Truth in Music. What a Concept!

The title of Susan Piper's brand new album is "The Truth Comes Out." Also the title of one of the songs from this incredible new collection, its four words sum of Susan's approach to song: lyrics that tell you as much about your life as they do about hers, melodies always original, never derivative, tasteful, supple, on-the-money guitar work, and a voice that grabs you and hangs on tight with its virtuosity and conviction.

Susan Piper needs no gimmicks to conquer an audience. She comes armed with the truth.

Susan was born and raised near Cleveland, Ohio and wrote her first song at the age of five. "I always wanted to be a singer," she recalls. "I was a tomboy and yet I imagined myself in a sequined gown holding a microphone, singing for people. During my adolescence I started writing some really depressing songs and that's when I began to play guitar, pretty much feeling my way, not so much learning chords as manufacturing them as I went along to make the sounds I was hearing in my head. As my songwriting expanded, so did my guitar playing. When I was fifteen, braces on my teeth, bleached hair, I got my first steady gig at a local club, on Friday nights. My parents had to drive me there."

Underage as she was, her talent and her drive brought her steady work for the next three years, then, "When I was eighteen I drove to Cape May, New Jersey to sing with a band for the summer, and I never went back to Cleveland," she says. "I moved to Philadelphia and sang there until I just burned out. Pfft! Like that! I didn't perform for three or four years. Then I got a job in a nursing home as an activities director and I think working with older people was healing to me, and brought me back to writing. I wanted to write about them, things they'd tell me about their lives, about themselves. I thought about performing again, started going out to open shows, scared to death. It was like the music had gone away. But gradually the confidence came back and that's when I wrote a lot of my songs for my first CD." Her fledgling confidence received a powerful kick
when she won first place in her category at the prestigious Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas.

She began to co-write with noted Nashville songwriter Austin Roberts and he suggested that she send some of her songs to Tommy West, a New Jersey-based music veteran best known for having produced the great albums of
Jim Croce. "Tommy encouraged me to try difficult things," she remembers. "If he liked what I was doing, I could tell myself, 'I can do that!'"

Her new CD, "The Truth Comes Out," is a rare gem that was mostly cut live -- thatis, her vocals were recorded along with the instrumental tracks. And most of the superb guitar playing you are hearing is Susan. "We wanted to capture as much emotion as possible," she says, "as if you were in your living room and I was playing and singing right to you."

The result is the magnificent distillation of all the music that has coursed through Susan since the first song she ever wrote. Her producer Tommy West calls it "Folk-cabaret, or, when he is in a more esoteric mood, "folk-noire." What it is is
Susan Piper Music, a highly original art form that blends lyric, melody and performing virtuosity into something wonderful, special, and utterly unique.

SUSAN PIPER New on the Planet