Paste Magazine 8/30/19

Music is a great outlet for folks in stressful jobs, but it rarely survives outside of a garage or home studio. Singer-songwriter Suzie Brown is a wonderful exception. During the day, she is a cardiologist specializing in heart transplants and heart failure, on top of helping raise two kids. On evenings and weekends, she turns her attention to her artistic endeavors, which yielded this, her sixth full-length of lived in and lucid Americana. Brown’s songs mine the various facets of her life as she juggles her homebound responsibilities and dual careers as well as she can, owning up to the reality that she drops the occasional ball. But there’s a steely determination in songs like “Masterpiece” and “Waiting on the Call” that acknowledges her exhaustion but doesn’t let it define her. The grounding element is Brown’s voice. It’s earthy and twangy enough to fit well into her chosen genre yet colored with a sweetness that keeps her sometimes downcast tunes from feeling like a heavy burden. She means it when she sings, “Sometimes I wanna scream like a three-year-old child/Stomp my feet, throw all my things in a messy pile,” well aware of the strange almost blissful glow that comes from such an outburst.