Susan Justice: Sometimes You Just Have To ‘Eat Dirt’

In a busy New York subway station, a man serenades passersby with a beat-up guitar. A few of them look up from their BlackBerrys and toss a little change in his guitar case. It’s a scene that plays out in subways and streets around the world.

Susan Justice knows that scene all too well. She has been on a remarkable journey from street performer playing for handouts to a major recording contract. As a girl, she traveled the world with her parents and nine brothers and sisters, singing on city streets, in parks, anywhere people would listen. But if you saw her performing, you might never have known the conflict she was feeling inside. To talk about her journey, we thought it would be nice to tour around with her in a place she knows well: the streets and subway stations of Manhattan. These were her performance halls, as well as the inspiration for the new album and its title song, Eat Dirt.

“I wanted to make a play on the usual, ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,’ because everyone’s heard that,” Justice says in an interview with NPR’s David Greene. “In the beginning of the song, there’s a piece of candy on the floor that I’m going to eat even though my mom’s going to smack me if I eat. But I’m very curious, so I eat it anyway. So then the chorus comes in and it says, ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you sick / And if you’re sick, you learn a lesson / With every lesson, you’ll get wiser,’ so I figure that it pays to cross the line and eat a little dirt sometimes.”