Suki Waterhouse on Speaking Up, Making Music, and Opening for Taylor Swift

Not so long ago, Suki Waterhouse realized something: She finally feels like she owns her story. She can read the old tabloid headlines and see the paparazzi photos, reflect on past heartaches, and look at her life’s challenges from a place of acceptance.

“I didn’t feel like I owned my story at all or any of the stuff that happened to me,”  the singer, songwriter, and actress says over Zoom. “It’s the first time I’m thinking about this out loud, but being a little older … It’s entirely mine. And things happened to me, but I’m also the hero of my own story.”

She adds: “It’s all mine, and it’s kind of fabulous.”

That sense of ownership that Waterhouse has embraced takes center stage across her upcoming album, Memoir of a Sparklemuffin, out Sept. 13. The LP — which she named after a real-life species of Australian spider with a “complicated existence” — finds Waterhouse singing about her life with no fear of how people will react, and with a confident cheekiness that comes with experience.

“Starting as a model, it was never thought that you would get to speak or talk about your side of the story or make art about that. It just wasn’t even an option,” she says. “It was very much like, you’re going to be this image and adhere to this image, and it’s better if you don’t speak too much.”

Sparklemuffin has songs that reflect on her relationship with fame (she became a tabloid fixture years ago when she dated Bradley Cooper), losing love and finding it, and her ever-evolving career (“Model, actress, whatever,” as she describes herself on one song). The album arrives a year after she introduced herself to a new audience as Karen Sirko in Daisy Jones and the Six, an experience that contributed to the singer feeling “looser in a lot of ways” in the studio.

“My last record felt so definitive of a dark period that I was trying to move on from,” she says, referencing her 2022 debut, I Can’t Let Go. “I felt like I’d be trapped in this vortex of this feeling forever. This one feels a little bit more like, ‘OK, we survived this. What are we doing tonight? We’re up.’”

There’s one track on the album she probably wouldn’t have written before, called “Lawsuit.” Waterhouse sings to an ex who’s not doing so well at life today, as she sarcastically wishes him “good luck with that lawsuit.”

“That was maybe something I would’ve felt too afraid to write,” she says. “But again, it’s your story. I feel like I have that permission now. You never want to give everyone the full details of anything but … It’s about a bunch of women all connecting about the same guy that they dated and being like, ‘We’ve all got eyes on you and we’re not alone anymore.’” (She doesn’t say who the song is about.)

She points to the single “To Love” as the track that aligns most with where she is today. She wrote the song following a pretty normal morning: She woke up, made her bed, and took a stroll to the corner store to buy a KitKat. “There are so many different ways that my path could have gone, but there was an angel sign being like, ‘You’re in the right place, and you have love around you that’s really beautiful.’”

With that setting in mind, Waterhouse completed the album earlier this year, while pregnant with her first child with her fiancé, actor Robert Pattinson. Although she is quick to pass on questions about her personal life with Pattinson, saying she’d rather “keep it to the music,” she does say that love is a “strong component in everything I write about.” (They welcomed their baby in March, and she submitted the album to her label, Sub Pop, just five days before giving birth.) 

There’s a gorgeous, Lana Del Rey-esque track toward the end of the record called “Legendary,” where Waterhouse sings about finding peace alongside a “worthy man” with a perfect smile: “Can’t believe I get to have this, slayed the dragons for this legendary love,” she sings.

“Love constantly shows up in how you deal with life, how you develop as a person, who you choose to love, and how you show up in a relationship. It’s like this constant fountain of inspiration,” she says. “It just never really stops.”

Waterhouse is still getting used to being celebrated for her music. Just minutes before speaking with Rolling Stone, she announced that she’s joining Taylor Swift as an opener for an Eras Tour stop in London on Aug. 17. “I was dreaming, dreaming, dreaming of this happening,” she says with a smile. “I was manifesting super hard. So when [I found out], I was like, yes, dreams can come true.”