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Playlist: Rich Reardin's Portfolio

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Beyond a Song: Barbara Bergin (Part 1)

From ISOAS Media | Part of the Beyond a Song series | 01:00:00

Host Rich Reardin talks with Austin, Texas singer/songwriter Barbara Bergin . This is part 1 of a 2 part interview.

Bergin_prx_1_small BARBARA BERGIN  (PART 1): PUBLISHED ON PRX  7  / 17  / 2020 - BEYOND A SONG originates in BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA and is sponsored by:
THE BLUEBIRD NIGHTCLUBREAL TO REELS RECORDING STUDIOAND VISITBLOOMINGTON.COM

Beyond a Song host Rich Reardin interviews Austin, Texas  singer/songwriter Barbara Bergin.
I’m Barbara Bergin, orthopedic surgeon by day, and you can occasionally find me gigging after hours in Austin, Texas, the Live Music Capital of the World! Bought my first stick, a Gibson B-25 Student Guitar, in 1968, with babysitting dollars. Back then I was earning a fat fifty cents an hour, so I would have to say that’s been one of the best investments I have ever made. You might think that since I started playing guitar when I was in the ninth grade, by now I should be quite the hand. But like many girls of my day, we were more interested in hanging with the boys, and the guitar was just a ticket to sitting at the table. I did learn how to play G, C and D, and was on my way to playing all the cool folk tunes you can play with those three chords, like Sloop John B.
College, med school and orthopedic residency slowed me down a little. But with one of my first paychecks, I promptly purchased a sweet Martin D-38, and that lovely guitar set me on the path to Travis finger-picking, and learning a few more chords.
Despite being primarily a left-brainer, and honing the scientific skills of my career, music and story-telling have always been a passion. In 2007 I published my first novel, ENDINGS (Sunstone Press). I won a few awards and sold a bunch of copies. Didn’t quit my day job though. But second and third novels are in the works, along with my non-fiction work-in-progress, Sit Like A Man (S.L.A.M.)
I have a pretty healthy case of stage fright, so I was surprised when songs started coming to my head, along with the chords to back them up. If you write songs, I guess they must be sung, so I got involved with a music school in Austin called Girl Guitar. It’s based primarily on the concept of forming band classes for women, and they’re taught only by women. The six -week class sessions are followed by public performances, and I was on my way to performing my own songs. Dealing with stage fright is also a work-in-progress, but since I’m not quitting my day job, it’s not too worrisome.
Since I’m a story-teller, writing old-timey ballads, bluegrass and folk tunes just seemed to come naturally to me. The owner of Girl Guitar, Mandy Rowden, and many of her students are aspiring and accomplished musicians in their own right, and publishing music and cutting CDs is a happening thing around there. Always wanting to try something new, I recorded my first CD, Blood Red Moon, in 2018. I had the help of one of my teachers, Jane Gillman, who is also my producer, and my sound engineer, Merel Bregante. I’m so happy with my product. I’m sure more are to come.
In my spare time, I run a medical self-help blog: drbarbarabergin.com.  As a cowgirl and rancher, I am also an experienced western equestrienne, in the sport of Reining. As of this summer, my new horse, Sneakers and I are in sync and looking toward regional championships in August.
And did I say I’m still not quitting my day job?

Musical selections include: Whistlin' Train, Blood Red Moon, My Life's Good (Because I Don't Live in the City), Possum's in the Corn, Three Eggs in my Apron, Warm Place, Like Father Like Son

For more information, visit BEYOND A SONG.COM 

Beyond a Song: Barbara Bergin (Part 2)

From ISOAS Media | Part of the Beyond a Song series | 01:00:00

Host Rich Reardin talks with Austin, Texas singer/songwriter Barbara Bergin . This is part 2 of a 2 part interview.

Bergin_prx_2_small BARBARA BERGIN  (PART 2): PUBLISHED ON PRX  7  / 25  / 2020 - BEYOND A SONG originates in BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA and is sponsored by:
THE BLUEBIRD NIGHTCLUBREAL TO REELS RECORDING STUDIOAND VISITBLOOMINGTON.COM

