Susan Hedges: Songs in the key of life

The singer Susan Hedges is something of a phenomenon. Blind since birth, she has ? by her own admission ? led a sheltered life on the Wirral. Yet, at just 17, she has already attracted some very famous fans with her soulful, country-inspired songs. Robert Chalmers meets an extraordinary talent

"Why Susan?" It was the first thing that I asked her, though I'm not too sure why. I think it must have been because "Susan Hedges" sounds like one of those names a real star jettisons, once she's decided to pursue a career as Dorothy Lamour, or Patsy Montana, or Madonna.

"It happened because the doctors told my father I was going to die," Hedges says. "I was born three months premature; I was being kept alive in an incubator and the specialist told my dad to go down to the register office straightaway. When he asked them why, they said, 'Because if you don't you will find yourself registering a birth and a death at the same time, and that is mentally a very bad place to be. So go now.' It was only when my dad was standing in front of the registrar, and she said, 'Name of child?', that he realised he hadn't got one. And he asked her: 'What's your name?' And so I was Susan, like her."

We're sitting in Susan Hedges' bedroom at her parents' house in Little Neston, on the Wirral, just outside Liverpool. There's nothing in the room that's not to do with music. On the wall, there are a handful of posters from her gigs that Susan, who is 17 and has been blind since birth, can't see. There's a keyboard, wired to an amplifier and a small set of speakers. Hundreds of CDs are stacked on shelves. Most of them are by singers she's too young to have any right to have heard of: Steve Earle, Nick Drake and Lucinda Williams. She's also collected more than a hundred recordings by Jerry Lee Lewis.

It's here, in this small room, that she wrote the songs for her own extraordinary albums, Myron Angel and her latest CD, Crimson Love on Velvet Black. The new-country legend Nanci Griffith plays Hedges' records on her tour bus. Emmylou Harris has performed with her. She's been making guest appearances with the Texan country star Tom Russell since she was 10. She can't get played by DJs on British national radio, though. She mentions that she posted her latest CD – released on the small Scottish independent label Goldrush – to the producers of Jools Holland's television show, Later. "They wrote back, explaining that they get a lot of letters like mine," she says. "It hasn't deterred me."

She feels her way to the keyboard and plays a song called "Be Gentle on This Friend of Mine". Her voice – she sounds like an amalgam of Natalie Merchant and Sandy Denny – is one of the most hauntingly beautiful I've ever heard. When she plays live, the way this diffident teenager mutates into a woman whose voice has the melancholic force of a 40-year-old with a past is, frankly, astonishing. The most perceptive of the four reviews she's collected in her thin file of cuttings from local papers begins with the word "Gobsmacked". "When she performs, she hypnotises people," the writer Alan Bleasdale told me after he saw Hedges on stage for the first time at a recent awards ceremony in Liverpool. "I'm in awe."

At a time when the music business is, more than ever, in thrall to young performers who are visually focused and musically orthodox (to spend a couple of hours talking to Hedges, then watch her contemporaries agonising over their feeble cover versions of tired classics on Fame Academy, is to see the show for what it is), the Merseyside singer is doing it the old way: writing in cafés on wet afternoons, rewriting in her room, then trying her songs out in front of small local audiences.

Still sitting at the piano, she sings me her new song "A Splendid Little War". The phrase occurred in a speech by US President McKinley, at the time of the Spanish-American Conflict of 1898. It's typical of her ideas, which are quirky, imaginative, and more Randy Newman than Pete Waterman. "Myron Angel", the title track from her first album, is about a 19th-century dime novelist who became obsessed with apparently prophetic cave-paintings he came across at Carrizo Plain in California. It doesn't sound very rock'n'roll. "I like stories," she says, "and I like history."

She wrote one of her best songs, "Jerusalem Syndrome", after she heard a radio documentary about a delusional condition that strikes down tourists travelling to Israel. "The programme explained that Jerusalem Syndrome is an acknowledged disorder that affects 0.2 per cent of pilgrims who visit the city," Susan says. "They arrive feeling quite normal, but then they see the religious sites and they get so overcome that they start believing they are characters from the Old Testament."

They tend to hang around together, she says, "and it struck me that you could end up sharing an apartment block with a Hezekiah, two Samsons and a Jonah". "Jerusalem Syndrome", which tells the story of a visitor fleeing the Holy City after being plagued by false prophets, ends with the line: "Forgive me Delilah, I just couldn't take any more."

These would be wonderful songs whoever recorded them. ("By some slight irony," Bleasdale wrote in the fax he sent me after he first heard her, "I couldn't see Susan Hedges from my table at the awards ceremony, so at first I didn't know that she was blind. All I heard was all you need to know about her – that voice.") That said, her blindness makes her determination and assurance even more remarkable. When she was small, her parents Tom and Marg, who are laboratory technicians at Liverpool University, were listening to Otis Redding and Neil Diamond. Their daughter developed her musical taste on her own; nobody is quite sure how.

"I started listening to country music when I was four," she says. "But I quickly branched out from that and started listening more to singer-songwriters."

By this stage, I interrupt, you would have been... "Six," she says. "But even then I was never interested in what I call the 'Dead Dog' kind of country song. I can remember going on stage when I was seven, and singing 'Would You Lay With Me (in a Field of Stone)?'"

Where was that?, I ask her, wondering what it's like to hear an infant perform David Allan Coe's intense, doleful anthem.

"Pontin's," she says.

