SUSAN HENLEY
I have performed on stage for 45 years. All across North America. Huge shows. Tiny shows. Big money. Barely money. A couple of awards here and there. It’s not a job or a career. It’s a vocation.
Along the way I have worked with some extraordinary women. I have learned a great deal from them and I treasure their friendship to this day… (Work with people who are better at it than you are. How else can you improve? I regret not having the guts to make more mistakes when I was young. That’s the way to learn so I’m learning a lot now…)
I remember a phone call. A deep voice said, “You’re Susan Henley. I’m Patti Loach. I know of you. You’re a singer and I’m a piano player and we kinda live in the same area. Would you like to go for a walk?”
I remember that walk. I towered over her and I could barely keep up. We also didn’t say much. At times it was awkward. To this day, neither one of us is skilled at small talk.
We kept meeting for walks, decided to meet “musically”. And so we began going back-and-forth between my tinny Casio keyboard in my front hallway and her Steinway grand in her kitchen.
Our communication changed. Our conversations flowed through the music and we can converse endlessly this way. The songs we keep are the ones that, when we rehearse and they resonate, we say nothing. Because we feel it. The song is clear and it goes into our binder to be performed.
And we are just getting started.
Susan Henley, February 2026
PATTI LOACH
I took a circular path to arrive in the place I’m in now. Practicing classical piano is a solitary pursuit. Sure, it’s satisfying when you finally make peace with a challenging passage and can surf on the endorphins of a good performance, but … practicing piano can be lonely.
It wasn’t until I was forty-five that I realized that there is a whole lot of fun to be had in the company of singers.
What took me so long?
For the past two decades, thanks to the singers who’ve come into my life as friends first, I’ve been on a wild ride through vocal repertoire: German lieder. Italian opera. Musical Theatre. American Songbook. Singer-songwriter. Rock. The common denominator has been the singers who inhabit those songs with their own unique voices, taking me along for the ride from my perch on the piano bench.
Halfway through that ride I met Susan Henley.
To be honest, I don’t know if I would have been ready for her twenty years ago: the songs she’s brought to our collaboration have been some of the most challenging rep I’ve tackled yet, and certainly the most eclectic, stylistically. Let’s just say, Tori Amos is a far cry from Robert Schumann. In fact, many times when Susan suggested a new song, I responded with a flat no, she left it on the piano with a gentle “just try it”, and months later I’d find myself playing it in a show with her. She’s persuasive as hell.
Plus, occasionally she shows up with sourdough loaves, still warm from her oven. What’s not to love?
Lucky me, to have this wonderful human keeping me company on this circular path.
Patti Loach, February 2026
