'I Can Still Hear You': Suzzy Roche On Building An Album During Bleak Times

On October 30th, the new album from Suzzy Roche & Lucy Wainwright Roche will be available to the world after quite the personal triumph over circumstances to see it through during these disrupted times. For Suzzy Roche, I Can Still Hear You was already going to be a reflection of some of her most difficult experiences, including the passing of her sister Maggie Roche, and the disturbing but necessary look at the way women's roles in society are still limited and restricted, revealed by the Me Too Movement.

Already a deeply meaningful project, the album was then interrupted after only a short period of recording in Nashville by the pandemic. Deciding to complete the album meant distance recording and mixing from home and an extreme challenge became an extreme triumph for the mother-daughter team. Another pandemic triumph for Suzzy Roche is the release of her new novel, The Town Crazy.

In the end I Can Still Hear You takes in our times even more fully than Suzzy Roche and Lucy Wainwright Roche could have imagined at the outset, which made its timely release all that more important. While they hope to bring something "soothing" to peoples' lives, you'd also be very rewarded by looking into the themes interlaced with the music, reminding us of the value of human connection and of human dignity, too.

Tower's PULSE! was very honored to speak to Suzzy Roche about her life in music and the journey toward releasing I Can Still Hear You.

Hannah Means-Shannon: I think New York has become kind of the poster child for how to band together and handle a terrible situation and I’ve been proud to see that.

Suzzy Roche: One of the things about New York, for all its rough and tumbleness, you’re always having to make way for other people here. That’s the nature of living in a big city like this. And also for people of all kinds of backgrounds. So there’s a certain amount of tolerance and respect.

HMS: I know that you’re an actress too, and you’ve been part of theater in New York, but how big a part has New York played in your musical life? Would you say its identity has been a big influence on you?

SR: Oh yes. I grew up in New Jersey and I was always trying to get into New York. I grew up in a very small town, where a lot of people never even went into New York, even though it was only an hour away. I knew that I wanted to be here, and I immediately came here when I could. New York is very deeply in my DNA at this point.

HMS: The style of music that you performed with your sisters, and in your own work, draws on musical traditions that people wouldn’t necessarily associate with New Jersey or New York, necessarily. Do you see it in the context of Americana music now or do you still see it as something that’s less common in urban areas?

SR: Well, the music that I performed with my sisters, I call it Roche music. It’s completely unlike anything else. We grew up, as I said, in a sheltered town, and culturally sheltered. We shared a room. We made stuff up. We thought we were sounding like everyone else, but that was not the case. I think we just enjoyed creating stuff together. As far as influences and stuff, back in the day when we were children, we were listening to the radio, which had all different things on it. Everything wasn’t so separated like it is now. I think we were influenced by many things, but we were completely just making stuff up.

HMS: That’s wonderful. I agree about “Roche music”. I’ve heard other people speak about the importance of radio shows when they were young, listening to things like the top 40 with no genre divisions at all.

SR: That is really true. It’s also reflected in everything else that’s going on. Everything is so sub-divided now.

HMS: It’s true. Many young musicians who are working digitally are feeling like the cross-genre words they are trying to use are just becoming impossible to decipher.

SR: There are pluses and minuses to these things. One of the most exciting things about music right now is that you can do it yourself.

HMS: Oh, yes. Which is partly how this album is managing to be released. I want to thank you for deciding to go ahead and release this, but in your case the perseverance you showed is outstanding.

SR: Honestly, it was really bleak. We had started recording in Nashville for ten days, and immediately after we came home, the lockdown happened. Lucy and I really didn’t even see each other for a couple of months, aside from waving from a distance. So we had to set up makeshift recording studios in our apartments. We did a lot of singing, a lot of guitar playing, and we sent tracks back and forth to Nashville. But so much of it was done in the most dreary, bleak atmosphere.

Every day I’d say, “I can’t do this. I can’t do it.” So much else was going on and it seemed so unnatural. But I was also hanging on this fact that there was this project to work on. Because when you’re recording, you forget about everything else for a while. Also, I did feel very strongly that this record was really about what happened, and we wanted to release it during this year. It is about a very specific time. I don’t know that I’ve ever had a record be related so specifically to a time.

HMS: That’s a great point. Not every album is tied to intimately into a musician’s life as this one is. Some are, and some musicians would say that certain albums had that status for them. But even when you were going into making this album in Nashville, it was already very much tied to a time in your life, wasn’t it?

