Seattlest Interview: Susan Werner

Did you expect this sort of reaction, or were you just sort of hoping people heard it?

I didn’t know what would come back to me when I put out this record, but I did know that I wanted to approach gospel music from the perspective of a non-believer. I suspected that either I was a crazy genius in doing this, or I was just crazy. Either it would be uniquely successful and wonderful or it would just fall flat and collapse because it was too strange an idea. I’ve found that there were so many more people than I could ever have suspected that have had the exact same struggles with the church and the same attachment to the church. If I didn’t care about the church, I never would’ve written this project. I just would’ve moved to Eugene with the rest of them.

Has there been a marked difference in how Americans react and how Canadians react?

Yeah Canadians…they’re so sweet. They’re like our little country cousins. They’ve been interested in this project as part of their effort to understand the crazy Americans, how do they tick, what part does religion play in the American psyche. We are strange to them. I had many of them come up to me at some festivals this summer and say to me, "Now I understand a little better my cousins in Buffalo." [laughs] Really they said something exactly like that. "We go on vacation down there, we love your country, but this part of it is fascinating and strange."

Well, it’s become so much a part of our International face. A lot of our politicians now, even the Democratic field, have to answer the church questions, you know, and [they] have to come up with some sort of statement of faith in order to be taken seriously as a representative.

Yeah, however I do think there’s an interesting shift in the field of candidates this time around. This time it’s the Democrats putting their faith forward. Where on the other side, you have folks like Giuliani and Fred Thompson who just said the other day that he only goes to church occasionally. McCain is no model Christian. And I think that’s refreshing. I think it’s an interesting shift, I think it also shows how the power of the symbols and iconography of Christianity take up a broad middle of the country. It’s not just explicitly the domain of the Right. That people talk about faith and conscience and character, values and they use Christian terms to describe those things, whether they lean left or right. To me the church is a permanent part of the American landscape, as permanent as the Grand Canyon and the redwoods. It’s here to stay. It’ll be here a generation from now, it’ll be here five generations from now. And I think to befriend the church and its turns and how it holds sway is to accept the country you’re living in, accept the terrain. It goes with the weather, right. If this is going to be the weather, you may as well learn how to drive in the snow.

Since [releasing this record], have you been writing anything new, or are you still focused on these songs right now?

No, I have writing projects going on. Whichever one comes together first, becomes the next recording. I’ve become interested in the blues. The blues offer an outlet for frustration, I like that. You hit a point in midlife where you run into a few limitations, and it comes as a terrible shock. You know, your own mortality, the limitations of your talent, the limitations of money, how much money can buy you, how much you’re making, how much money you will make and if you make much money, the limitations of how much satisfaction the money can bring. Money and mortality, those are always there in the blues. And, sure, "My baby done left me." We’ve all heard "My baby done left me," but it’s something about mortality and money, lots of blues songs about money. And I have a feeling we’re headed toward a recession of some kind. The credit crunch, the real estate market, bankruptcy and foreclosures...a lot of people feel like they’re living on the edge. [There’s] no sense of security in this country, I mean retirement, healthcare…these are all ongoing concerns for most people. But then there’s the fact that those are sort of lofty terms. I mean "sub-prime" is easy to rhyme, but…[laughs]

You did just there.

[laughs] Yeah, but something fundamental about concerns about money and mortality…it’s bad news. The blues is there when you’re feeling bad about these things.

So is that something you think you’ll do—another songbook sort of project?

Well, yeah, maybe. We’ll see. One of the challenges about the blues, personally, for me, is to render authentic performance, to write an authentic song in that tradition. The blues catalog as we know it was written by men and women who never finished high school and suffered from a variety of physical ailments and hard lives, frankly. So how do you sing the blues if you live on the 11th floor of a high-rise? [laughs] I have to figure out how to do that and make it believable, so that’s one of the challenges of this project, and I don’t know if I’m going to succeed with it. It’s one of the things that’s interesting me right now.

Another thing is writing a show, a musical for the stage. It’s a lot of work, like writing two records worth of material. It takes years to do it. But I think it’d be thrilling to bring characters you care about to life. To help them express something essential, something transcendent. The theater’s wonderful and the theater’s a place that rewards songwriters who can put 12, 15, 20 songs together with a common theme. The music doesn’t become such that it’s all about one track, one porned-up, hyped-up three-minute scream-a-thon. Unless you have the six-pack abs to match, it’s almost impossible to compete in the world of pop music. But the world of theater rewards a songwriter’s ability to assemble 15 tunes that all run together. And also theater has an historical component. You can bring historic characters to life, it can take you to another time. I like those challenges. I’m interested in those types of things.

Do you think you’d write the whole thing, or you’d get a playwright [with whom to collaborate]?

One of the wonderful things about writing a show, composing music for a show, is that the idea for the show, most of it, comes from someone else and somewhere else. You don’t have to generate all the content yourself. There’s a character in, let’s say I was going to write a musical about…let me think for a moment who would be fun to write about…Gertrude Stein’s not a lot of fun, but there’s been some treatment of her life…but let’s say Simone de Beauvoir, let’s try that. Let’s say I’m going to write a musical about Simone de Beauvoir. Well, the great thing is that she already lived, all this stuff already happened to her. I don’t have to come up with the character, I don’t even have to come up with the events, necessarily. And a book writer, someone who has...that expertise, puts that character’s life and the episodes of their life in an order that has some sort of plot to it, direction to it…a trajectory to it, a dramatic arc. As a composer, I can contribute some ideas about that arc and what episodes stand out to me, but my job is really to write songs that move the story along and express that character in larger-than-life terms. And that’s a really interesting talent to me. I go to shows and make notes on how the story moves, how the music moves the story along and what succeeds to me, what doesn’t succeed.

So, changing the subject, this [interview is for a blog that’s] about Seattle. So I’m wondering, do you look forward to coming to Seattle when you come here? Are there things here you like to do?

I was just there at the Gig Harbor festival in August. I have friends who live in southwest Seattle. I took the ferry to Vashon Island on a beautiful afternoon. It’s so wonderful, so beautiful. I’m not the first person to say that, I realize, but I get it. I get why you move there and stay there. I get it. So Seattle is glamorous, it’s physically glamorous. But, it’s also repressed in a kind of charming way, which makes me love Seattle. People don’t honk their cars. They just sit there and take it, which makes me love them, because it makes me wonder about the secret lives of the people of Seattle. They just sort of grit their teeth and smile. They have a lot of coffee and they seem really happy, but underneath it, they have separate feelings. And that’s interesting to me. That’s the kind of place writers want to hang out.

Well it’s different…I grew up in the South, which is a different sort of thing. Down there it’s Southern hospitality that comes from a different place: the grin and bear it attitude.

Well that’s why I think this blues record is going to be successful in Seattle, because it’s not a culture that encourages you to express frustration.