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.”
Jack White Responds After Uproar Over Taylor Swift Songwriting Comment
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Jack White posted a statement on Instagram Monday evening after numerous publications took his comments in an interview with The Guardian out of context. When discussing poetry and songwriting, White mentioned fellow musician Taylor Swift‘s style of songwriting, and explored his own approach to storytelling when creating music. Unfortunately, online outlets framed his words as a critique of the Tortured Poets star, especially when it came to headlines that quickly circulated on the internet.
“Putting this up for a day and then taking down to just put this to bed,” wrote White in the since-deleted post. “I didn’t say that I think Taylor Swift’s music was ‘boring’ or whatever click bait the net is trying to scrape together. What I was trying to say in an interview I did about poetry and lyric writing, was that I don’t find it interesting at all for ME to write about MYSELF in my own lyric writing and poetry because I think that it could be repetitive for ME to always write about and It could be uninteresting for people who listen to my music to delve into, and that imaginary characters are more attractive to me as a writer.”
White went on to acknowledge the “tremendous success” of Swift and other songwriters who have their own process, while stating that just “because I say I have a way of doing things doesn’t mean that I think that EVERYONE should do it the same way.” He added, “They should do what works for them, And they do, and it is obviously appealing to many people, and I’m glad to hear that.”
When asked by The Guardian in the article published Sunday, if any of any of his songs were entirely autobiographical, White replied, “Not too much. Now it’s become very popular in the Taylor Swift way of pop singers writing about all of their publicly aired break-ups, which I don’t find interesting at all. I think it’s a little bit boring for me to write about myself.”
White further explained, “Even if I’ve had a really interesting day, I feel like I’ve already lived that, I don’t need to go through it every time I sing this song. If it’s something really painful, I’m not going to put this important, painful thing that I went through out there for some idiot on the internet to stomp all over. So I put a percentage of that into what I do and then morph it into somebody else’s character. I can’t really learn about myself until I put it into somebody else’s shoes.”
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In his Monday statement, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee said that at times he has been “made less and less interested in doing interviews” amid the “age of this massive demand for click bait and content.” Any “scrape of anything interesting” can be used as drama and “spit out as bait,” he continued, leading White to “not want to answer questions with any sort of romance or passion or reflection as I’m too busy having to worry about accidentally triggering nonsense like this from so called ‘journalists’ and ‘editors.'”
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He ended his response to the wave of backlash following his interview by saying, “This has always been a problem as it encourages artists to give ‘safe’ answers to any question and stifles artistic vision and imagination and pushes all of us to not share anything interesting, which was one of the points I made about keeping private things private in that same interview. But yeah, content.”
ADVERTISEMENTWhite recently released Jack White: Collected Lyrics & Selected Writing Volume 1, a collection of lyrics from the artist’s solo recordings including No Name, The Raconteurs, and more, plus selected poems and writings by White, and essays by poet Adrian Matejka.