Susan Werner grew up on a farm in the “pretty part” of Iowa, she says. That is, five miles southwest of Manchester, where there are hills and trees. She picked up the guitar when she was five. She graduated with a master’s degree in voice from Temple University in Philadelphia.
“I sang opera,” Werner says. But that didn’t work out professionally. “I wasn’t good enough.” She relegated that talent to a party trick: “Nothing livens up a gathering like somebody belting a really loud noise out the front of her face.”
Then she went back to the guitar. “I had been writing songs since I was a kid,” she says. “But I never really paid attention to it.” She started performing at open mics around Philadelphia. Now, decades later, Werner says she has “too many” albums out, in genres ranging from gospel to folk.
Werner will perform songs from albums new and old at Eastham’s First Encounter Coffeehouse on Saturday, Nov. 16.
Her inspirations, she says, range from comedic, to political, to deeply personal. In recent years, she’s recorded albums she calls travelogues. There’s NOLA (inspired by New Orleans), The Birds of Florida, and An American in Havana.
Werner has lived in Chicago for the last 24 years. “The travelogues are efforts to understand a place that I don’t know,” she says. “Though I may have left these projects with more questions than answers.” Each album is influenced by the musical culture of the area — NOLA is jazzy, The Birds of Florida has a laid-back, beachy groove, An American in Havana features Cuban instrumentation and rhythms.
“To go to each place is to be open to a story,” says Werner. “It’s to leave the comfort of your living room and put yourself where you don’t know people and they don’t know you. It’s to find your way — and maybe find something beautiful.”
Her latest album, released this year, is Halfway to Houston, with 11 songs. It’s a Texas travelogue. “I asked my Texas friends to draw a map of the state on a cocktail napkin and pick five places they thought I should see,” Werner says. “They all said, ‘Go to El Paso, go to West Texas, go to Alpine, go to Marfa.’ ”
The first song, “Halfway to Houston,” originated in Werner’s nephew forgetting his tie after a family gathering: “He’ll be halfway to Houston before he remembers!” said the songwriter’s mother-in-law. Werner remembers liking the alliteration. The song isn’t about forgetfulness, though. It’s a Texas roadhouse-style ballad about a lovers’ quarrel. Werner’s vocals are backed up by her band — “a stable of musicians back in Philadelphia,” she says, most of whom she knows from music school. “They play their rear ends off,” she says. “They can play anything.”
Her setlist at First Encounter will include many songs from Halfway to Houston, Werner says, as well as songs from her 2017 album Eight Unnecessary Songs. They’re “songs that have no redeeming social value whatsoever,” she says. On smaller, more intimate stages, Werner has found there’s a place for them. They include “What Did You Do to Your Face?” and “Pabst Blue Ribbon.” She quotes Oscar Wilde: “Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.”
That doesn’t mean her songs are never serious. The new album’s ninth song, “Should’ve Followed Through,” also deals with romance, but this time in a “one that got away” form. While on a long drive through Texas, Werner remembered how a long time ago she met a musician at the Cactus Café in Austin. They had a brief connection but never followed through.
“I’m at a point in life where some people I had intense feelings for are starting to disappear,” Werner says. “Some of them are beginning to die. It brings up feelings of appreciation but also closes the chapter on anything you might have imagined happening.” That conundrum seemed like a worthy experiment for a song, she says.
“Sisters” the seventh song on the album, is a duet with Tish Hinojosa, a folk singer from San Antonio. Together, Werner and Hinojosa wrote the song about the relationship between Ciudad Juárez, in Mexico, and El Paso. “I went up to a scenic overlook in El Paso,” says Werner. From that height, she saw the Rio Grande and the border wall separating the two cities. “It was winding through like a spine,” she says. “I thought to myself, the spine belongs to both. The idea of twins came to mind.”
“Sisters” is a softer song, like a lullaby. The lyrics begin like the start of a story: “Back to back in the desert sand,” sings Hinojosa, “that’s how they sleep in the evening. Two twin girls grew up hand in hand, with their lives interweaving.”
“The cities were intertwined long before a border existed,” says Werner. “To go there is to see a weaving of economies and cultures and human beings that is really powerful.”
Storytelling in music, Werner says, is her specialty. To tell a story through song takes “experience plus imagination,” she says. “And authentic feeling. What was the feeling that got you into this in the first place? Then keep that handy as your imagination fills in the rest.”
Road Trip
The event: A performance by singer-songwriter Susan Werner
The time: Saturday, Nov. 16; doors open at 7 p.m., show at 7:30
The place: First Encounter Coffeehouse, 220 Samoset Rd., Eastham
The cost: $35 at firstencounter.org
