Twenty years later, Oh Susanna’s Johnstown is a different album in a transformed music industry

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Twenty years later, Oh Susanna’s Johnstown is a different album in a transformed music industry GlobeArts

Although the record is 20 years old, Suzie Ungerleider still gets requests to play material from her debut album,. It surprises her every time. Not because the songs are old or aren’t any good, but because they’re disturbing. Named after a town infamous for a devastating 19th-century flooding, the album evokes a desperate Appalachian mood. The title track is a murder ballad about a prostitute killer.is her favourite song,” says Ungerleider, who performs under the name Oh Susanna.

Ungerleider, 49, is speaking in a west-end bakery, around the corner from where she recorded the album with Peter Moore at his studio on Beaconsfield Street. The area has gentrified – the bakery seems like a relic from the near past. “I used to bring Peter tarts each day on my way to the studio,” she recalls, sipping mint tea.

The album took six weeks to record. Today, someone as new and unproven as Ungerleider was then probably wouldn’t be able to afford a month and a half with a producer such as Moore, who recorded the landmark 1987 Cowboy Junkies record. Moore famously used a single ambient microphone connected to a Beta cassette deck on that church-recorded album.

Ungerleider shakes her head at the thought of being an upstart in 2019. Blue Rodeo’s Bazil Donovan and Bob Egan played on her debut album. An unproven artist today wouldn’t be able to afford their service. Ungerleider herself might not have the money for them now, for that matter. She has an audience built up over the years, but still relies on subsidies to make a go of it, as many independent musicians do.

 

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