Beyond a Song host Rich Reardin interviews Austin, Texas  singer/songwriter Barbara Bergin.
I’m Barbara Bergin, orthopedic surgeon by day, and you can occasionally find me gigging after hours in Austin, Texas, the Live Music Capital of the World! Bought my first stick, a Gibson B-25 Student Guitar, in 1968, with babysitting dollars. Back then I was earning a fat fifty cents an hour, so I would have to say that’s been one of the best investments I have ever made. You might think that since I started playing guitar when I was in the ninth grade, by now I should be quite the hand. But like many girls of my day, we were more interested in hanging with the boys, and the guitar was just a ticket to sitting at the table. I did learn how to play G, C and D, and was on my way to playing all the cool folk tunes you can play with those three chords, like Sloop John B.
College, med school and orthopedic residency slowed me down a little. But with one of my first paychecks, I promptly purchased a sweet Martin D-38, and that lovely guitar set me on the path to Travis finger-picking, and learning a few more chords.
Despite being primarily a left-brainer, and honing the scientific skills of my career, music and story-telling have always been a passion. In 2007 I published my first novel, ENDINGS (Sunstone Press). I won a few awards and sold a bunch of copies. Didn’t quit my day job though. But second and third novels are in the works, along with my non-fiction work-in-progress, Sit Like A Man (S.L.A.M.)
I have a pretty healthy case of stage fright, so I was surprised when songs started coming to my head, along with the chords to back them up. If you write songs, I guess they must be sung, so I got involved with a music school in Austin called Girl Guitar. It’s based primarily on the concept of forming band classes for women, and they’re taught only by women. The six -week class sessions are followed by public performances, and I was on my way to performing my own songs. Dealing with stage fright is also a work-in-progress, but since I’m not quitting my day job, it’s not too worrisome.
Since I’m a story-teller, writing old-timey ballads, bluegrass and folk tunes just seemed to come naturally to me. The owner of Girl Guitar, Mandy Rowden, and many of her students are aspiring and accomplished musicians in their own right, and publishing music and cutting CDs is a happening thing around there. Always wanting to try something new, I recorded my first CD, Blood Red Moon, in 2018. I had the help of one of my teachers, Jane Gillman, who is also my producer, and my sound engineer, Merel Bregante. I’m so happy with my product. I’m sure more are to come.
In my spare time, I run a medical self-help blog: drbarbarabergin.com.  As a cowgirl and rancher, I am also an experienced western equestrienne, in the sport of Reining. As of this summer, my new horse, Sneakers and I are in sync and looking toward regional championships in August.
And did I say I’m still not quitting my day job?

Musical selections include:The Captain of the Robert E. Lee, Let's Get on Up, Daughters Lament,She Danced With The Young Prince of Wales, Low Water Bridge,Blood Red Moon 

For more information, visit BEYOND A SONG.COM 

Beyond a Song: Suzie Ungerleider (Part 1)

From ISOAS Media | Part of the Beyond a Song series | 01:00:00

Beyond a Song host Rich Reardin talks with Canadian singer/songwriter Suzie Ungerleider. This is Part 1 of a 2 part interview.

Suzie_prx_1_240x240_small

SUZIE UNGERLEIDER (PART 1): PUBLISHED ON PRX 7 / 9 / 2021 - BEYOND A SONG originates in BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA and is sponsored by:
THE BLUEBIRD NIGHTCLUB, REAL TO REELS RECORDING STUDIO, AND VISITBLOOMINGTON.COM

Beyond a Song host Rich Reardin interviews Canadian singer/songwriter Suzie Ungerleider. In 1995, taking her stage name from the famous Stephen Foster song seemed perfect. Oh Susanna was both a play on her own real name, Suzanne, as well as a way to hearken back to the great American folk songs that were a source of inspiration for her own music. Oh Susanna was a kind of shorthand to impress upon the listener’s mind, the time and place where she wanted them to travel - along the rusty old trainyards to the fields, mines and hills of mythical America. She promised them that, if they were willing, this journey was all possible by the power of my voice singing a lonesome song.
Taking the name Oh Susanna also made her feel that, suddenly, right before my feet, a red carpet magically unfurled, leading her to a stage lined by footlights and cloaked in a red velvet curtain. There, waiting for her , would be a lone microphone on a stand under a spotlight. All she had to do was act like Dorothy and follow the path to that wonderful place she longed to be, open her mouth and sing. She had been so afraid to walk up onto that stage. She had buried my childhood dream of being a singer for over a decade, but now, she was finally inching my way along that imaginary red carpet.
Wearing that mask helped
her show a face that sometimes felt more like her than who she was in everyday life. She could sing about other people’s experiences and yet express her own feelings through her songs. Although not always made explicit, she set these stories on the plains, in the mountains, in cities and wilds of the country of her birth: The United States of America.
A place of great promise and dreams and, on the flipside, a place of hard-luck and desperation. From 1995 – 2011,
she wrote and recorded six albums that used melodies and imagery inspired by Americana. There was a twang and a heartache contained in her voice that she took from country, blues, old time and bluegrass music. But then something shifted. She began to listen less to American music and more to contemporary Canadian singer-songwriters, many of whom she knew. Tired of singing her own words and melodies, she recorded an album called Namedropper, a collection of songs written especially for her to sing by many of my talented Canadian compatriots. She admired how these writers wrote about their own lives and their homes, about things recognizable as Canadian.

