Oh Susanna brings sound of Vancouver nostalgia with her on B.C. tour
New album is set to backdrop of 1980s Vancouver
The sound of nostalgia can be heard through the music of Suzie Ungerleider's new album A Girl in Teen City.
The Toronto-based singer-songwriter, better known by her stage name Oh Susanna, set the album's tracks to the backdrop of 1980s Vancouver, where she spent her teenage years.
Starting Saturday, she's taking her nostalgic sound on a cross-B.C. tour.
"I realized that the main character of the whole song cycle is basically me as a teenager," said Ungerleider during a conversation with CBC's Margaret Gallagher on The Early Edition.
"But also that Vancouver itself was kind of a teenager."
Ungerleider said the city's adolescence was in the '80s because while Vancouver wasn't a small, back-water town — though she and her friends thought of it that way — it still hadn't grown into the cosmopolitan metropolis it is today.
Walking a fine line between tones of teenage melancholy and the retrospective that only years of living can bring, Ungerleider said the album's music showcases feelings of both adolescence and adulthood.
From the first song, Flashlights, you're guided on a youthful yet serious journey, beginning with sneaky and amorous midnight excursions accompanied by the cool boy up the street, to ending with infamous Expo 86 antics in the album's finale My Old Vancouver.
The Downtown Eastside, Davie Street, the Commodore Ballroom and various other staples are visited along the way.
"If I were writing these songs way back then I would be all moody and dark and irritable," said Ungerleider, laughing.
"We thought and felt certain things ... But at the same time, we didn't realize how interesting and how cool the little things that we did were."
"Because we were convinced we were living a super-boring life in Vancouver, but now I look back, and I look fondly at my youth."
Oh Susanna plays at the Massey Theatre in New Westminster, B.C., on Saturday, before moving on to Victoria, Vernon and Revelstoke.
With files from The Early Edition and Margaret Gallagher