It was the first song she’d written that she truly loved.
The melancholy track may have kicked off her artist project nearly a decade ago, but it wasn’t until a few years back that the London-native started performing, and music began to look like a viable career path.
On Friday, Dec. 6, Suki Waterhouse brings her unique brand of indie pop to the Agora in support of her sophomore studio album, Memoir of a Sparklemuffin.
Waterhouse’s music career took off after signing to independent record label Sub Pop, which rose to fame in the early ‘90s after putting its stake in the Seattle grunge scene by signing bands like Soundgarden and Nirvana in the late ‘80s.
“I was already making music,” says Waterhouse in a recent Zoom audio interview when asked about signing to Sub Pop. “I think the audience got larger, for sure, but I had my reasons for wanting to do it that have stayed the same. So, things changed, but nothing has changed, in a way.”
This past August, Waterhouse opened for one of the eight London shows on her longtime friend Taylor Swift’s the Eras Tour at the 90,000-capacity Wembley Stadium, but she’s still relatively new to performing. The singer-songwriter recalls recently being reminded of one of her very first shows, three years ago at the 300-capacity Winston House in Venice, CA.
“I kind of just shoved myself onstage and figured it out as I was going. I just did a bunch of shows, and some of them were more painful than others,” says Waterhouse. “But I definitely had that instinct of wanting to be onstage. I was always longing to be onstage in that way, I think probably more than anything else.”
The 32-year-old’s songwriting has come a long way since its inception at around age 15 or 16. For a long time, she rode out “that really beautiful phase, when you don’t even really consider ever putting anything out…you just make things.”
These days, Waterhouse is inspired by the cavities of her mind and the world around her.
Memoir of a Sparklemuffin lives up to its name, cataloging a wide range of stories.
The dream pop number “Model, Actress, Whatever” is a play on society’s tendency to pigeonhole people, while the soft ballad “Legendary” was born from sitting next to a “quite controversial” older couple at dinner, and absorbing how the messy twists and turns of their lives led them to each other.
“I was listening to them talk about their love story. It was so intense and sweet, how they spoke about each other. It kind of caught me off guard, so I wrote a song about it,” says Waterhouse. “There’s nothing more I like than hearing all the dirty details of someone else’s life.”
Waterhouse also dove deep into the archives of her own life throughout the writing process of this year’s full-length release.
“Faded,” which serves as a sort of thematic centerpiece for the storytelling approach to the album, was written as Waterhouse was diving deep into attempting to reconnect with her younger self. The singer-songwriter shared that her teen years and even a good portion of her twenties can feel blurry, distant, and difficult to recall in vivid color.
“I started writing my own memoirs in the writing process. Even if it was just in very small ways of, like, little snippets of memories, and maybe I’d be able to get a couple of pages out of a certain time,” says Waterhouse. “Sometimes, I feel like everything is so compartmentalized and bifurcated into different parts. I’m trying to get back into touch with the feeling that everything is one.”
The first line of the song came from remembering that an old boyfriend used to call her “Yoko” as a playful pet name, and Waterhouse went on to paint a fully fleshed nostalgic picture from there, fighting her own detachment.
“If I look back and cringe at myself at certain points, I want to be like, ‘No! That is part of your whole. That’s you as well, all the things that you thought and did,’” says Waterhouse. “Every year needs to be owned and sacred and seen as part of the whole, instead of kind of having the block out of certain things that don’t suit you to remember. That’s something that I was trying to do, and I want to continue to do, that really interests me.”
The exuberant mid-tempo pop track, “My Fun” is Waterhouse’s favorite song on the record to perform live. The arrangement involves putting on heart-shaped sunglasses and “catcall yodeling” by Waterhouse and her guitarist to start the song.
“It’s a really uplifting, joyful song,” says Waterhouse. “It’s kind of like delusionally upbeat and happy. It makes me feel good ‘cause I feel like that was one of the first songs I wrote for this record where I was suddenly intrigued after I wrote it.”
The song represents a shift that occurred within Waterhouse.
“It’s always telling what you come out of the studio with,” says Waterhouse. “When I came out with ‘My Fun,’ I could tell that I was in a different place. I could tell that I’d moved on from something.”
Waterhouse revels in celebrating the sentiment of this blissful season with her fanbase.
“Just forcing that positive joy onto an audience, and seeing people kind of transform throughout the song, clapping their hands and moving around. We’re all just kind of elated by that song,” says Waterhouse.
On the flip side, the catchy, up-tempo track, “Supersad,” was written from a place of trying to “jolt” yourself into more positive perspectives and habits.
“I think I’m pretty forceful with myself, if I feel like my mind’s slipping,” says Waterhouse. “Definitely, there’s been times where it has slipped off into the abyss for months at a time. It’s not always easy, and it doesn’t happen overnight, but I’ll do everything to bring myself out and try to change the direction if I feel like I’m getting into a [negative] mental pattern.”
But spiraling or “cocooning” herself away from the world can also have some validity to it, in Waterhouse’s book.
“Sometimes, I’ll follow it and see where it leads,” she says. “It’s your body telling you where to go, and you have to actually listen, sometimes. Your mind’s breaking, cause your body is rejecting certain things in your life.”
Another song Waterhouse feels translates well live, “Blackout Drunk,” was written quickly and easily after returning to London and strolling around Hyde Park, talking to her girlfriends about how embarrassing their male partners can be when they drink too much.
“Sometimes, we’d be talking about, like, imagine if women acted like this, and couldn’t get themselves into the Taxi at the end of the night,” says Waterhouse. “We started crafting this narrative of a night out. It’s always really good when you’re finding a song really entertaining, and you’re laughing as you’re writing it, and you really exaggerate the details.”
The singer-songwriter has cherished getting to bring her songs to life through touring and festival slots these past few years. The mutualistic relationship with her fans was an element of her art that she had been missing out on.
“There’s something so unbelievably cathartic, for myself and the audience, when we’re in this sort of connection, in a flow together,” says Waterhouse. “There’s an extraordinary power in live music. “Especially for me growing up, it was kind of how I centered my whole worldview, around the musicians I loved growing up, and especially the concerts that I would go to. It would, like, alter my brain chemistry.”
Waterhouse describes the contrast of transitioning from rolling into a new city, walking around, “feeling like death” to the instant serotonin boost of stepping onstage.
“It’s like a live-action horror movie,” she says. “Where, there’s that anticipation every night of, am I gonna bring to the table something, like, are we gonna have this like reciprocal experience together?”
But once she hits the stage, Waterhouse transcends into something bigger than herself for that small pocket of time, through the other-worldly atmosphere that live music curates.
“For a lot of people, and for me too, it’s like a religious experience,” says Waterhouse.
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This article appears in Nov 20 – Dec 3, 2024.