeing that music is inside of me and not in some alter ego. Believe me, I have loved being Oh Susanna, she is exciting, dark, funny, charming but I am now recognizing that was actually me all along, that it was Suzie Ungerleider who was all those magical things, I just didn’t let myself see it that way. 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. Now that I have grown, I am ready to shed that exoskeleton. It once protected me but I need to take it off so I can be all of who I am.