Oh Susanna brings sound of Vancouver nostalgia with her on B.C. tour

The sound of nostalgiacan be heard through the music of Suzie Ungerleider's new albumA Girl in Teen City.

The Toronto-based singer-songwriter, better known by her stage name Oh Susanna, set the album's tracks to the backdropof 1980s Vancouver, where she spent her teenage years.

Starting Saturday, she's taking her nostalgic sound on a cross-B.C. tour.

"I realized that the main character of the whole song cycle is basically me as a teenager," saidUngerleiderduring a conversation with CBC's Margaret Gallagher on The Early Edition.

"But also thatVancouver itself was kind of a teenager."

Ungerleidersaid the city's adolescence wasin the '80s because while Vancouverwasn't a small, back-water town though she and her friends thought of it that way it still hadn't grown into the cosmopolitan metropolis it is today.

Walking a fine line between tones of teenage melancholy andthe retrospective that only years of living can bring,Ungerleidersaid the album's musicshowcases feelings of both adolescence and adulthood.

From the first song, Flashlights,you're guided on a youthful yet seriousjourney, beginning with sneaky andamorous midnight excursions accompanied bythe cool boy up the street, to ending withinfamous Expo 86 antics in the album's finaleMy Old Vancouver.

The Downtown Eastside, Davie Street, the Commodore Ballroom and various other staples are visited along the way.

"If I were writing these songs way back then I would be all moody and dark and irritable," saidUngerleider, laughing.

"We thought and felt certain things ... But at the same time, we didn't realize how interesting and how cool the little things that we did were."

"Because we were convinced we were living a super-boring life in Vancouver, but now I look back, and I look fondly at my youth."

Oh Susanna plays atthe Massey Theatre in New Westminster, B.C., on Saturday, before moving on to Victoria, Vernon and Revelstoke.

With files from The Early Edition and Margaret Gallagher