Album Notes

Hailing from Edinburgh, where she grew up surrounded by music with a father who was a hugely talented pianist and every child had to have an instrument she was sent to piano lessons at 6. After just a couple of sessions she composed her first ’piece’ on the keyboard. These initial musical experiments continued unfocused until hearing, when she was 15, Holly Tomas in the basement of a bar. The depth of the lyrics and strength of Holly’s beautiful voice instantly created a love of the acoustic style and inspired Susanna to hone her creativity towards a purpose. This introduction to singer-songwriters led to Friday nights on The Mound and a wealth of local talent where Susanna had the opportunity to cut her teeth on the local scene. Shortly after this she was granted a music scholarship for 6th form at a school in Cambridge. Here musical theory and practice were added to the mix as the emphasis was mainly on the classical side of music, though she became a feature of the bi-annual acoustic concerts playing her original material. This breadth of experience was added to the layers of her songwriting and began to head her towards the direction her songwriting would eventually take. After school she lived in London on and off for about 5 years, latterly playing regularly with The Giant Pygmy Orchestra. She did many things during this time including working in the only non-porno video shop in Soho, buying fridges for the homeless, selling credit cards to people in Sainsbury’s, working in bars and kitchens and studying, before finally dropping out of uni and coming back to Scotland to start a family in 2006. Her music draws on all sorts of influences from hallucinations, poems, books, moods and experiences, to manic breakdowns and misunderstandings in everything. A mix of indie-folk-rock-pop-bluesy-jazz she uses anything that catches her imagination to create a varied, often very dark though frequently humorous, style where no two songs sound alike and the vocal lines can change from gentle and lyrical to enormous roaring in the space of a bar. She currently is living in Edinburgh with her fiance and son.