Philadelphians have seen and heard almost everything under the sun, but apparently the city still has some surprises left, as musician Suzanne Sheer discovered during a walk home Monday night from the grocery store with friends.
The South Philly resident spotted an upright piano on the sidewalk along Broad Street and, naturally, decided to play it.
The ensuing 87-second video of Sheer singing “Pop Star,” an original song set to be released in 2024, went mildly viral on Reddit. And, as is wont to happen when Philadelphians online gather, debate ensued.
Questions sparked over whether she was really singing live, whether the piano was staged, and whether it was an elaborate plot to promote her next album.
“A little suspicious since the reverb and depth of the vocals couldn’t be achieved on a phone, in the street, in the open and on a broken piano,” wrote Reddit user /Uzzer_lozer19.
“Lol. I think she recorded that audio with the phone then superimposed. But yeah, I can see why everyone’s thinking this is faked,” added user /yabo1975. “OP is either her label promoting her, or the singer, Suzanne Sheer, herself. She’s got albums out and is from Philly.”
Reached by phone while driving to Pittsburgh for Thanksgiving, Sheer laughed off the skepticism as a compliment for both her and modern technology.
“I think it’s really cool that people think that it sounds good enough that they think I recorded it in a studio and we’re just pretending,” Sheer said.
But the audio was captured on the spot, she said. “I just propped my phone up in front of me and used the Voice Memo that everybody has on their iPhone. And then my friend pulled out his phone and we just put the audio from my phone with the video [from theirs]. It’s a great example of the quality recording you can get just using your phone.”
And if that sounds like an ad for Apple, it isn’t — though Sheer says she’s open to some kind of collab.
“My friends and I were joking, ‘How do we get people from Apple to do this? Let’s work something out here Apple,’” she said.
What about the lack of street noise in the background? That bit caused some consternation online.
“The street noise doesn’t seem to match-up with what we’re seeing,” wrote Reddit user /Fairchild660, who described themself as an audio engineer. “There are cars passing in the video that don’t sync with the audio, and vice versa. There’s also a dude on a bike that passes right by the piano at around the 1 minute mark — through a pile of leaves — yet doesn’t make a peep on the recording.”
To the relative quiet of the surroundings, Sheer said to thank karma.
“On Broad Street, there’s always so much going on, people on bikes; it’s a really noisy block,” she said. “But you can see there really wasn’t much going on [when I was playing]. It’s like the universe was like ‘We’ll pause the commotion so you can get this.’”
As for whether she brought the piano outside herself to stage a video shoot, the singer-songwriter maintains her neighbor discarded it and she was the lucky person who found it before it got picked up by the Streets Department or another passerby.
“I assumed something was wrong with it,” Sheer said. “The woman who had owned it came out, we talked, and she said nothing was wrong with it, [just that] it was taking up space for years and nobody played it.”
Sheer noted that not all the online comments were critical.
“So many people reached out and offered to help me take it up the stairs, and that was so sweet, but at the end of the day, I looked at my staircase, how heavy it was, and there was no way it was gonna happen,” she said. “Once I accepted that, I sat and played it while I can.”
The song she sang, “Pop Star,” is about “the experience of being an artist and the hustle of trying to make it and make something of your art, and sort of how that can be draining and at times make you feel a little bit lost.”
Kind of like this trash piano experience?
Not really, she said. “The sun was up when I was playing and by the end, I got to watch the sun set, got the view of Center City, and it was a really peaceful two hours.”
“I was even able to write a hook, something new. I will always remember that little piano,” Sheer said. “How cool would it be if more musicians played outside? Philly is so rich in culture, people, and music. But we need more pianos around.”
