step 2

 >> “question in my footsteps”. when you walk along with suzanne’s songs for a while one of the first feelings you just can’t avoid about them is their inquisitiveness. there’s a ‘question in every footstep’ you take with them, question marks are scattered all along her body of work, “marks on these miles of fields”.

 >> in a first encounter most of these questions go unaware, but they leave their imprint. when you’re really face to face with them you can’t look away because they look straight back at you. intently so. they want your attention, your care. they’re not looking for answers, least of all from you, they just need to be embraced and understood.

 >> after many journeys with these songs and the questions they ask, i came to believe that for every one of them there’s an answer somewhere. sometimes i see an answer in another song. for instance, to the final question in “50/50 chance”, i feel the answer is in the final verse of “tired of sleeping”. i connect the frail body of the girl on the hospital bed to the ‘bird that is hanging on a string’, whose “bones are twisting and dancing” - “she’s fighting for her small life”. and what if most of the songs in “songs in red and gray” are sort of answers to the “question in my footsteps” referred to in “rosemary”? ... “cause some things just don’t get through into this world although they try” ...

 >> questions often lead to other questions, but most of the times, though, the answer is outside the song,  beyond it, beneath it, out of the shot, so to speak. what is really important isn’t what is directly shown or told, but what is hinted at. for me, nonetheless,  the answer to every question is in the question itself, or to put it better, it’s in the act of questioning. the question doesn’t require to be answered, because its aim is to be posed and to ask to be posed. i perceive suzanne’s questions as being part of a big universal choir, whispering their queries as if they were softly singing a song of their own. just like a choir in a greek tragedy, they’re there to comment, to alert, to underline, to “make you see”.

 >> suzanne’s songs and their questions make you turn to what’s outside and inside of you, to what’s “in the fringes” and “beneath the skin”. to that extent, her work, at least to me, has always been a chronotransducer, a barometer and a reader of Time, interior and exterior Time, but also a “pipeline”, a conductor to the human soul. if there was one word that could somehow attempt to grasp the scope of her songs, i’d say that word would be ‘existential’, because they encompass human existence in its entirety. human life is never cut and dried. suzanne’s songwriting, to me, has the unique quality of ‘peeling off’ its complexity, in order to show us its “clean quilted heart” - love.

 >> suzanne’s inquisitive look is also an inviting look. it reaches out to you and asks you to join along on a journey that’s always “just begun”. the journey might be hard and Solitude might appear, more often than not, 'standing in the doorway'. like a real ‘femme fatale’ from a film noir, she won’t rest until she gets what she wants. “her palm is split with a flower with a flame” - i’ve always felt that connecting that which is split, would be the *one* answer, the real and only one.

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