22 Apr Suzie Ungerleider releases new stop motion video for ‘Baby Blues’
Following Suzie Ungerleider’s recent announcement of a name change and new album, ‘My Name is Suzie Ungerleider’, an accompanying music video has today been released for the lead single ‘Baby Blues’. The beautiful and evocative video by Christine Fellows uses a labour-intensive process of collage and stop motion animation.
The two-time Canadian Juno Award nominee Suzie Ungerleider officially opens a new chapter of her already distinguished and highly successful career with the August 13 release of her new album entitled My Name is Suzie Ungerleider. It’s her first since the artist formerly known as Oh Susanna announced that she would now record and perform under her birth name.
Bursting with trademark evocative melodies and trenchant lyrics, it’s the tenth solo studio album by the American-born, Canadian-raised artist revered for such landmark records as Johnstown, Sleepy Little Sailor and A Girl in Teen City. The decision to say “so long” to her long-time moniker Oh Susanna represents her recognition that the “exciting, dark, funny, charming” character that she thought was Oh Susanna was actually Suzie Ungerleider all along. “So here I am, leaving behind the trappings of a persona that gave me the courage to climb up onstage and reveal what is in my heart,” she reflects. “It once protected me, but I need to take it off so I can be all of who I am.”
Suzie said, “Christine Fellows made me a video by cutting up hundreds of images to make a dreamworld for my new song Baby Blues.”
Fellow Canadian folk-pop singer-songwriter Christine Fellows on her creative process, “Before I made the video, I listened to Baby Blues over and over and over again until it played on a loop in my head all day. I dreamed the song, sat at my work table, flipping through pages and pages of images with my Xacto knife as I listened. The first image that revealed itself to me was the starry sky and the landscape, and everything else followed from there. To me, paper collage and stop-motion offer a unique way of connecting with songs, underlining elements of the rhythm and lyrics and dynamics, taking the song apart and putting it back together from a visual perspective. It gives me an opportunity for a deep listen. It’s also really fun. I’m so grateful for the opportunity to spend time with Baby Blues. It’s a perfect song. I hope you love it as much as I do.”
The new album is introduced by the characteristically searing ‘Baby Blues,’ a song about how the traumatic events we witness when we’re young can haunt and indeed shape our older selves. It’s a deep subject with an upbeat punchline. “Like ghosts,” she says, “sometimes you just need to just sit with them, feel their power, and, because they feel seen, they release their hold on you for a little while.” Elsewhere, the album depicts an older and wiser artist and mother sometimes writing for her daughter, both at the time of her dramatically premature birth and miraculous survival on the achingly pretty ‘Summerbaby’ and, now a teenager herself, courageously dealing with her own identity on the intimate ‘Hearts,’ on which mountains of blue watch over her.
Now based again in her home town of Vancouver, she made My Name is Suzie Ungerleider with producer Jim Bryson, whose assured touch amplifies the atmospheric dreamscapes contained in Suzie’s reflective, intimate songbook.
