My introduction to the music of Susan Werner was in the fall of 1999 when a friend who produced a local acoustic music radio show lent me copies of Time Between Trains and Last of the Good Straight Girls. I was instantly enchanted with the sincerity and wit that Werner brings to her music. Her last album was a thematic collection of songs that sound like they are from the '20s and '30s, but are all original and new. Recently, Werner made available for download a song she describes as an alternative national anthem. "This is a song that takes the National Anthem and turns it on his head," says Werner. "It's Francis Scott Key meets Arlo Guthrie." I had the pleasure of speaking with Werner about the song a few weeks ago.
I wanted to start off by talking about "My Strange Nation," the song that you have posted on your website. What were you thinking about while you were writing this song?
I wrote in January 2005 after wandering around for a month or two after the November election wondering, "What? What just happened? What was that?" I came to the conclusion that the country had become unrecognizable to me. I was walking - a lot of songs show up when I walk to my office and back - the melody came to me that sounded like a trumpet call. The melody sounded like an anthem somehow, with the wide open prairies, the west, Aaron Copland or... think of the theme to Bonanza. [laughter] That type of melody showed up with the words "my strange nation" attached and the rest was pretty evident. This was some kind of anthem that would acknowledge my ambivalent feelings about the country I live in and the country that I love.
Were you nervous about sharing this song with other people?
Yes. I felt nervous about it. Whenever I feel something strongly in a song, so really strongly that it comes from a very personal place, I wonder if anyone else is going to have felt the same thing. Sometimes as a songwriter you have a sense that, "oh, this song is going to belong to more people than me." I wasn't completely sure about this song. In the most foolhardy of debuts, I played it in front of 3,000 people at the Ann Arbor Folk Festival hoping it would work but not real sure, but thinking, "Maybe this is the right town." It turned out to be dead-on. It was a total smash success and let me know that I was not alone and in fact there were 3,000 other people that shared my opinion. That was very encouraging. I could hardly sleep that night.
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