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.

Adia Victoria: “Heathen” (NON-COMM 2019)