Conversation With a Sparklemuffin: Suki Waterhouse and the road to self-discovery

Suki Waterhouse’s latest album, Memoir of a Sparklemuffin, is a sonically rich, ethereal, and upbeat 18-track odyssey. It’s outspoken, it’s introspective, and spending time with the record since its late summer release, it’s clear that Waterhouse, WXPN’s November Artist to Watch, has arrived at herself.

This extends to her tour, which kicked off in mid-October. It’s broken down into “chapters” creatively framed up on her Instagram, with each chapter paired with a poem and a song from the record. Waterhouse’s Philly stop on December 10th at Franklin Music Hall falls under Chapter 3, “Blackout Drunk.” Keeping true to the practice and intention of writing a memoir, the chapter’s photo collage and poem spotlights “our frozen muse” and those few seconds before a performance begins under a big twinkling disco ball.

Creative staging, fantastical thinking, teenage journals and the album’s titular spider each expose a different section of Waterhouse’s heartfelt and evolving vision as a “Model, Actress, Whatever.” We caught up over phone last week to talk about all of it.

WXPN: First off, how’s tour been? I mean, looking on Instagram, it looks like it’s been amazing. But I wanted to know how it’s going for you.

Suki Waterhouse: This one is particularly special. I’ve really worked on the world-building. I feel like I step onto that stage and I’m in a magical forest every night. Also just the fact that I get to play all these new songs and have such a long album that I put out in September. It’s like a much more high-energy set list, so I’m having a really great time on tour at the moment.

WXPN: The thing that really draws me to your music is the storytelling and the world-building. I always think about how artists want to present, and how it kind of holds hands or finds harmony with their own music. The outfits you’ve been wearing have been absolutely amazing, like gorgeous, for example. So I was wondering how you want to feel while you’re performing the songs, and how you hope the audience feels?

SW: There’s some kind of unspoken sensibility that I’m trying to reach for every night, which is sort of like disappearing into the music alongside with the audience, and it’s really something kind of intangible that you’re sort of searching for every night. It’s very delicate. The world-building, the production, the outfits, like, it’s all incredibly important to me. I feel like this time with the kind of forest-y elements I did, I wanted to be able to run around a lot more and wearing heels, they’re not too high. I wanna wear things that dramatically work for me. I feel like a lot of my performance comes through my hands.

WXPN: I would imagine it would be so much fun and feel so powerful. So I’m sure you get this question a lot, it’s the million dollar question. I did have to Google what a Sparklemuffin was, and it did not disappoint. I think I watched like five different videos of them just dancing and I was like, ‘oh girl, pop off.’

SW: Exactly. I suddenly felt really in tune with the spider. I love the idea of it doing this razzle dazzle dancing, and then it doesn’t know if it’s gonna get its head bitten off by its mate or not. But I think that, like, really solidified it for me. I kind of felt like the spider was this metaphor for dancing through life and hoping you don’t get your head bit off on the way.

WXPN: I was curious if it was a chicken and egg kind of thing. Were you kind of like writing these songs and then you found Sparklemuffin and then it just kind of clicked, or was it Sparklemuffin then the music?

SW: I think it came like halfway through. My other title ideas were incredibly different. I remember one of the other titles was A Yellow Rose for Bobby Peru, a Willem Dafoe character. Yellow roses were given in Victorian times to people that you just wanted to be friends with. I was kind of making friends with the idea of a tumultuous past or somebody tumultuous in my past.

The memoir part, I just have so much gratitude towards all the dirty details of people’s lives they spell out and I just inhale those stories. I was really taken by Liz Phair’s memoir this time around. I started doing it myself, writing my own memoir doing it kind of as an exercise to sort of fill in gaps. I just feel like some of it’s just completely, like, blotted out and some of like the web of things that have happened to like, get myself to this place I’m in now, like feels kind of blurry.

WXPN: I feel like the seed had always been there as far as like, writing and wanting to do music and stuff like that for you. And I Can’t Let Go was kind of like the stem coming up with a little bulb at the end. Then Memoir of a Sparklemuffin is the bloom in my mind.

