FEATURE: Spotlight: Suki Waterhouse

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Suki Waterhouse

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THERE are a couple of interviews…

that I want to bring in, as I am spotlighting the amazing Suki Waterhouse. Before that, and as her album comes out on Friday, let’s get to that first. The London-born artist, actor and model is releasing her debut for Sub Pop, I Can’t Let Go. It is a gorgeous album that is already trending and earning success, even before it has been physically released! This is what Rough Trade write about Waterhouse’s upcoming album:

“Nowadays, voice memos, videos, and pictures chronicle our lives in real-time. We trace where we’ve been and reveal where we’re going. However, Suki Waterhouse catalogs the most intimate, formative, and significant moments of her life through songs. You might recognize her name or her work as singer, songwriter, actress but you’ll really get to know the multi-faceted artist through her music. Memories of unrequited love, fits of longing, instances of anxiety, and unfiltered snapshots interlock like puzzle pieces into a mosaic of well-worn country, ‘90s-style alternative, and unassuming pop. She writes the kind of tunes meant to be grafted onto dusty old vinyl from your favorite vintage record store, yet perfect for a sun-soaked festival stage. Her first album for Sub Pop, I Can’t Let Go, is a testament to her powers as a singer and songwriter.

In Suki’s words: “The album is called I Can’t Let Go because for years it felt like I was wearing heavy moments on my sleeve and it just didn’t make sense to do so anymore. There’s so much that I’ve never spoken about. Writing music has always been where it felt safe to do so. Every song for the record was a necessity. In many ways, I’ve been observing my life as an outsider, even when I’ve been on the inside. It’s like I was a visitor watching things happen.”

Growing up in London, Suki gravitated towards music’s magnetic pull. She listened to the likes of Alanis Morissette and Fiona Apple, and Oasis held a special place in her heart. She initially teased out this facet of her creativity with a series of singles, generating nearly 20 million total streams independently. Nylon hailed her debut track, “Brutally,” as “what a Lana Del Rey deep cut mixed with Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides, Now’ would sound like.” In addition to raves from Garage, Vice and Lemonade Magazine, DUJOR put it best: “Suki Waterhouse’s music has swagger.” Suki is constantly consuming artists of all stripes, and, in the lead-up to making I Can’t Let Go, she was particularly drawn to the work of Sharon Van Etten, Valerie June, Garbage, Frazey Ford, Lou Doillon, and Lucinda Williams. After falling in love with Hiss Golden Messenger’s Terms of Surrender, she reached out to its producer Brad Cook (Bon Iver, War On Drugs, Snail Mail, Waxahatchee) to help define the sound of I Can’t Let Go. On I Can’t Let Go, Suki not only catalogs her life up to this point, but she also fulfills a lifelong ambition.

“When I’ve been stuck or feel out of touch with a sense of inner meaning and outer purpose, I’ve found both through searching my memories and finding those events buried in the shadowy areas of the psyche where they were ignored,” she says. “So many times of change in my life have required return visits—especially at the transitions through to the next stages. The album is an exploration of those moments when there is nothing left to lose. What is left and can’t be thrown away is the self”.

Make sure that you go and order this remarkable L.P. It is going to be one of the most impressive and lauded debuts of this year. I am going to source a couple of recent interviews from the remarkable Suki Waterhouse. With a successful acting career, I think that Waterhouse brings her skills, talent and experience into her music. Not to say that her songs are cinematic and dramatic. I feel her songs are more nuanced and stronger because she has disciplines other artists do not. I am looking forward to reading reviews for I Can’t Let Go this week. An artist I would really love to interview one day, The Guardian spoke with Waterhouse recently. It is interesting reading how I Can’t Let Go came together:

“This is not a golden era for women writing love songs about men. With the exception of Lana Del Rey, the last decade of female-fronted pop has been defined by revenge anthems and breakup bangers, with “dump him” a common refrain. But Suki Waterhouse isn’t sold.

“I find the whole ‘dump him’ thing very toxic,” she whispers into her oat milk latte in a quiet nook of Notting Hill’s Electric cinema in west London. “I get it, but it’s important not to underestimate how incredible it is to be with somebody. And also how yummy and wonderful masculinity can be when it’s the good kind, when it’s warm and protecting … ” She pauses, smiling knowingly. “Anyway, let’s not go on that tangent!”