Inspired,
she embarked on writing a song cycle about herself as a young punk rocker coming of age in Vancouver. A Girl in Teen City, for her, was unique in that she was channeling her teenaged self and yet also looking back at it all from the place she is now. It was at this point that she started to feel the parts of herself integrating, her musical self and who she was when not onstage, these started to feel more one and the same. By telling her own stories she was showing who she really was. She was lifting the veil of Oh Susanna and revealing who she was as Suzie Ungerleider. Pretty soon Oh Susanna started to feel like a costume that no longer fit but that she had sewn herself into. Instead of being liberating, the name Oh Susanna started to feel like a constraint.

The song Oh Susanna was first published in 1848, when its author Stephen Foster was just 21. The United States of America was less than a hundred years old. The story of America is rife with turbulent contradiction: it is a land striving toward the ideal of freedom yet built on the backs of slaves. A country created by stealing land from the Indigenous peoples. So, in the land of the free, freedom is for some but not all. Justifying this subjugation of non-white people is an elaborate theory of Racism and White Supremacy. A product of its time and place, the threads of these wrongful beliefs are woven through the lines of the song Oh Susanna.

The song Oh Susanna is part of Minstrelsy, a tradition in which (usually) white actors perform as characters that are demeaning and dehumanizing to black people. Foster wrote the original lyrics in “plantation dialect” meaning in the manner of how Foster (a white person) thought a black person from the American South would speak. The racist nature of the song is most explicit, however, when a verse makes a joke of the death by electrocution of “five-hundred n-----“. This verse, of course, is rarely sung today and therefore not widely known. After the Civil War, Stephen Foster himself changed many of his “plantation dialect” songs into standard English.

Of course, when she decided to use her song as her namesake, the words had long been changed and verses eliminated in order to “whitewash” its racism. Because of this, the song had no racist connotations for her. The song was just an American folksong that she had learned in public school with sweet, longing, playful lyrics.

She doesn't remember the exact time when she became aware of the original lyrics of the song Oh Susanna, but she did begin to feel it was an ugly relic of the past, that it was what people used to think – like the changing of the lyrics, things had changed for the better. After the killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and people took to the streets to express their outrage at this happening again and again, it really became so obvious that we have a long way to go, that racism is still strongly embedded in our minds and our institutions and that it is only privileged white folks like me who can be blind to it even though we benefit from it and perpetuate it through our acceptance and silence.

Suddenly those racist lyrics felt absolutely current. Right here and right now, the lyrics conjure and make present violence against black people. This is the power of language. By saying something, you make it happen in the listener’s mind. It didn’t matter to me that not very many people know that the original lyrics to the song Oh Susanna are racist. I felt that if I were to continue to use the name Oh Susanna I would be passively accepting and perpetuating its racism.

She says: In 2017, after writing a whole album of songs as a love letter to my home town Vancouver, I started realize how homesick I was. As a youth I wanted to leave that city so badly. Because my parents were from California and New York I never really thought I belonged in Vancouver. It was just a place I happened to land along with my parents. I believed I was to do what they did, go elsewhere and discover myself. I moved to Montreal to go to college and it was there that I started to unearth my dreams of being a singer. Scared shitless, I stepped onstage for the first time to sing covers at a coffee house at Gertrude’s, the basement bar located in the McGill Student Union building. The small crowd went wild and I was ecstatic. I started to dream again.

After college, back in Vancouver, I sang a few more times in public and wrote a few songs. Then I made a little demo tape that caught the attention of the music industry. I was lured to Toronto and met musicians who loved the Carter Family and Hank Williams as much as I did. They understood this music I loved and made it a living thing by playing their own version of it. So in 1997, I decided to move to the big smoke where live roots music was oozing out of the doorways of The Horseshoe Tavern, Ted’s Wrecking Yard, The El Mocambo, C’est What, Holy Joe’s and The Rivoli (just to name a few). In that city, I felt seen as a fully-fledged singer-songwriter, I was a young upstart, but a serious one who went by the name Oh Susanna.

For the next twenty years, I made so many friends and connections from living a musical life. I gained a husband and a child all by being in the community of Canadian musicians. I was lucky to finally be what I had dreamed of as a kid, someone whose life centred around music and musical expression.

Then all of a sudden it was music, specifically A Girl in Teen City, that made me look closely at who I was before that musical life. Music led me to re-visit and reflect upon the place that made me who I was. Vancouver. Writing those songs allowed me feel how much that salt water was in my blood and how those mountains that watch over you no matter where you go were my protectors. I was a prodigal daughter, who had lived and learned and grown through her travels and trials, and I had to come home.

