Part 1

Name: Sukie Smith
Nationality: British
Occupation: Singer, songwriter, actress
Current Release: Sukie Smith's The Glass Dress and a Ringing Bell is out via Shillingboy.
Recommendations: I recommend Factum Foundations work. As many sunrises as you can manage and vintage Schiaparelli Jewellery

If you enjoyed this Sukie Smith interview and would like to stay up to date with her music, visit her official homepage. She is also on Instagram, and Twitter.  



Where does the impulse to create something come from for you? What role do often-quoted sources of inspiration like dreams, other forms of art, personal relationships, politics etc play?

There are several reasons to create for me, sometimes a set of feelings are so overwhelming the only thing to alleviate the pressure and weight of them is to write them out, to confess to yourself the unsayable and to write absolutely unfiltered truth just so it's possible to hear the extremes and cause of the pain.

I wrote about the madness around my father’s death a lot on my album Back to the Sea, especially on “No Ghost.” I so wanted a haunting from my father, it is an attempt to communicate with him, a plea with the force that keeps us separate to let me in for a minute to speak with him again ...



It took a year to finish and during the writing of it I had a dream that an old fashion telephone spoke to me and it was my father just saying my name over and over like a ring tone. So my song spell worked maybe.

At other times, yes, dreams have served up songs whole … I woke up with the lyrics to “Pull and Twist” virtually spilling out of my mouth … I have pens and note books everywhere, for sure next to my bed and just wrote the whole lyric as I woke up. Then, still half asleep, I made chord shapes and sang the song almost as it is now.



Same as “A Ringing bell,” although that was less elegant.



I had been on a walk very early in the morning on Hampstead Heath and went to a cafe to stop feeling so spacey. But the whole lyric arrived in my head … which for me sometimes a sensation of a liquid being poured into my mind so I became utterly abstracted and muttering, asking the waitress for paper and then writing out the song which made me sort of cry at the end hahaha … I have not been back there.

For you to get started, do there need to be concrete ideas – or what some have called a 'visualisation' of the finished work? What does the balance between planning and chance look like for you?

I love love love the process of writing a song. For me there are several definite stages.

If a song starts to form itself in my mind I will make time, if I can, to listen to it, maybe with my guitar, voice notes or garage band ready to record an idea and then just let what ever half formed thing exist .Then that recording can sit around for a while and join itself in my mind with other embryonic phrases which is joyous when it happens.

I was on tour in Italy and I had most of my song “Back to the Sea” written. We had a day off and my cellist and I had a flat to ourselves and we were being quiet and then the chorus forced its self into our peace and made us both cry haha. Maybe it articulated tour malaise or tour exhaustion:

“if we get no sleep, how do we dream / Rise up, come on, rise up, be strong / this freedom is so hard won we must make our bones count.“

And there is a time when you can’t be patient anymore and it’s time to level with the song and work out what it wants and what’s missing. I sometimes draw out the whole thing, like a story board or an image which I am describing in my song and by seeing it I realise there is a missing piece, someone in my drawing hasn’t made it into the song for example ...

“Strange Love,” I had forgotten to speak about the actions an individual who the song was about was doing which caused the concern … which meant the little rap at the beginning was included.



I do sometimes have a planned ambition, like a tempo or time signiture … but a song will always have its way. If it doesn’t; like it, it won’t do it.

Writing to order is a very interesting discipline and if its score or a specific song for a film etc. I like the collaboration with a director. It’s a very different writing method, I plot the points a song or instrumental has to reach and write within those parameters. The atmosphere and intention of the dialogue also dominate but authentic music happens, just shaped differently.

I think being an actress and knowing my job is to fulfil a directors vision while at the same time creating my own character within the scriptwriters narrative really helps writing music this way. You have to totally be submerged and rehearsing a play helped understand that this more ordered writing process isn’t a threat to a song, it’s just structure and there is immense freedom still in that.

I wrote “You lead I follow” for a film and some of the scripts dialogue became part of the lyric ... It has a life of its own as the lead track to my album Gone Before Morning now.



