Suzzy Roche Shares 'Stayin' Home' From Sister Maggie's Posthumous Solo Release



Suzzy Roche's goal for the posthumous Maggie Roche compilation Where Do I Come From was "for her voice to be heard as much as possible." But the video for the unreleased 1972 demo "Stayin' Home," premiering exclusively above, provides a visual souvenir of the late singer-songwriter, too.

The clip, which features Roche dancing along to the song, was the idea of StorySound Records chief Dick Connette, who's releasing the compilation. "Right after she died I discovered a video of her dancing," Suzzy tells Billboard. "Maggie was very quiet and shy on stage, but then all of a sudden she would go and do this dance during the middle of one of the songs, which was so great. Dick took this dance and reconfigured it a bit and said, 'Why not let it be raw Maggie?'

"It really is her, and a different side of her. That's the thing I wanted, to put out the most possible information about her."

Suzzy acknowledges that the Where Do I Come From project has been "quite an emotional roller coaster" for her. It came from a direct charge from Maggie, who passed away during January 2017 from cancer at the age of 65. "In the last week of her life she asked me to please do something with her music," Suzzy recalls. "I was completely devastated by her death, and it really took me a year to even lift my head because my mother died four months later. It was a terrible year."

With Connette's assistance, Suzzy dove into a wealth of material Maggie left behind, putting together a two-disc, 32-track package due out on Oct. 26, which would have been Maggie's 67th birthday. The set spans her career up to 2007, with plenty of Roches material and songs from Maggie's 1975 duo album with the third Roche sister, Terre. It also features three other unreleased tracks -- the title track, "Down the Dream" and "Christmas Love," the latter a song Maggie wrote for the Roches' We Three Kings holiday album in 1990 that was recorded by members of the family especially for the compilation.

"(Maggie) told me she had always wanted to make a solo record, which I didn't know," Suzzy says. "So I wanted this to be that, and I wanted the songs to really have her voice as much as possible and span her entire songwriting life. Her songs are quite complicated -- deceptively simple but sophisticated, musically. And her songs really affected people."

Suzzy, who's curating a memorial concert for Maggie -- "the heart and soul of the Roches" -- on Dec. 4 at the Sheen Center in New York, has plenty of additional unreleased material from her sister's archives. But she isn't promising any future releases yet.

"Under my bed I have everything, all of her music," Suzzy says. "I was very hesitant to use some of these very rough things on (the compilation) because I didn't know if she would want half-finished things out. So I was very careful about the four things that are on there. It practically killed me putting this together, so I can't say if I'll let more of this material out or not."