Suzanne and I

Album: Anna Calvi (2011)
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Songfacts®:

  • Half Italian singer/guitarist Anna Calvi grew up being exposed to a multitude of genres of music by her music-loving father. She cites the classical composers Ravel and Debussy among her influences and her music has been described as "brooding melodramatic goth-pop." The intensely romantic nature of Calvi's songs, however, is "more abstract" than the one-dimensional eroticism of most pop, she told The Guardian: "Suzanne and I, for example, is about falling asleep, meeting someone in your dream, and never waking up. It's actually about death."
  • Calvi told the NME about her filmic vision, which ensures that the burgeoning drama of tracks like this one haunt long after they've stopped playing. "What usually happens is I listen to a piece of music or I watch a film," she explained, "and I feel really moved by it and it sort of compels me to create something. I feel it in my stomach and then I record it. The melody and the lyrics come out simultaneously. And, of course, after that I sculpt it, but the essence of the song is kind of there crystallised when it first appears out of me."
  • English musician and producer Brian Eno (he was the man twiddling the knobs on Coldplay's Viva La Vida) sung backing vocals on this track.
  • Calvi told The Observer that she drew on My Winnipeg, a surrealist-inflected feature film about director Guy Maddin's home town, for this song. She explained: "There's a film called My Winnipeg about a guy who really wants to leave a town but he can't because everyone keeps falling asleep. It's a really dreamlike film with surreal images of frozen horses in white snow. I had that in mind when I wrote 'Suzanne and I.'"

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