Suki Waterhouse is taking authorship of her story: “I have so much belief in not silencing yourself and making it into art”
Suki Waterhouse has had to grow into the idea of owning her story. Although she’s been writing her own music since she was 16 – the same age as when she was put on the path to it girl stardom after being scouted by a modelling agency in London – she was too scared to share her songs for years.
Instead, she focused on acting, scoring roles in rom-com Love, Rosie and Pride And Prejudice And Zombies, although she is now best known as Karen in 2023’s Daisy Jones & The Six adaptation. Eventually, she started drip-feeding tracks in 2016 with ‘Brutally’, but it wasn’t until 2021 that she really stepped into the spotlight as an artist with the double threat of ‘Moves’ and ‘My Mind’ – and a Sub Pop record deal.
Her 2022 debut album, ‘I Can’t Let Go’, was a big step forward in the process of claiming authorship over her life, its incredibly personal songs exhuming old relationships and their effects on Waterhouse. Even so, she still had a way to go – a journey that she perhaps completes on her second record, ‘Memoir Of A Sparklemuffin’, released earlier this month.
More confident, more fearless and more resilient, the new record contains songs she’s said that she would previously have been too scared to write – like ‘Lawsuit’, which details a group of women bonding over the same shitty man – and others that knowingly, cheekily nod to her past work and the preconceptions that people could form from it. Her latest single, ‘Model, Actress, Whatever’, falls into the latter camp, but in it, Waterhouse also embraces her whole path as part of who she is today. “Call me a lover, disaster, whatever,” she shrugs. “Other half of my story is with me forever.”
“I’ve always been drawn to the idea of memoirs – that’s why I wanted to call the album ‘Memoir Of A Sparklemuffin’,” she shares. It’s a couple of days before the new record is released and Waterhouse is talking to NME mid-VMAs prep. Hours after we speak, she’ll be hitting the red carpet and presenting an award in New Jersey in full glam (and feathers!), but right now, she’s sat in New York, dressed in a black and red tracksuit with her legs tucked up in front of her on her chair.
“Songwriting has been my way to reflect on how I’ve received love, how I’ve given it, and how I’ve been maligned by it”
“I’m a memoir gobbler of people’s real-life stories, and I think it’s such a gift when you get to read one,” she continues, her face lighting up. “I’ve been reading Liz Phair’s book Horror Stories. I love the Jane Fonda documentary. I love reading people’s old diaries. When you’re actually allowed that glimpse into someone’s soul and their story, it’s my favourite thing ever – it’s the most inspiring thing to me.”
‘Model, Actress, Whatever’, she says, is partly about not diminishing herself anymore. “It’s me taking control of that narrative in some way. I have so much belief in not silencing yourself, not quietening yourself and going in the opposite direction and making it into art.” In its music video, she plays an actor who’s berated by her director for her “blank face” and sends up the idea of Hollywood regimens with snail mucin smoothies and kombucha. “I wanted to imbue the video with a lot of humour because, well, it’s funny,” she smiles. “I wanted to make a song called ‘Model, Actress, Whatever’ and hear that on the radio or something – ‘Suki Waterhouse, model, actress, whatever’. There’s a release and a freedom in taking the piss out of yourself a little bit.”
Listening to ‘Memoir Of A Sparklemuffin’, it feels as if Waterhouse is much more comfortable with herself and feels like she has less to prove than she perhaps once did. “I guess so,” she replies, pondering the last point. “I think it’s also getting a bit older and going into your thirties, the misogyny lessens a little bit, or maybe it’s just you getting older and understanding what’s going on a little bit more. You’re slightly afforded a little bit more respect than when you’re a young girl in your twenties.”
Now 32 and, recently, a new mum, the artist points to her baby as another factor in her feeling more at home with herself. “There’s something about having a daughter of my own that has allowed me to feel less…” She trails off and restarts on a slightly different thought. “I can look around at my life and absolutely love what I do and be so dialled in and want to be over ever single detail. I’m really in love with my project and my family and it’s been a very special time of feeling like both things are very nourishing.”
Then-impending motherhood had a big impact on ‘Memoir Of A Sparklemuffin’. Waterhouse had already finished the record and was ready to hand it in, leaving a couple of months for her to sit back, enjoy the remainder of her pregnancy and get ready to welcome her daughter. Or so she thought. When she listened to the original ten-track album again, she realised it wasn’t done. Instead of being able to faff about, she knew it needed to be finished before she gave birth. So she built a makeshift studio in her home in Los Angeles, knuckled down and turned it into the 18-track double LP that’s out in the world now.