SW: That’s how it feels to me. I think with I Can’t Let Go, when I looked at how I was approaching that record, I had so many different thoughts in my head that were very constricting. It was kind of like, you know, oh my God, I’m coming from being an actress and having modeled and now I might wanna do music. Any time I’d been releasing music before, I would sort of get negative press, or they would figure out how many units of something had been sold and I was like, am I gonna be allowed to just have a go at this? And then by the time I got to Sparklemuffin, I’d been on the road, I had so many unbelievable unexpected things happen in those two years in between. What was coming out of me in the studio was just a completely different person to who I was when I was first making the record.

WXPN: It seems like you allowed yourself to explore more. There are just so many more types of instruments and sounds and samples. Even your vocal range makes it seems like you wanted to do something different with this album. I guess you kind of touched on it, what you wanted to do different, like how you’re a different person now, but did you have stuff that you were like, ‘I want this to be blank, blank, blank?’

SW: When I was kind of close to finishing it and handing it in, I remember like a couple of months before I was like, “hmm, this is not, I haven’t…” It’s like a feeling that I knew that I hadn’t reached it. It’s almost like nothing’s fully realized until the day that you actually have to hand it in. I was pregnant, I knew I was having a baby in like the second week of March and I was like, OK, I have to have this project ready, like at least the week before. I think “To Get You” was one of the last songs that I wrote on the record. I didn’t have that slower song that I wanted to have on every record. Like a song that I can look back 20 years and still feel like it’s just like a completely classic song.

I went and worked with Jonathan Rado, who I’d never met before, who I really, really looked up to. You can be like, “oh, like Jonathan Rado from Foxygen, that’s one of my favorite bands,” and most of the time when you’re in LA, it’s like, yeah, he lives 10 minutes away. That song came out that day and we just recorded it on tape and it was just like the best day ever. It’s such strange full circle moments where you’re like, oh my God. I was listening to a band when I was, like, 15, walking around London. I had no idea that this was what the song was about. And lives in the same city as me and we’re like, working together 15 years later. It’s like, really strange to me.

WXPN: I’ll kind of give you the choice here…do you wanna talk about “Model, Actress, Whatever” slash “Could’ve Been A Star”, “Legendary,” or “Nonchalant”?

SW: We can talk about “Model, Actress, Whatever”.

WXPN: I feel like the songs, “Model, Actress, Whatever” and “Could’ve Been A Star” hold hands in a complimentary way. They and the record are kind of talking to it itself. How does it feel to step back — especially with those two songs that are very, you know, personal, about your outlook about yourself and the world — what is it like to step back and look at those two songs particularly?

SW: I love the idea that those two hold hands. I think they really do. Like, “Could’ve Been A Star”…I guess there was some kind of evaluation of your relationship to being public or having some level of fame. “Could’ve Been A Star” was actually a song that came from a friend of mine who’s an actress. Her mom always wanted to be an actress and came to America when she had my friend to basically give her all these opportunities that she hadn’t had. That touched me really deeply. I remember reading the Cher biography as well, and like her mother was this very beautiful charismatic woman who changed her name and had all these different jobs and she would watch her mom, like calling up casting directors to get to get like parts of the extras.

I was exploring that mother / daughter dynamic with fame and celebrity and desire to, you know, have like this expression that didn’t come to fruition for one of them. I guess like those two songs marry together because, kind of going back through like writing my memoirs and stuff, trying to remember who the 13, 14 year old version of myself was. That was like writing in her diary saying what she wanted to be when she grew up, and some of the kinds of emails I was writing to people or like, boys, I had crushes on, I was quite fantastical. Being like 31 or 32 and I was quite fantastical about ways for it to come true. And so I wrote this song about why I model, actress…

WXPN: Absolutely. I’ve read some of my old journals recently because my mom’s trying to get rid of literally everything out of their basement. I’ve been, uh, catching up with young Megan. It’s been…illuminating.

SW: It is illuminating. It’s quite shocking and it’s like, kind of hard to read sometimes.

WXPN: I definitely do appreciate the fantastical nature of your album as well because that comes through with “Legendary” specifically. But I would say overall that imagery was there earlier than that too. So it’s cool to see that evolve. Anyways, I hope you enjoy your tour.

SW: Oh, I really hope you get to come and see it.

WXPN: Yeah, absolutely. Enjoy the rest of your day, and go on, Sparklemuffin.

Suki Waterhouse headlines Franklin Music Hall on Tuesday, December 10th. Bully opens, and tickets and more information are available via the WXPN Concert Calendar.