Heartache brought Baby Animals frontwoman Suze DeMarchi back to Australia and inspired the concept of her new solo record

SHE was the frontwoman for The Baby Animals — now heartache has brought Suze DeMarchi back to Australia where she’s found her musical roots again.

Australian rocker Suze DeMarchi who is releasing her second solo album Picture: Tim Hunter.

SUZE DeMarchi has been homesick since she left her Perth home at 17 to follow her rock’n’roll dream.

For more than three decades, she has chased that dream and lived its gypsy life all over the world, with 16 years based in Los Angeles to bring her up children with rocker Nuno Bettencourt.

The Baby Animals frontwoman rekindled her band when she eventually came home about five years ago, settling in the Sydney beachside suburb of Coogee with her daughter Bebe and son Lorenzo.

“Even now living in Sydney I am still homesick for Perth because my family is there,” she says.

“I was living in America for 16 years and the last five years of that was harsh, you know, so I was pretty keen to get home.

“I also wanted my kids to have some Australian culture during their childhood.”

Baby Animals returned to the studio a couple of years ago to make This Is Not The End, which chronicled much of the personal upheaval in DeMarchi’s life and have remained a touring entity since the album release.

It was 20 years between records for the Baby Animals. Their singer managed only a 16-year gap between her debut solo record Telelove and this year’s Home.

Her second solo album features a collection of songs inspired by the title’s concept including the Crosby Stills Nash and Young song Our House, Ryan Adams’ Come Home and Adele’s Hometown Glory.

It’s an eclectic bunch of tunes anchored by DeMarchi’s distinctive voice which takes on a deeper warmth away from the ferocity of a rock band.

“I have a tattoo with Home on it. I wanted home so much when I moved back, I wanted my own home, so that was the lightning bolt moment. I wanted sing songs about home,” she says.

“And that album Raising Sand that Robert Plant did with Alison Krauss, I wanted to do something like that.

“And there was no pressure because I didn’t have to write the songs, I didn’t have to spill my guts to anyone again. I just had to sing and play.”

DeMarchi’s brain imploded when she embarked on a Google search for songs on the theme, turning up hundreds.

She spent three weeks going through potential cuts to add to her own immediate list.

“I even recorded some of them to see if they would work and they were so bad. We did Burt Bacharach’s A House Is Not A Home — I love that song — but I could not sing it, it was too hard and it was a car crash. I have a whole new respect for Bacharach and Dionne Warwick,’ she says.

She credits Home’s warmth, the vulnerability of her vocal and its rootsy sound partly to the production of Shane Nicholson, who also lends his voice to the Gabrielle Aplin song Home.

“He was great for it with that country vibe and he’s a rocker as well,” she says.

Her other collaborators include Russell Morris, who sings Our House with her and Tex Perkins singing The Letter, the Box Tops song they had performed together on a RocKwiz tour a few years ago.

Her dear friends Jimmy Barnes and Diesel join her on the Stevie Ray Vaughan cut The House Is Rockin’ and Dallas Frasca guests on the Clash track Safe European Home.

“I am so in love with Tex; I can’t stand next to him for too long or I want to dry hump his leg. He is the loudest person I have ever sung with,” she says, laughing.

“He owed me because I sang Islands In The Stream with him for one of his records. As he says, he is so cool he can do anything and it won’t affect his coolness.”

As cover records go, DeMarchi’s Home is one of the more original concepts and features surprising and unexpected selections.

But it is proving a bit of an amusing headache for the business boffins.

“It’s a real problem for iTunes. If you have more than one song on a record with the same title, they don’t know where to put it,” she says.

“And when I did the launch gig, it became the joke because I would have to say ‘And this next track is called Home’.”

Suze DeMarchi performs at Lizottes, Newcastle on October 2 and The Basement on October 30.

Originally published as Heartache brought Baby Animals frontwoman Suze DeMarchi back to Australia and inspired the concept of her new solo record