Suki Waterhouse — The Coolest Place

When I call Suki Waterhouse, we both have our cameras turned off. I have a towel bundled atop a wet head of hair, and Suki informs me she’s decided to spend the whole day in bed. It’s afternoon in New York, and morning for me in New Zealand. “It’s been a really crazy but very fun week,” she says, referring to the press tour she’s just wrapped for her new show, Daisy Jones & The Six. “Today I’ve just retired to bed. It’s 2pm here and I haven’t even roused myself, I’m just going to stay completely horizontal today.”

This quiet moment is rare in what’s been a high-frequency year so far. We’re only in the third month of 2023 when we speak, but Suki has already toured the United States to promote her debut album, I Can’t Let Go. Titled The Coolest Place in the World, the tour saw Suki and her three other bandmates go cross-country in a tour bus, playing 23 shows in the space of just a month. On March 3rd, coincidentally the same day as Daisy Jones & The Six dropped on Amazon, she released single To Love – a dreamy snapshot of the luckiness of being in love, and the journey it takes to get to it.

The multi-hyphenate Londoner has always been music-obsessed, and her new show was a portal to deep-dive into one of her favourite eras of song – the 70s. In Daisy Jones & The Six, which is based on the novel of the same name by Taylor Jenkins Reid, Suki plays Karen Sirko, the keyboardist of a fictionalised 70s rock band. It required her to learn how to convincingly play the instrument in a short space of time, with the show’s goal to produce a whole album. It worked out, and a song from the series’ album, Aurora, hit number one on iTunes the day it was released. Let Me Down Easy is the first song by a fictional band ever to take out the spot. “I think my favourite part [of the show] was the enforced band camp,” Suki says. The cast’s core members are the six bandmates, played by a stellar cast; there’s Sam Claflin, Riley Keough, Will Harrison, Sebastian Chacon and Josh Whitehouse in the band with Suki, then Camila Morrone adds to the team as wife to Sam Claflin’s character, Billy Dunne. “It was a half dream, half nightmare having six actors who really don’t know how to play in a band together,” Suki laughs.

It was through filming the series that Suki found the confidence to make her own record. Peppered with notes on adoration, love lost to careers, the crossing of paths, and internet gossip, it’s a retrospective on the joyful but often painful and tumultuous nature of being in your 20s. At 31, Suki looks back at that decade with thankfulness for where she is now. “It’s so wonderful that I’m now able to advocate for myself It was through filming the series that Suki found the confidence to make her own record. Peppered with notes on adoration, love lost to careers, the crossing of paths, and internet gossip, it’s a retrospective on the joyful but often painful and tumultuous nature of being in your 20s. At 31, Suki looks back at that decade with thankfulness for where she is now. “so much better, and have boundaries in a way I probably never could have had 10 years ago,” she says. “I have wonderful friends and so many great people around me and I think I’m able to be a little more vulnerable and lean on people a bit more. I’m able to parent myself in a way that I don’t think I really would have been able to a few years ago.”

Suki’s writing process is an insight into her naturally sensitive, empathic nature. “I haven’t really mastered how to write songs about something that’s not incredibly personal,” she muses. “There has to be an upheaval or I have to get super obsessed or struck by somebody else’s life. If something has happened in a close friend of mine’s life, and if I’m really invested, it could be something like that.” For each song, it begins with a phrase or a turn of phrase, she says. “To Love came from thinking about the ways that people’s paths cross. And where I could have ended up if I stayed with somebody different, or if all these different events hadn’t collided to put me exactly where I am now.”

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