It is hard not to feel that this latest addition to her pop-cultural portfolio is a little … low stakes? “I’m really aware that it’s like: ‘Oh, you’ve done modelling, you’ve done acting, and now you’re gonna give me this album.’ I’m really wary of people just being like: ‘Fuck off!’” she admits. “I totally get it.”

Rather than manifesting a sudden burst of confidence, I Can’t Let Go came together like a photo album: snapshots of different times, places and people. The breathy acoustic track Slip was written during a trip to Montreal, where she went to work with a chef-cum-musician on the recommendation of someone she met on a night out; the reverb-heavy ballad My Mind was written during the pandemic in her west London flat, where building work meant the windows were blacked out for months; Melrose Meltdown was inspired not by the trip she took with a friend to Bhutan (“We were drinking too much and feeling a bit shit”), but by a text she read on the plane home. “She was showing me some messages and I was moved by her alcoholic ex-boyfriend, who’s really quite a good poet in a way.”

The album has a rose-tinted energy, with restrained backdrops that marry 60s girl-group sentiments with dreamy modern pop and lyrics that would be at home on early 2010s Tumblr – there’s plenty of “crying on your milk-white sheets” and getting “faded into oblivion”. It’s very two drinks into an evening, when emotions are generous and arise as if out of nowhere.

“I definitely approached it thinking quite cinematically,” she says, citing Thelma & Louise and Fruits of My Labor by the country singer Lucinda Williams as inspirations for her goal of making something that “sounds good in the middle of the desert”. Fittingly for the subject matter, the space they were meant to record in fell through and they ended up in a wedding hall, with Cook and members of Bon Iver bringing Waterhouse’s demos to life in a bridesmaids’ room crowded with makeup lights and “Live, Laugh, Love” cushions”.

Just before wrapping up, I want to bring in The Line of Best Fit’s feature. They are tipping Suki Waterhouse for big success; a name that everyone needs to know about. A huge talent who is a sensational artist, they tell us more about how Waterhouse came to prominence:

“After being plucked from obscurity as a teenager from a London clothes shop, at a whiplash-inducing speed, Waterhouse became synonymous with the last decade of British fashion – the epoch of the ‘it’ girl – where she, alongside the likes of Cara Delavigne and Alexa Chung, crafted narratives of cool. She became a poster girl for the likes of Burberry and Tommy Hilfiger, gracing global covers of Vogue and just about every glossy surface in between. The camera has proven to be her greatest ally: her film debut in 2012 felt like a natural pivot, having since appeared in the likes of Love Rosie (2014) and Assassination Nation (2018), with an upcoming role in the Amazon Studios adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s bestselling novel, Daisy Jones and The Six.

But this is not a bolt from the blue, not the product of careful strategy calculated at a boardroom table. Her love affair with music predates anything else. I Can’t Let Go came from a youth spent caught between airport terminals, rare moments of suspension where she could breathe, for a moment, amidst the chaos.

IN THIS PHOTO: Parri Thomas for The Line of Best Fit

Waterhouse is 30-year-old now, with as many notebooks for as the years she has lived, their pages heavy with the details of experience. She has been penning lyrics in departure lounges since the age of 17, when the first, tentative foundations of I Can’t Let Go were laid. “My favourite thing is to be in an airport with a gross orange juice, staring at everybody in this weird, in-between space, dreaming of what it’s going to be like when I get there and thinking of everything I’ve left behind,” she tells me after the shoot has wrapped, pulling on a hoodie and swapping her boots for trainers, deconstructing the image as quickly as she created it. “I had a bad habit of just blowing my life up right before I had to get on a plane, quickly leaving people behind.”

I Can’t Let Go began as one of the few aspects of her life that was truly her own. Waterhouse has often been forced to shrink into the shadow of the man she loves; her own accomplishments were treated as merely incidental among the surgical dissections of her personal life in the press, particularly surrounding her high-profile relationship with Bradley Cooper, and her current partner, Robert Pattinson. It’s a reality which had been echoed in the Gossip Girl reboot, when a character said: “When are you going to get it? As far as the press is concerned, he’s R-Patz and you’re Suki nobody.”

