Our On Stage with...Summer Cabaret Series - a unique opportunity to hear some of the finest musical talent ON the Auditorium's stage is well underway. Susan Werner tells us how she got her start, and what life is like as a professional musician. To make your reservation, call 312-922-2110 ext. 300 today!

Tell us about what it's like to record your own album.

It is always a thrill to record an album - to see that resources and personnel have gathered to bring something you've created out to the larger world, that's just so exciting. To witness the parade of talented people who come through the studio doors - drummers, guitar geniuses, piano players, B3 organ wizards, gospel singers - I mean, with The Gospel Truth, we had nine singers from the Wilmington (Delaware)/Chester Mass Choir come in and sing, as a choir - it's so  humbling to think that these songs and ideas you dreamed up in your little office are now worthy of someone else's best efforts.

What musical figures and genres have influenced you?

My heroes are always people who can write and perform - people like Randy Newman and Richard Thompson and Joan Armatrading. I wanna be like them - I wanna be here 20 years from now, still doing something new, still learning to play a new instrument or write in a new style.

How do current events influence your music?

Current events will usually show up in a parody - currently I have a version of Harold Arlen's "(Forget your troubles, c'mon) Get Happy" with the words changed to "Barack Obama, c'mon get happy - he's gonna take all your cares away." Topical material usually sticks around for a year or so and then fades - so current events don't factor into larger album projects. But a good topical number makes people laugh SO HARD - during the stock market craze in the late 90's, I had a parody of The Sound of Music's “Do Re Mi” that was Maria singing "Dow Re Mi" in which she taught the Van Trapp children how to invest their money in the stock market. People were crying, they were laughing so much.

Tell us about what we’ll be hearing on July 23.

At the Auditorium show, which is entitled "Susan Werner sings the Susan Werner Songbook," I'll be performing songs written by, well,  me. No surprise there. For the most part, the songs will come from two projects: the 2004 project called I Can't Be New, in which I wrote songs to sound as if they might have been written in the 1930's - in the style of Cole Porter and Gershwin, for instance; and from the 2007 project called The Gospel Truth, which was described by one reviewer as "a collection of hymns for the spiritually ambivalent" - a description I LOVE - because it's gospel music that's not so sure about the answers. And that better corresponds to most Americans' experience with religion and the church - most of us aren't all that sure about it all. Most gospel music is all about faith - but what about doubt? Plenty of us out here have a lot of doubts. Those deserve songs too - and songs that offer no easy answers.

 What’s on your I-pod? Why?

I have a bunch of 60's and 70's pop classics, along with string quartets, Bach inventions and Beethoven piano sonatas. I'm hoping to do a cover project sometime that takes pop classics and renders them even more classic - classical, in fact, with string quartet and piano and harpsichord and chamber music instruments. That's the idea, anyway - to tell the truth, it's not easy to combine some of the hippie dippie lyrics of the sixties with the seriousness of a string quartet and have it sound like anything but a joke - so I'm having to sort through the Billboard charts carefully, I can tell you that.

What’s your favorite Auditorium memory?

I still remember the first time I went all the way up the seats to the very nosebleed tippy top seats and looked down - and felt a big wave of vertigo. Whoa. Maybe people were better with fear of heights in the 19th century or something. I also liked walking out onstage for the first time a few years ago and seeing the hall lit up - standing right at the lip of the stage and looking out into that space, with the lights and the murals and the gold leaf and all of it, and thinking "this is the view of some of the greatest performers in history." And thinking, therefore, I better give a pretty good show - or try, anyway.

How did you get your start in music professionally?

To describe my first professional music gigs - well, in college already I was playing guitar and piano and singing at weddings and jazz clubs and coffeehouses and even played banjo in a strolling pep band at tailgate parties in the parking lot outside the stadium at the University of Iowa when I went to school there. Football fans toss big bills in the when they've been, well, tailgating for a while and you come by and play the Iowa Fight Song. I'm telling you. But my first unpaid gig was when I was five - I sang and played guitar for my first grade class at St. Mary's elementary school in Manchester Iowa - we all stood at the front of church and sang "It's a Small World." And I had no stage fright, not even then. I only had stage fright really badly once in my entire life, when I had to sing in the opera Boris Godunov at Iowa - I got through it somehow, but I have steered clear of Russian opera since then.

Do you have any advice for any aspiring musicians?

Here's what Melissa Etheridge said to me years ago when I asked her for advice: "Play for anyone and everyone." Play your music everywhere and always. That's how people come to know you and that this is what you do. Success will not come find you, you have to go out and meet it halfway, you really do. You even have to chase it down sometimes - like a piece of paper flying down the street in the wind. It may have somebody's phone number on it. Call them up - and then go into their office and play for them. Really.

Call 312-922-2110 ext. 300 to make your reservation today.