I have now been back in Vancouver for a year and a half. I am still following my path but this time it is one where I am truly integrating my musical being with who I am, finally seeing that music is inside of me and not in some alter ego. Believe me, I have loved being Oh Susanna, she is exciting, dark, funny, charming but I am now recognizing that was actually me all along, that it was Suzie Ungerleider who was all those magical things, I just didn’t let myself see it that way. 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. Now that I have grown, I am ready to shed that exoskeleton. It once protected me but I need to take it off so I can be all of who I am.

Musical selections include: Greyhound Bus, Lucky Ones, Hearts, Drunk as a Sailor, Roses, Mount Royal

For more information, visit
BEYOND A SONG.COM

Beyond a Song: Kate Klim (Part 1)

From ISOAS Media | Part of the Beyond a Song series | 01:00:00

Beyond a Song host Rich Reardin talks with Nashville singer/songwriter Kate Klim. This is part 1 of a 2 part interview.

Kate_klim1prx_small

KATE KLIM (Part 1): PUBLISHED ON PRX 7 / 1 / 2022 - BEYOND A SONG originates in BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA and is sponsored by: THE BLUEBIRD NIGHTCLUB, REAL TO REELS RECORDING STUDIO, AND VISITBLOOMINGTON.COM

Beyond a Song host Rich Reardin interviews Nashville singer/songwriter Kate Klim. Kate Klim was five years old when her family inherited a piano, 9 years old when she received her first lesson, and 11 years old when an unsuccessful audition for the film “Life with Mikey” caused her to rethink her planned career as a movie star.

This was fortunate, because the singer/songwriter the Boston Herald has called a “best bet for folk-pop stardom” then turned to music.

With roots in Illinois and Pennsylvania, Kate discovered her parents’ record collection early. She fell in love with iconic songwriters like Carole King, Paul Simon, Billy Joel and Neil Young, but also with her mother’s stack of Motown 45s and classic 80s artists like Cyndi Lauper and Tina Turner. (She will forever have a soft spot for the Bangles, and her first official “cover song” was performed at seven years old - a very passionate rendition of Don Henley’s “Heart of the Matter” delivered after a falling out with her then 6-year-old sister.) While Kate had been tinkering with melodies since she was a toddler, as she grew up they evolved into full fledged songs and by college she found herself majoring in songwriting at Boston’s acclaimed Berklee College of Music. It was here that Kate worked on her skills as a writer and performer, and became involved with the music community known for producing icons like Bob Dylan, Tracy Chapman, Patty Griffin and many more. Within a few years of her debut as a singer/songwriter, she was opening for artists like Shawn Colvin, Lucy Kaplansky and Richard Shindell and a regular on stages like Club Passim and Nashville’s Bluebird Cafe.

Kate has been recognized by some of the country’s premier songwriting contests. She won the 2010 Kerrville New Folk competition, was selected as an Emerging Artist by the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival. She has also been a finalist in the Mountain Stage Newsong Contest (as Kate puts it, “if you need to lost a song contest to someone, you could do worse than Ingrid Michaelson”), the Mid-Atlantic Song Contest and Telluride Troubadour Competition, among others.

Her first release “Up and Down and Up Again” was created with the help of renowned producer Crit Harmon (Martin Sexton, Susan Werner, Lori McKenna), and was dubbed a “gem” by Performing Songwriter Magazine. Crit’s experience with Lori McKenna led him to suggest Nashville, TN as a place for Kate to explore – she ended up moving there permanently in 2009. Her second release, “Kamikaze Love,” was produced by friend and band mate Brian Packer. A good marriage of her folk and pop sensibilities, its songs were featured in several TV shows, including the pinnacle of high-brow, intellectual social commentary: “Keeping Up With the Kardashians.” Her third studio album, 100 Million Years, was released in the late summer of 2014 – an album Kate described as having “a little more maturity and a little more quirk.

After a hiatus of several years surrounding the birth of her two sons, Kate returned to the studio in early spring 2020 with new experiences to share and new songs to sing. While the initial recording session wrapped in early March of 2020, the final sessions were postponed as the first wave of Covid shutdowns hit. The album, which chronicled change and growth through the lens of her ending marriage, was completed at home while she finalized divorce proceedings with her then-husband under the same roof.

The result is her 2022 release “Something Green.” Despite the album’s roots, she is quick to point out that they aren’t songs about loss. “It's an album about hope, love, change, and new growth.” Kate looks forward to return to live shows in support of the album, which she views as her strongest release yet. While the subject matter and recording experience were far from what she envisioned, what came of it was something positive and something healing. The lyrics from the title track seem fitting: “Sometimes you burn it down, so the rest don’t go. Sometimes you burn it down… so something new can grow.”

Musical selections include: What I Thought I Wanted, Can't Wait, Kamikaze Love, The Boston Song, Even When It's Bad, Songbird

For more information, visit BEYOND A SONG.COM