is Susan Brooks, a singer & songwriter currently working and residing in Los Angeles, CA.  Originally from Austin, Texas, Susan has lived in New York City, New Orleans and Los Angeles while pursuing her creative interests.

  is French for Flower of Love.  My name is Susan, which comes from the Hebrew word for lily or rose (or, more simply, flower).   Those are my favorite flowers;  in Christian tradition they signify eternal life and divine love, respectively, and in Sufism the rose indicates the presence of God, the Beloved.  Flowers are also a powerful signifier of the Goddess:  lilies have associations with moon and stars, and also symbolize the balance of male and female characteristics in the universe;   roses indicate the grace of an unearthly sweet yet earthly love.  I chose the name   because it embodies contrasts yet indicates an organic whole:  delicate and sacred blooms reaching to the sky with strong roots anchored firmly in the rich brown realness of earth.  Life blossoms when you work its soil.  This project is a flowering of my creativity and I wanted to express that.  I have a lot of spiritual interests, I earned a degree in art history from the University of Texas and I studied a lot of mythology and psychology and world religion and history.  That really reflects in my art, in how my creativity comes out. The music is inspired by everything from Goth and punk to troubadour songs and especially by things like Grail mythology which form universal currents in different cultures, Gaulish, Celtic, Germanic, Frankish.  I’ve always loved legends and fairytales.  They’re really powerful, because they tell true stories about mankind in poetic language.  They speak to the right brain and the deep unconscious and draw forth elements of culture from something deeper and both more and less civilized.  That sort of tradition connects us to our past.  I want to reclaim something with my art that I feel has been somewhat lost in our era.  Folklore has a powerful feminine element and has been devalued for that reason.  It’s male as well, certainly, dually sexed, like the lilies and like us, but women and girls, especially girls, have historically been blocked from expressing to their fullest capacity and our world is much poorer and darker and sadder for that.  Male and female work best in equal partnership.  Mythology isn’t always rational;  like religion or the finest art, it is mysterious and beautiful.  Those transcendent qualities are inherent to both genders, but they have become unbalanced.  The most pressing need of our time is the acceptance and integration of the feminine to her respected and real place in life.  There is a profound shift taking place toward more equitability in the arts and in life and that is what the main theme of my work is:  free expression of the female emanation.  This does not preclude treasuring of the masculine;  I advocate nothing less than unconditional love for both.” 

Susan credits such musical influences as Kate Bush, Bauhaus, Big Country, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Sex Pistols, and Simple Minds with the main inspiration for her sound.  “I grew up in the eighties, listening to all of those amazing bands from the British Isles.  I listen to all kinds of stuff, really, but my ancestors are from Northern Europe and Britain and my parents lived in England before I was born, so I was sort of steeped in all this family tradition and that’s been the music I was most drawn to and what comes out when I write songs.  The first time I ever heard “Promised You a Miracle” by Simple Minds, it was so beautiful;   it changed something in me so profoundly that I have never been the same.  It didn’t sound like anything I’d ever heard before in my life.   None of that punk and postpunk music did.  I sat in my family’s little house in Texas and the energy of all that creativity poured across the Atlantic Ocean and crashed straight into me.  I didn’t surface for years.  Later, in college, I was drawn to otherworldly Gothic stuff:  Bauhaus,  Dead Can Dance;  then ambient and techno after that.  Anything with a creative and adventurous spirit.  I love The Pistols for that reason.  They accomplished something enormous, and blazed the trail for everyone who followed.  They’re the best of Britain in their own way, dredging up something richly fertile from really rocky soil to make the past completely new.  I completely admire that.  I lived my life through books and art and music throughout my childhood and I still dwell there daily, but now I have learned to spin things out into the real world from my inner one.  I have always been drawn to sort of Romantic elements manifested in all of the arts, all the way from William Blake through the Pre-Raphaelite painters, the Victorians, Virginia Woolf:  Orlando.   You might not think this is all connected to late twentieth century music, but it is.  Shelley and Byron were like punks in their own way and in their own era;  it’s an unbroken line, the visceral connection of the past to the future, the creation of time and the material world through art and emotion.  The Romantics reached for the highest pinnacle of creativity and legitimate, individual self-expression, just like Rotten and all the rest – the same current connects the nineteenth century to 1976 and continues to infuse today.  I respond to that heightened passion, a lust for life.   I am drawn as well by the thread of far older cultures that informs the works of all of these more recent creators.  My interests have carried me across artistic and geographic boundaries;  I am pulled by an essence that flowers eternally without regard to specifics of time or space.  The Texas influence in my life is interesting for that reason, because Texas is a down-to-earth yet engagingly mystical place with its own hugely Romantic tradition.  My mother’s family goes back several generations in East Texas and it is a breathtakingly naturally beautiful place with amazing realness and creativity and, it must be admitted, social weirdness, Southern Gothic at its finest.  Part of the New World most definitely, it is still very timeless with little pockets of spells like Prospero’s island:  old funky wooden houses with stopped clocks and roomsful of arrowheads and antebellum antiques.  It’s still working on me and it was very fertile to live there through my formative years.  Discovering punk rock in the context of that environment was like finding a crack in the world where honey flowed in from the sky.  It was the fateful visitation of King Arthur’s angels to Parsifal’s forest, drawing him out via adoration and curiosity to claim his greater destiny.  Those artists looked like gods to me in my sweet but musty little realm;  now I’ve accepted their challenge and stepped out to seek my own space in that divinity.”  

Susan is also an accomplished poet and writer with more than fifty published articles and a recently completed book manuscript to her credit.   She is available for interviews:  “I love working with the press.  I’ve worked as a music and art journalist and editor, and I like seeing the other side of things.”

 

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For more information on FLEUR D’AMOUR, please contact:

FLEUR D'AMOUR
SUSAN BROOKS
P.O. Box 251973
Los Angeles, CA 90025
Email: fleurdamour@fleurdamour.us
Voicemail 646-785-0056
www.fleurdamour.us

 

 Copyright © 2006 by Susan Brooks. 

FLEUR D’AMOUR is a registered trademark of Susan Brooks. 

All rights reserved.