Is there a preparation phase for your process? Do you require your tools to be laid out in a particular way, for example, do you need to do 'research' or create 'early versions'?

Preparation is mostly silence and solitude for me … I sometimes write great streams of consciousness, abstract, rambling pages and pages and then go through it at a later date and find lines I like. There are often lots of accidental rhymes in the lines.

For “Move Towards the Storm,” the subject matter was so enormous, writing about being hospitalised for a long while and being in intensive care, in and out of consciousness, recovering from and preparing for huge operations, the sensation of the ward, the non existent silence, the machines, the strange freedom of being utterly reliant on other humans for every possible action …

That was a song that needed a lot of thinking about and sitting in the in-between space that is conscious thought and somewhere else … Literally walking around my memory and observing the action ...



My experience of hospital was very sonic. That’s what I think of most if I revisit it at all … whispers, beeps, crying, telephones, monitors, footsteps all of that stuff …

And yes I do research. For “Fixed Star,” I read about what they really are and also I read a lot about the instrument that was discovered in a ship wreck which could calculate, to incredible accuracy, where the planets would be on any given year … So wild …



Do you have certain rituals to get you into the right mindset for creating? What role do certain foods or stimulants like coffee, lighting, scents, exercise or reading poetry play?

Not consciously. But I do sort of creep up on a song or a desire to want to write, I might find a part of my flat that I don’t normally sit in … a space between some furniture or on the stairs … slightly unfamiliarising myself with my space.

Songs can be a bit of an exorcism, not pretty .. sometimes they are really private .. or I am, not wanting to be really obvious in my intention to maybe make a song … sometimes being wildly tired or hungover is good … sometimes its just not! Sometimes reading or hearing a line in a film is really inspiring.

The first line in "The Witches Daughter" was exactly that, I was just stunned at how accurately that resonated with my experience at the time …



What do you start with? And, to quote a question by the great Bruce Duffie: When you come up with a musical idea, have you created the idea or have you discovered the idea?

It's both. I might be playing chords and then make a melody or a phrase might sing itself to me all ready with a lyric, or a line will demand to be part of a song. And yes, I don’t know what is first, the intention or the quest to find what is to be found.

But if you go looking, songs are there … interior life, external substance, I can’t tell the difference … this is only with the initial creation of songs … the mixing / arrangement / levels is utterly and emphatically coming to the sound I know is correct for the song.

When do the lyrics enter the picture? Where do they come from? Do lyrics need to grow together with the music or can they emerge from a place of their own?

Lyrics … I think they are perhaps the most important element to my songwriting … or they were, I am consciously addressing that now in the way I write … But the words of a song feel so very powerful as they have such intention in them. They are chosen for their meaning, their rhythm and their nuance… I am very much drawn to narrative songs.

It’s interesting when an album or collection of songs is complete which words have repeated themselves. On In Case of Emergency, I seemed to say the word “quiet“ a lot and that whole album was recorded with the engineer's new born baby sleeping in the next room so maybe that was part of it.

The Glass Dress and a Ringing Bell has the word “Light” in titles, Into the Light in lyrics and also the request to “Move.” Move towards the storm …

There is a lot of action in this record … how can there not be, it's a document of life over death.

What makes lyrics good in your opinion? What are your own ambitions and challenges in this regard?

Oh when an outrageous rhyme happens … from the way it's possible to twist the sound of a word to melt into a satisfying match with another lyric. In “We Try Not to Think About It Now,” that happened a lot.



It's a huge diary of a song, I was documenting events that happened in trips to Los Angeles and couplets just kept forming that were all true and all rhymed with themselves. It was really unforced, apart from one line about “Orange Blossom Groves,” I just wanted to sing about places with sunset colours, everything apart from that reference is a snap shot of reality.

“LA with your pink and gold, LA orange Blossom Grove” - they exist but I didn’t actually see them so that was a purposeful image just for the colour and the rhyme ….