Interview: Suzie Collier

Interview with Suzie Collier about creative process, musical narrative, layering sounds (geckos) and authenticity. From March 2025.

Excerpt

What do you feel about genre and the people who say I belong here and I belong here?

In terms of genre, I feel like everyone is a weird melting pot of a million different things that we’ve ever heard and love. I just want to get that out as a pure beam, just beam it out into the world in its pure form. And if that happens to touch on all these things like jazz or classical music and people can hear that then that’s great, but I just want the pureness of it to come through.

So what does it mean to give that or produce that in a pure form?

I don’t know, I guess it just has to feel honest. I kind of think that’s my only duty. Your only real duty is just to be honest to yourself and your psychological or emotional space that you’re in right now and you're experience of being in the world and, yeah, just beam it out.

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How conscious are you of your storyline? How specific are you being with the shape? Are you thinking, ‘I’d like to leave the listener here, I’d love them to feel that tension over here’?

It’s rare that I’m thinking about it in a literal way, but storytelling is like a vehicle for helping the listener to eventually feel something, building up a sense of momentum and direction, like ‘okay, we’re all in this thing together, we’re all moving towards something together.’ Trying to steer that towards a final moment where, in a really basic sense, you’ve come to the end and whoever you are at the end is different from who you were at the start. I think about anchors and having some kind of recurring thing that anchors down the whole experience so you can travel to lots of different places in a piece of music and introduce loads of different ideas, but having a central thing that brings you back I think is really important, and it helps the whole thing to feel cohesive.

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I really love a particular quote of David Byrne’s, which is: ‘creating because of instead of in spite of otherness.’ How do you feel about otherness and you in the world?

I was quite quiet in school and spent a lot of time trying to suppress any part of me that was different. I felt like my identity was made up of lots of borrowed parts of other people, trying things on and figuring out who I am like, ‘what if spoke a bit like this’ or ‘what if I dressed a bit like that’ - this weird patchwork of different things. I think with music what’s really nice is that all of those things that make you different, if you lean into them and throw them into the melting pot, it makes the music feel so much more colourful and rich and that world feels more vivid. That’s been really nice, to have a space where you can just pour yourself into fully and not have to worry about being too much or too different. The otherness is what makes it special.