A Few Words with Agnostic Tunesmith Susan Werner
The first time you hear Susan Werner’s “Probably Not,” from her 2007 album The Gospel Truth, you would be justified in thinking that all it does is cleverly invert a call-and-response hymn into an atheist anthem:
Is there a god above?
Is there eternal love?
Probably not
But if you listen to the whole thing, you’ll discover she’s hedging her bets.
But what if I've been wrong
And God's been up there all along
And He hands me a heavenly crown
Would I dare to turn Him down?
Probably not
“Get comfortable with uncertainty,” the Iowa-born, Philly-based singer-songwriter tells me. “It’s your friend. I’m willing to be surprised, especially if it’s a nice God.”
Many of Werner’s best songs, even the meditative and heartbreaking ones, have punch lines. “Humor goes a long way,” she says. “When we laugh, we agree.”
It’s not just about putting out songs that listeners enjoy. Bringing people together through music matters to her. “There is plenty of anxiety afoot,” she says. “We’ve stopped talking to our neighbors. But if disaster hits your household, those are the people who show up to help.”
Music has been a constant companion for Werner. At five years old, she learned three guitar chords from her brother. Soon after she switched instruments, the result of anticipating the notes while reading the scrolls as they were fed into the machinery of her grandparents’ player piano.
On albums like I Can’t Be New (2004) and Kicking the Beehive (2011), she balances wordplay and sentiment in a distinctive style that draws upon folk, jazz, and mellow 70s sounds. Her latest, NOLA, is dominated by piano played in the “junker” style—a term that possibly derives from Champion Jack Dupree’s 1941 recording “Junker Blues.” It’s a wobbly, under-the-influence sound. She tells clubs not to tune the piano before her performances.
Werner dutifully tours for each release, usually solo for economic reasons, though she confesses that these intimate shows can be a little draining. “I’m lucky to have this be my job,” she says, remembering a classmate from grad school, now a professional opera singer, who went to Club Fez in New York to see her perform and confessed afterwards, “I wish I was doing what you’re doing. You get to create your own material.”
A few years back, Werner’s career nearly took an unexpected turn when Broadway producers commissioned her to compose songs for a musical based on Bull Durham. “It was a challenge to build out a structure that combined musical feeling, character, and story,” she remembers. “The acting, singing, and especially the choreography really brought it alive.” The death of one of the producers seems to have permanently derailed any chances of Bull Durham coming to Broadway, but experience of collaborating has left her hungry for more. When asked what she would do with the money from a Genius Grant (are you listening, MacArthur Foundation?), she immediately says that she’d hire musicians to take with her on the road. “Having someone to interact with musically is one way I define success,” she asserts.
This might seem like obvious point, but songwriting without performance is at least half unfinished. For Werner, backup musicians (or better yet, fellow musicians) allow her to get at “what is below the words. They excite the audience and deepen the impact.”
Just as important, having another musician onstage relieves her of the between-song banter—something she excels at but has grown tired of. “I wish I didn’t have to talk,” she says. “Music is supposed to be different from how we spend the rest of the day. We need more music and less speech.”
Werner continues, oxymoronically eloquent—and in a surprising vein for someone who first captivated me with her “evangelical agnosticism”:
“It’s the steam in the kettle, the mystery in the temple. Something happens in music that is divine.”
-Mark Swartz