IN THIS PHOTO: Parri Thomas for The Line of Best Fit

So true to life are Waterhouse’s lyrics that each of the ten songs of I Can’t Let Go are perfect crystallisations of the moments they’re drawn from, like bubbles of air from a different era preserved in ice. She says, “Everything was moving so fast throughout my twenties that the songs I wrote had to be about the something – or the somebody – that imprinted that time. When I listen to it, I know exactly where I was, how I fell in love, and how I tried to fill a lot of those voids. I can connect all of that through my songs: how I destructed, or came together, at different points. They serve as memory cornerstones for times that would maybe otherwise be quite blurry.”

It would be easy to assume that Waterhouse’s lyrics are the product of rose-tinted fantasy and poetic embellishment in the vein of Lana Del Rey, but she insists, “The details are always way crazier than I would say.” One of her first songs, unattached to a project and released only to build her confidence as an artist, was “Valentine”. Crafted in the image of her idol Aimee Mann with its ethereal, feather-light acoustics, almost every aspect of the lyrics, as well as its artwork, carried reverberations of reality. “’Valentine’ was made from a Valentine’s Day poem that I’d been sent, and was sending back,” she explains. “The artwork was the card that it was sent on to the hotel. I was taking it one song at a time, so it was incredibly detailed. The lyrics have fantasy vibes, but it was actually what was happening.” On the track, she sings: “If only you could be here sometimes / Then I could control my symptoms / You could drive from Malibu out to LAX / Take me out for dinner, put me straight back on the jet.”

IN THIS PHOTO: Parri Thomas for The Line of Best Fit

Every musical and artistic choice of I Can’t Let Go serves an emotion. In the music she loves, she says, “I always want to feel heartbroken for someone I’ve never met.” Waterhouse finds this quality mirrored in scorched, summer doldrums of Lucinda Williams’ “Fruit of My Labour”, and Mazzy Star’s otherworldly “Fade Into You”. But she also finds it in the poetry of Ariana Reines; Duncan Hannah’s tales of the near-mythic summer of love in 20th Century Boys, and Natasha Stagg’s novel Surveys, about a relationship straining under the glare of fame and social media. “I’ve written so many songs that I love but don’t make it to their final formation, after chipping away, chipping away, chipping away,” she tells me. “But the ones that really excite you stick around like an old friend, and you keep giving energy to them.”

Though people may expect Waterhouse’s grip on the past to loosen through making the record, the true realisation she has had is better than that: there is no shame in old wounds. “I think it can be kind of alienating, in some ways, when you appear as though you’ve moved on from something when you’re still working through it. Even if a long time has passed and your perceptions have widened, there’s still not a completely closed door. There was a frustration and restlessness with myself for not being able to truly let go of things that had shaped me. It was all about healing myself and moving out of a place that I’d been stuck in for a long time,” she tells me. “I’m excited for the part where it feels like I won’t own it anymore”.

I will leave things there. I am a big fan of Suki Waterhouse, and I can see from her social media how excited she is about I Can’t Let Go coming out on Friday – and how excited her fans are in turn! Released a few days before my birthday, I am going to check the album out and get myself an early gift! Suki Waterhouse is a wonderful artist. She is so compelling to hear and read in interviews. I will try and catch her live if she plays London soon. Where does she go from here? I think she is based most of the time in Los Angeles, so getting back to the U.K. might not be that easy. We will get more albums from Waterhouse; her acting career will continue to grow, and I am sure there will be other irons in the fire. One can tell that music is a true love. Rather than her being a model and actor ‘giving music a go’, Suki Waterhouse seems to have come to one of her biggest passions late. I actually think that she has the maturity of hindsight now to be able to release an album that is mature and richer than what she might have released in her twenties. Even though her earliest music came out back in 2016/2017, I feel what she is releasing now is her strongest work yet. I cannot wait to see where she heads next. The amazing, inspiring, intoxicating and gigantically talented Suki Waterhouse is…