Overview
The music of Susquehanna is predominantly influenced by Latin and Caribbean music, incorporating strains of flamenco ("Roseanne"), soca ("Tom the Lion"), bossa nova ("Breathe"), Latin rock ("Bust Out") and reggae ("Blood Orange Sun") alongside the familiar Daddies territory of swing, ska and rockabilly. While the majority of the album is original material, a notable exception is a re-recording of "Hi and Lo", a ska punk song which was originally written by Daddies frontman Steve Perry for The Mighty Mighty Bosstones in the mid-1990s, ultimately ending up as part of the Daddies' own repertoire and becoming a staple of their live shows.
Perry explained that the album's tropical slant was due to his prediction that one day "American pop will owe a huge debt to world sensibilities...these I wanted to explore and potentially boil down to some fundamental building blocks that might lead toward a new, more international style". Stylistically, Perry claimed that he based the structure of Susquehanna on James Joyce's Ulysses, in that each of the songs were written in a distinctly different style and genre but the album as a whole was thematically coherent. He further elaborated that he drew additional inspiration from Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 film Pierrot le fou, in the regard that "songs are a means to an end. Genres reflect off each other".
| “ | It's like a little movie, doing what I always do with genres, which is to use them kind of like paint. I use various genres and grind them against each other. I like to put a flamenco song next to a song that's a glam rock song next to a song that's a swing song, so that the flavor changes. | ” |
Like most of the Daddies' previous albums, Susquehanna is written as a loose concept album. Described by Perry as a portrait of "various relationships in decay", each song deals with memories, all written in the format of an abstract narrative following a character in the aftermath of a broken relationship. Perry has summarized the essence of Susquehanna's story as being "about losses and continuing on. It's about love, doubt and fatigue...and ultimately about gratitude".
Read more about this topic: Susquehanna (album)