She went to a Liverpool school for the blind, where she had a difficult time. Blindness, she says, drove her back into herself and her music. "If I'd been sighted," she says, "I don't think that songwriting would have been my main interest. I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you. I'd be standing on the street corners with my mates. I'd be going out to clubs and that. But as it is, I spend a lot of time alone in my room. I'm listening to music day and night."

Susan, who's in the last year of a BTEC in Music at Liverpool Community College, was still at school when she made her first commercial recording – a CD of jingles she wrote for North West Water. "They asked me to play at this big dinner," she says. "Prince Charles was there." Did he say anything to her? "He told me he thought that I was fantastic," she replies. "He didn't buy a CD, though."

So what did she think then? "I thought – you'll buy a CD next time, Big Ears."

She met her hero, Tom Russell, when she was 10. A distinguished country performer in his own right, the Texan is also famous as an encourager of young talent. Russell discovered the 14-year-old Nanci Griffith, singing by a camp fire near San Antonio. He found Hedges at the Monaco Ballroom, just outside Wigan. "I'd started to play gigs on the British country circuit," she says. "I was introduced to Tom backstage. I sang one of his songs with him. Since then, there's never been a time when he hasn't got me up on stage to sing with him."

"It gave me goosebumps just to hear her," Russell told me. "She sang perfectly, and soulfully. She was never trying to show off, like most young singers do. From the very start she meant it, which is unusual. Since then she has matured at her own pace. She is real, which is saying a lot these days."

When she was 13, she met the producer Gary Hall, who recorded both her albums at his own studio in Preston. Hall and Russell both encouraged her to follow her instincts, and to confront the realities of her existence, not shrink from them. There's a song on Crimson Love on Velvet Black called "The Fighting Kind", which she wrote after her mother told her about a conversation she'd had in the hospital.

"The doctor called us in," Marg Hedges remembers, "and said, 'The baby's lungs have not matured and we don't believe she'll survive.' When he went, the nurse turned to me and said: 'She will.' I said, 'Pardon?' She said, 'We see these babies all the time. And we know. Some of them just lie there, and some of them fight. And this one is fighting, all the time.'"

Of course, there's only so much that a 17-year-old – whether they're sighted or not – can draw from life. One of the extraordinary things about Susan Hedges is the way that this young woman – who, by her own account, has had a comparatively sheltered existence – manages to write convincingly about intimate areas of life of which she's had little or no experience. Being a single mother, for instance, or a drunk, or an incorrigible philanderer.

Her ability to describe the world as it is for other people, she says, owes a great deal to her co-lyricist, Paula Stafford. They met at a poetry reading when the singer was 11. Stafford (a laboratory assistant, like Susan's parents) was three times her age. They're close friends, and you can still find them writing together sometimes at La Casa, a café near Liverpool University.

"Paula and I have grown together as songwriters," Hedges says. "When we met, she'd never written a song in her life, and neither had I. We learnt – we're still learning – our craft together. I haven't had half the experiences I write about. Paula has."

One of the striking things about Hedges' songs is their constant reference to visual images – far more, bizarrely, than you find in the work of most sighted songwriters. There's a track on her last album called "By the Time That it Gets Dark".

"I can't see colour," Susan says. "I have no idea what colours are. That's why I got the idea for Crimson Love on Velvet Black. People often ask me about how you could possibly fall in love if you're blind; what things would attract you to a person. Sighted people rely on eye contact or facial expression; things like that. They ask whether, in my case, it would be the sound of the voice."

And?

"I say yes." She laughs. "Maybe."

"This is something that we talk about constantly," Stafford told me. "It's something that's very important between us. When I'm writing lyrics with Susan, I'm constantly aware of the things she can't see. She tells me that she dreams, and yet I can't understand what her dreams would be like. I find it very difficult to put these things into words. I had an idea for a song we did called 'A Thousand Lights'. Susan recorded it, beautifully. Afterwards, she said: 'What did you mean by that – a thousand lights?' I said, 'It's the stars, Susan.' And then she said: 'Star is just a word to me.' "

Dreams, Susan says, mainly consist of sounds. "If I dreamt about you," she says, 'I would dream sounds and textures. I would hear your voice in a dream. I could feel your hand. But there wouldn't be any other dimension to it."

Susan Hedges is currently finishing her third album, River City Girl. She's written some of the new songs alone, some with Stafford, and some with the American country star David Olney. She's also recorded a breathtaking version of Burt Bacharach and Hal David's "I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself".

Listening to her sing these songs, you have the exhilarating feeling of witnessing a major talent on the threshold of recognition. But her songwriting, like the work of many of her heroes – Nick Drake, say, who committed suicide at the age of 26, or Sandy Denny, who died when she was 31 – has a strong resonance of melancholy about it, even if Hedges' trauma came at the beginning of her life, not the end.

It's undeniable, I suggest, that not many of the great figures in her chosen career have been happy. "Yes," she says. "I remember someone once shouted out to Townes Van Zandt, 'Play us a happy one.' And he said: 'These are the happy ones.'"

If any questions hang over her success as a singer, they're likely to relate to when and how, rather than if. Since I heard her work, I've been selfishly hoping that she might get a phone call in early 2003 from Joe Boyd, the legendary, London-based producer who recorded many of the people she admires, including Drake and Denny. Her own ambitions are more modest. "I'm hoping to go to the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts," she says. Hoping? "Yes," she says. "It's really hard to get in."

As an admirer, my main concern is that, wherever she does go next, her teachers recognise her – like Sandy Denny, and Nick Drake, and Nanci Griffith – as a great original voice, and resist the temptation to homogenise the sound of an artist who has proved herself in so many ways already. She's already unique, already bold, already amazing and already – to use a word that has no meaning for her – a star.