Oh Susanna is a country girl with inhibitions, but her music has the rootsiness of a Woody Guthrie, writes Tony Clayton-Lea
'Oh Suzie Ungerleider" doesn't have the same ring to it as "Oh Susanna". But then neither does the literal translation of Ungerleider's surname: starving, hungry person. Sitting opposite your correspondent in Dublin's rather swish Village venue (next door to Whelans, where she will be playing later that night), Ungerleider doesn't look like the kind of person who doesn't know where her next meal is coming from. Resolutely middle-class (her father is a professor of sociology and education in Vancouver) but fired up by the virtually constant spate of social inadequacies she has witnessed over the years, Ungerleider's singer/songwriting schtick - such as it can be described - is influenced by spartan themes of misery, regret, near-to-death experiences and why-live attitudes; the important, happy subjects that are grist to the mill for any singer/songwriter worth their bag of salt.
For someone who is essentially a folk singer, Ungerleider has one hell of a pedigree as a punk rocker. The way she tells it, the underground music scene in Vancouver was strong, tensile and eclectic. The community was also compact, which meant that most music genres were mixed without fear of cynicism or snobbery. Initial listening habits included Dead Kennedys, Sex Pistols, The Clash and Black Flag.
"I always preferred the melodic stuff, not just thrash," she says. "The melodic stuff led into more rootsy bands such as The Blasters. The fact that punk very much had a social conscience and said things that tied in with what the likes of Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie and his father, Woody, were saying also helped me to see the light."
Yet the teenage Ungerleider lived vicariously through these bands. Too shy to perform in front of a crowd, she began singing in her Montreal University dorm room. When she discovered people listening intently, instead of throwing pillows at her, she graduated to city-based coffee-house gigs, from where she covered songs by the likes of Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash and the Rolling Stones. From her early 20s, in the early 1990s, she began to write songs, but declined to play them for an audience until she reached the age of 25.
As it always should, persistence paid off when a Los Angeles-based radio presenter broadcast a demo of Ungerleider's that her sister had mailed out 12 months previously. The response was such that she was able to come out from under the weight of not knowing what to do.
"I knew I wanted to do this but I didn't know how," she explains. "I needed that break, that initial recognition, and to have people take it seriously was a huge difference for me. Sometimes, teenagers just get out there and do it but I had buckets of inhibitions about it and was really more self-conscious than most."
Meanwhile, the metallic thrust of punk was making way for the stringed moroseness of roots-based folk. Within a short time of starting to write her own material, Ungerleider became quite obsessed with old-time folk recordings.
"I wanted to evoke that starkness and darkness, the lonesome voice in the hills," she says. "Of course, now there's a resurgence of that kind of music but at that time in the mid-1990s it seemed quite natural to sing it. Part of me thought I was singing dead music, but now it's quite a strong movement. It was interesting to feel that I was alone in doing what I did, yet for that feeling to disappear when other people started doing it.
"I've always heard music that way - always the voice first. I came from it in how it emotionally affected you, and then how the lyrics reinforced the initial instinctual reaction. Now it's more of a conscious thing, but in the early days it was music that meant something to me and I just wanted to evoke a similar feeling. How did I do that? I just stumbled around and figured it out for myself."
Unlike other singer/songwriters working in the skeletal framework of lo-fi roots (these include US acts such as Gillian Welch and Will Oldham, Ireland's Goodtime John and Barry McCormack), Ungerleider has a hard time being willingly autobiographical. While in songs she says she is as much herself as her emotional state, she needs to put that self into a third person character.
Writing about sex, by all accounts, is the closest thing to being off-limits to her. Is she a prude? "My friends say I am."
She says she is amazed and impressed by someone like Lucinda Williams, whose sexuality is clear in her material and which often makes Ungerleider blush (which she actually does before my eyes, as if on cue).
"There's a license to be able to do that when you write songs or perform - it opens the door to expressing yourself in a way that you would never be able to do otherwise. But I don't know if I've ever said to myself there's anything I shouldn't write about. It's a much more deeply self-censored thing that I don't even know I'm doing."
What she is perhaps more aware of is her measure of progress over the past four years. Her recently released album, Oh Susanna, is, if not her crossover record, then certainly one by which she is becoming better recognised. Persistence once again is paying off.
"I want what I do to be good," she reasons, "and I guess I measure that by whether or not I'm moved by it, or whether it brings pictures into my mind. I like to evoke some kind of mood and somehow transport the listener somewhere else. I used to be a lot more precious about it, but now I'm taking a page from, say, the Stones or Wilco or The Band - music that has imagery, a story. Sometimes music can be too intricate and fragile. My own music now is a little bit less extreme.
"I'm a lot happier now, too! I'm living out the very thing I wanted, and although it's never like you thought it would be it's still something that makes me a lot more settled. I question it, but I need to do it. I was kinda floundering, whereas now I have a way to express myself. And even if it's expressing ambivalence or dissatisfaction, it's still great. The riddle is how to express those things without coming across as sappy or trite."
Oh Susanna is released by Hot Records