| Intro | Canadian singer-songwriter | |
| Is |
Singer Songwriter Musician Guitarist |
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| From | Canada | |
| Type | Music | |
| Gender | female | |
| Birth | 1971, Northampton, USA | |
| Age: | 49 years | |
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| Instruments: |
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Suzanne Elizabeth Ungerleider, who writes and performs under the name Oh Susanna, is an American-Canadian alternative country singer-songwriter from Vancouver, British Columbia, currently based in Toronto.
Career
Ungerleider chose to perform under the name Oh Susanna rather than her given name as a means of keeping her private and professional lives separate. She initially wanted to be a somewhat theatrical performer. “I had this notion, okay I’m going to try and wear these vintage clothes and I play this old Stella guitar, which is like this mail order guitar that blues guys used to play,” said Ungerleider. She played her first show under the name Oh Susanna at the Railway Club in Vancouver in July 1995, and released her first independent recording, a seven-song EP, in 1997. At approximately this time, she decided to relocate to Toronto after attending Blue Rodeo’s Stardust Picnic festival. In 1999, she released her full-length debut, Johnstown, and toured Canada and the United States with fellow musicians Veda Hille and Kinnie Starr, in what they dubbed the “Scrappy Bitches Tour”.
At the 19th Genie Awards in 1999, she won the Genie Award for Best Original Song, for her song “River Blue” from the film The Fishing Trip.
She has since released six more albums, Sleepy Little Sailor (2001), Oh Susanna (2003), Short Stories (2007), Soon the Birds (2011), Namedropper (2014), and A Girl in Teen City (2017). Her recordings have featured guest musicians Luke Doucet, Justin Rutledge, Burke Carroll, Bazil Donovan and Jim Cuddy of Blue Rodeo, Ruth Moody of The Wailin’ Jennys, and members of Weeping Tile.
Of the inspiration for her songs, Ungerleider has said “A lot of that stuff comes from other people who have told me things. Some of it’s totally made up”. She also says that her Western Canadian upbringing has inspired some of her lyrics.
In 2012, Ungerleider announced that she intended to obtain Canadian citizenship. Plans to begin recording a new album were sidetracked in 2013 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. However, she has undergone treatment for that, and released the album, Namedropper on October 7, 2014.
Her latest project “A Girl in Teen City” is an autobiographical depiction of herself in her youth “in search of identity, “falling in love, getting drunk, having her heart broken, hanging out with friends in bedrooms, basements and parking lots, sneaking into shows in burnt out warehouses, watching the waves, walking home over bridges and railroad tracks in all that endless rain.””
Personal life
Ungerleider was born in Northampton, Massachusetts but raised in Vancouver. Her father, Charles, is a professor at Vancouver’s University of British Columbia. She lives near Toronto’s High Park with husband/drummer Cam Giroux and their son who was born in 2005.
Discography
- Oh Susanna EP (1997)
- Johnstown (1999)
- Sleepy Little Sailor (2001)
- Oh Susanna (2003)
- Short Stories (2007)
- Soon the Birds (2011)
- Namedropper (2014)
- A Girl in Teen City (2017)
Contributions
- The Fishing Trip (film) (1998, Mongrel Media) – “River Blue”
- Maybe This Christmas Too? (2003, Nettwerk) – “Go Tell It On the Mountain”
- Great Canadian Song Quest (2009, CBC Records/iTunes) – “Tough City”