CALL ME SU | INTERVIEW + TRACK REVIEW

Some songwriters write from memory. Others write from imagination. call me su seems to exist somewhere between the two, creating songs that feel less like autobiography and more like strange, beautifully human fables. Populated by dreamers, outcasts, flawed leaders and forgotten souls, her music unfolds like short stories, where the Australian landscape becomes as important as the people wandering through it.

Her latest single, Mad King, began with a haunting image of political collapse, but quickly grew into something much larger. Rather than targeting one leader or one moment in history, the song explores the seductive nature of power, the fragility of reality, and the unsettling ease with which people can be drawn into someone else’s delusion. It’s political without being partisan, theatrical without losing its humanity.

Behind the music is an artist who has spent decades refining her craft, embracing reinvention and allowing storytelling to take centre stage. Having lived many lives, both creatively and personally, call me su brings a rare perspective to songwriting, one where empathy matters more than certainty and every character has something worth saying. We caught up with her to discuss Mad King, the Australian outback, storytelling, transformation, and why the most compelling ghosts aren’t supernatural at all.

TRACK REVIEW -

Mad King wastes no time pulling you into its world. That opening guitar riff is instantly intriguing, setting a mood that’s equal parts mysterious and unsettling. Then call me su’s vocal arrives, sitting low in the mix with a subtle radio-like texture, as though you’ve wandered into an old tunnel where someone is telling a story through a crackling speaker. Everything else is left to your imagination, and that’s exactly what makes the song so captivating.

This is storytelling before it’s songwriting. Every instrument feels like it’s there to serve the narrative rather than demand attention for itself. The restrained production creates space for the lyrics to breathe, while the tension quietly builds underneath, never needing to explode to make its point. Mad King trusts the listener to lean in, rewarding them with a song that feels more like a dark fable than a traditional folk track. It’s thoughtful, atmospheric and quietly haunting long after the final note fades.

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Your songs feel less like confessions and more like short stories inhabited by dreamers, outsiders and ghosts. When you’re writing, do you see yourself as a songwriter or a storyteller wandering through imaginary worlds?

There is no place I can define where storytelling ends and songwriting begins, it’s very fluid. I see myself as both. I have definite rules of musical composition that I follow, that is what makes me sound like me, but the end result has to be true to the landscape in my head.

The image of a president talking to portraits of dead leaders is unsettling because it feels both absurd and believable. What fascinates you about the moment powerful people begin losing their grip on reality?

I’m horrified or fascinated by the idea of psychosis, that someone’s delusions mean they are living in a different world from us. What is truly horrifying, is that someone with enough power or charisma might make it so that people leave our shared reality and start living their delusion. The classic recent example would be the January 6 insurrection. Thousands of people believe those insurrectionists were heroes defending democracy. It’s fascinating the same way a horrible accident is fascinating – it’s going to turn your stomach but you can’t seem to look away.

Mad King isn’t really about one politician. It feels like a song about power itself. Do you think power inevitably corrupts people, or simply reveals who they always were?

If power inevitably corrupted, there would be no Martin Luther King. I think power and fame find you out. When your every action is watched and scrutinised, especially in the current era when everything is on camera, there is no place to hide. Mad King is about a leader who has been found out and rejected, and who cannot comprehend their fall from grace.

Growing up with the Australian landscape, what do you think the outback can teach us about loneliness, mystery and human nature that cities often can’t?

The Australian outback has so much to teach! The intensity of the light, the olive green of the eucalypts, the way the natural world seems to roll over and through the land as if your little home was just a tiny pimple. And the distance! When you drive 160km to go to a supermarket or to see a doctor, life has a different rhythm. Loneliness is easy to obtain for those who seek it out, but people can also have a vibrant social life if that is what they are up for. In little country towns, people look out for one another. For someone seeking to unravel a mystery or learn answers about human nature, I would gladly point them in the direction of a remote outback town, with a caveat: you might not like the answers you get.

You’ve described the writing of Mad King as arriving almost fully formed within an hour. Do the songs that come quickly feel different from the ones that have to be wrestled into existence?

Yes, because the process has been short circuited. It’s happened a couple of times now, and it elicits a kind of awe, like... holy shit what just happened? It’s very special because it’s so rare.

Many of your songs seem populated by characters rather than versions of yourself. Is it easier to tell difficult truths when they’re spoken through somebody else’s voice?

I genuinely don’t know how autobiographical writers do what they do. Even when I do write from the heart so to speak, it seems to have an observational quality, as if I am someone else who is interested in my own thoughts. I need to tell stories, fables if you like, and I feel I have more freedom and power as a writer when there’s no “me.”

Gothic imagery often deals with haunted houses, ghosts and darkness, but your music feels haunted by memory and human behaviour instead. What are the ghosts that interest you most as a writer?

They come out of the landscape I keep in my head, asking to have their story told. Tent fighters, dissolute school children, old singer-songwriters past their prime, meat boners, venial bosses, broken, flawed people, outcasts, I feel like those are my people, that the stories they have to tell are compelling and real.

Having written songs since the early 1990s, what do you think your younger self was searching for in music, and is she still searching for the same thing today?

Younger self was looking for a particular sound: two or three chord progressions, a hollow body guitar and a Shin-ei fuzz. I keep elements of that close to my heart – I still find the simplest musical building blocks produce the sweetest sounds. As I’ve gotten older, the power of story, of words has taken centre stage. I rarely agonise over a chord change or a solo, but I will agonise over a word choice, to get it just right.

There is often a connection between transformation and storytelling. As someone who has embraced her own journey openly, do you think reinvention is something we choose, or something life eventually demands of us?

For me yes. I have literally been a number of different people in my lifetime. I’ve changed names, countries of residence, urban for rural and finally my gender. I’m now living a happy, joyful life as a transgender woman. call me su invites others to accept the journey that has brought me to this place. It’s both a stage name and an invitation. I feel there has been personal growth in each iteration of self. I get better every time, I become more aware, more mindful (for want of a better word). I wonder how others get by doing the same things, being the same person. I don’t think I am more clever or better than those others, I am just curious about it, because I don’t understand.

If someone hears Mad King fifty years from now without knowing anything about the political figures who inspired it, what do you hope still feels relevant about the story you’re telling?

I think the idea of a narcissistic leader who cannot understand their fall from grace will be just as compelling, because in fifty years’ time I’m going to bet there will still be narcissists attracted to leadership roles. There will still be sycophants panicking as the edifice falls and poison pen memoirs to be written by the disgruntled. People leap to the most obvious candidate as the inspiration for Mad King, which is fine, but I’m willing to wager there will be plenty of obvious candidates in the future.