“The beautiful thing about making this record was that I had this very physical deadline – not just one where it’s like, ‘You should turn it in then’, but a very physical one,” she laughs. “That was something that I really leaned into with this project, and not being able to leave my living room for a couple of months was probably the best thing for it.”
Being stuck in one room for two months, unable to really go out and soak up the world, might seem like an instant inspiration killer. For Waterhouse, though, it meant she had to look inward. “You’re very inspired by that time limitation and knowing that your world is about to become completely different,” she says. “You’ve got a certain amount of time where you know it’s just going to be you before becoming a mother. All of the anticipation around that all felt really inspiring.”
In that time, her creativity expanded, with Waterhouse writing more, painting and writing letters to her future child. It was also something of a reflective time for her; the idea of this new chapter and its incoming responsibilities making her interrogate her feelings in fresh ways. “I found this journal on Substack called The Moon Lists, and it was really cool to look back on it [after] because you explain all of your senses – what was that week characterised by, what were you smelling, what were you seeing,” she explains.
It’s interesting to look back on that and remember that it was raining in LA, and I was obsessed with eating cabbage and making cinnamon tea.” Even now, reflecting on her life pre-motherhood and post sparkes new things in her. “Everything is different once you have a kid but you’re also the same in a way as well. That strange contradiction is very inspiring moving forward, too.”
“When you’re actually allowed a glimpse into someone’s soul and their story, it’s my favourite thing ever”
Although ‘Memoir Of A Sparklemuffin’ feels like the work of the artist who made ‘I Can’t Let Go’ – just evolved and elevated – it also bears a striking difference. That debut album often spoke of darker experiences in love; this record sweeps you away with stories of beautiful, world-beating romance. “Now I found myself this kinda love, I can’t believe it,” Waterhouse sings over the Mazzy Star jangle of ‘To Love’. On ‘Big Love’, she traces her path from shadowier times to the present: “Thought I would die, but my body resisted it / Stared at the sun til I found it / Big, big love.”
The latter is the song she’s currently most excited for people to hear. “That one is probably one of my favourites on the record,” Waterhouse says, getting distracted for a second. “Sorry, my baby just walked out,” she explains, turning back to the camera. “I love the idea of that song – going through all this treachery to find a person I really love. I really love the imagery.”
For Waterhouse, her songs can serve a similar purpose to the prompts on The Moon Lists. “Songwriting is a great benchmark for you to look back on your own experiences – in a song, you’ve always written what’s true to you in that moment,” she explains. “So a song you wrote five or six years ago was true to you then, and that shifts as time goes by, and it can give you this really interesting palette of experiences. Songwriting has been my way to reflect on how I’ve received love, how I’ve given it, and how I’ve been maligned by it at times. I’ve reflected a lot on the consequences of my own choices, too.”
In August, just under a month before the release of ‘Memoir Of A Sparklemuffin’, Waterhouse was gifted a singular kind of experience – opening for Taylor Swift on her second London stint of ‘The Eras’ tour. “I found this photograph of me nine years ago at the ‘1989’ tour in Los Angeles, and then I was at Wembley in 2017 watching the ‘Reputation’ tour,” she recalls. “I could never have thought that one day I would be on that stage. I think I said on stage, ‘I could say this was a dream come true, but I literally have never dreamed this big’..”
On Instagram after the show, Waterhouse thanked Swift for “the unwavering support in my own journey as an artist”, nodding to the years of encouragement the superstar has shown her. “I remember a long time ago, [since] I put out my first song ‘Brutally’, she’s just always been there to be encouraging and say that she loves the songs,” she shares. “She put ‘Moves’ on her Eras playlist for before the show – that in itself was an amazing thing to happen. She’s our greatest storyteller that we have and she’s just a light to the world.”
Now, Waterhouse is preparing to take ‘Memoir…’ out on her own tour of the US – something she’s got big plans for. “That’s something I’m on the phone about all day, picking out little bits of production, like ‘What’s the shape of this leaf going to look like?’” she shares cryptically. “With this tour, I really have the opportunity to be really immersive and creative. I want this show to be a completely different experience than any of the ones before. I just want to be levelling up and making it as magical of an experience as you can possibly have.” Just as she’s taken full control of her story, Waterhouse is doing the same with all parts of her artistry – ready to turn the page on a thrilling new chapter of what will one day be her own memoir.
Suki Waterhouse’s ‘Memoir Of A Sparklemuffin’ is out now via Sub Pop. Her US headline tour begins in Denver, CO, on September 28.
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Rhian Daly
NME