SR: I would have to say it goes back to the day that my sister died, which was on the night of the inauguration of Trump. That was the beginning of the nightmare that we are now living through. And experiencing the Me Too Movement and the Black Lives Matter Movement. I had written a bunch of songs, but it began to be clear what the underlying theme was, and that it had a lot to do with the Me Too Movement. And with the underlying misogyny that’s not even really picked up on. Everything that we had been working toward since my childhood. And now, losing Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

HMS: I was going to ask you about how you felt about that, but I didn’t know if that was just another hard thing to add to the list.

SR: I feel devastated. I was devastated when Trump was elected. I cried for days. Mostly I cried for the young people, and the young women. I feel like that now. I hope that things don’t go back to the Dark Ages for women. I wanted to make a record that had an underlying theme of women and I didn’t want to make any apology there.

HMS: That’s wonderful. Thank you for doing that.

SR: It’s not obvious, probably, to a listener, but it is definitely in the fabric of the record.

HMS: That’s something that’s very interesting about this record, its subtlety. I suppose you could have framed it as a protest record, but that’s not really what it is. It fits in with your work over time, but that aspect is turned up to a certain degree without displacing other elements.

SR: What happened to me with all of this is that I realized, though The Roches were a very feminist group, and though I’ve always felt myself to be a very strong feminist, I realized how many concessions I’ve made in my life to the basic premise that women are less than men. Or women are sex symbols and the like. I think I didn’t realize the extent of it. It’s kind of like an onion that keeps getting unpeeled. I was one of those people, and I’m very grateful to the Me Too Movement for waking me up, even though I thought I was awake.

HMS: It’s these assumptions that become like the furniture around us because we accept them in order to deal with the issues of immediate survival. Meanwhile it all continues to fester.

SR: Yes, and through the years, there were certain things that you just had to do if you wanted to continue working in the world. Now I really like the idea that those things are being shattered, even though there’s the last gasp of those who have the power now trying to undo women’s ability to be who they are. And for female artists to be able to express the way that they want to express.

HMS: I heard a very scary story recently from a Rock band who told me that they continued to get hate messages and attacks simply for having a female lead vocalist. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. How can that still be going on?

SR: I know that we got it a lot as we were coming up. We didn’t look right. We didn’t dress right. We played our own instruments. I don’t think we were as aware of how radical we really were, but we were. We came up against an enormous amount of resistance for it, even though we had fans, too.

HMS: Do you think that you were a group of women made it more possible, psychologically, to get through that? The fact that you were in it together?

SR: Yes, and we were also in that kind of sister cocoon. We were fiercely passionate and we just went ahead. Now that I’m older, working with Lucy is so interesting, because she was raised in a matriarchy and there is not one feeble bone in her body about this issue. And all of her friends, too. That gives me a lot of hope.

HMS: I was very fortunate in that regard, too. We sometimes hashed things out because my mother and grandmother would accept things from their generations that I didn’t think they should accept, but I’m incredibly grateful for them. If I hadn’t, what would I be assuming and accepting now?

There’s one song on this album that’s pretty scary, in a way, “Joseph D”. The narrative really brings out the reality of these ideas.

SR: That’s a very direct result of all the things I’m talking about. I’m also a novelist, so I do see things in terms of characters. This record is also full of characters. The thing about Joseph D. is that he gets away with behaving like this and then sees himself as a victim. He’s an abuser and sees himself as a victim, and that’s familiar to me and all of us right now, watching who we are watching. That is a characteristic of these little babies who are men and abuse women. I wanted to write about that character but in the way that he sees himself.

HMS: That’s the part that rings really true for sure.

SR: You start to get to thinking, “Why is this person doing that?” And you see it from their point of view, and maybe they were abused, but that’s not an excuse. But the point of the story is that the person who was abused gets out. I think that goes to the heart of what I’m talking about. I think many people have remained in relationships like that and they don’t get out. But I want to say, “You can get out.”

HMS: That’s still a very necessary reminder, I agree.

With some of the cover songs on the album, the theme grows and continues in different ways. We’ve got “Factory Girl” and “Jane” on this album. What made you choose “Factory Girl”? I know it was part of the lineup for The Roches back in the day and you have some special guests on that song.

SR: “Factory Girl” is a song that, of course, is in praise of a woman who is a worker and is not going to be owned. She’s going to be her own self. The person who is enamored of her knows how special she is. I love that song. I loved performing it with my sisters. Lucy performs regularly with The Indigo Girls. I love Amy [Ray] and Emily [Saliers] deeply.

We interacted when they were just starting out and they were fans of The Roches. There’s a deep mutual respect there and to have them on the song completes the circle. Lucy met them first when she was a little girl and now she plays with them in their set. They are strong women and great role models. That’s a real special one for me and for Lucy.

“Jane” is a song written by my sister Maggie, and she wrote it when she was just a teenager. Lucy always loved that song, and it’s a love song to a woman sung by a woman. Lucy’s singing on it is just so pure.

HMS: Great choices.

How did you handle collaboration? I imagine that you and Lucy could get together, to some extent.

SR: Literally, I sang, and she sang in our separate places, and sent each other files. I comped everything together. I had to learn how to do all that.

HMS: I was going to ask if you’ve ever done anything like that before!

SR: I’ve done it minimally, but I’ve never done it to this extent. But the thing is, the vocals sound so great on the record and I’m amazed. How is that even possible? Half the time I was in my pajamas in a darkened room. And yet it doesn’t really sound like that.

HMS: Did you have any moments of extreme frustration trying to make it work?

SR: Yes, there were many tearful sessions spent with myself because I couldn’t figure out why the machine wasn’t working properly. Also, just getting the singing in the zone where I wanted it to be since I was doing it in a vacuum like that.

HMS: It’s amazing what you’ve managed to do here. Putting albums together during Covid is like an uphill climb on a mountain based on what I’m hearing.

SR: There are a lot of people who have said, “Let’s stop and we’ll pick it up next year.” And there’s definitely something to be said for that, but for me, I couldn’t imagine how I was going to get through it without a project to work on.

HMS: I can understand that. The single and video for “I Can Still Hear You” are out, and I noticed a tie-in with the album cover art of the window with the heart lights shining.

SR: One of the first things that happened during the shutdown, Lucy came over with one of those heart lights to put in the window. And she has one in her window. Something we both noticed is that at a certain time of night, the hearts reflected on several walls. So she took a photograph of her hearts and we decided that should be the cover.

HMS: Wow. It’s a haunting image but also a very special image. It really speaks to the times. Of course, in many places, people are hanging things in windows to say, “I’m still in here.”

SR: Exactly, that and the clapping at seven o’clock is a way for people to communicate with each other. As time went by, it became more fanatical, like people screaming out of their apartments, “I’m here! I’m here!”

HMS: Like sound therapy. And that makes its way into the video. It’s really cool that the video features New York so prominently.

SR: And another video, for “I Think I am a Soul” features New York prominently, too. The hearts show up again in the song, “Get the Better”, which is the one song that Lucy and I have ever written together, and it was written in lockdown. To me, that song captures the feeling of being in your apartment like that.

To me, it was like being in a dream, and you’re interacting with your subconscious mostly. There’s a great video for that one, too. The song takes place in the city, but the person who made this gorgeous video set it out in the middle of nowhere. It’s beautiful. The other thing about this record that’s significant is that there are eleven creatures on the record.

HMS: Right! That’s something that I also wouldn’t have necessarily expected on this record, to have these natural elements. Do you know why you did that, or did it just kind of happen?

SR: It began to dawn on us as we were working on it that there are pigs, and dogs, and birds. It was great, almost as if they were helping us. That’s how it seemed to me.

HMS: It’s so interesting, because often in the absence of nature, that’s when it looms large for us, like you were saying about the subconscious. It’s like being absent from someone and feeling like they are with you. The animal aspects made me feel like there was a longing for nature.

SR: Right, and because of the dream-like condition everyone was in who was making this, that it was also meshing together with a kind of dark fairytale. You know how in old fairytales and picture-books, there are always birds and chipmunks and things in the pages?

HMS: Yes, that’s perfect! They are always hiding in the little details of the illustrations.

SR: That’s exactly what happened with this. I think fairytales are very iconic and they really do tap into deep feelings, kind of like opera does.

HMS: The emotional arcs of those stories read very true and can help us process a lot in our lives.

SR: One of the things that both Lucy and I feel very strongly about doing in our music is to soothe. We like it to sound soothing and to speak to people, not in a sugar-coated way, but to try to be comforting and mean something to the people who listen to it.