PREMIERE | Suzanne Bonifacio, "Mistakes"
Buffalo, NY pop icon Suzanne Bonifacio; press photo courtesy of Ken Axford.
Somewhere through the cataclysms and clusters of chaos we find our own unique form and idiosyncratic orders of things. Through the blasts of histories and flames that rage forward into the present day, the formulation of progress is pieced together from the scattered particles of matter and folderol that combine and collect together to create the whole. Imperfection is the quixotic disarray that informs the rhythms of logic that build the pillars of truths. The notion that nothing and no one is ever truly complete is the query that propels us and all of humanity writ large. Disorder dictates the organizational patterns that create the nuances and sciences of order. The weights, measures and scales of understanding arrive to us at points from the origins of theorems that are postulated from observing the blizzards of matter freefalling in the void of space that exists above and all around us. Like the atoms whirling and fleeting about in the breeze, carried by the wayward winds; we arrive at our own conclusions and points of calm by finding fleeting moments and places of pause within the maelstrom of everything that we cannot fully define or grasp that exists beyond the scope of our own comprehension.
Thus sets the tone and stage for Suzanne Bonifacio’s staggering single, “Mistakes”. A slow burning sacred chamber track, the Buffalo, NY artist moves the lens inward toward meditative spaces. Delicately developed over the course of the past few years in a world consumed by the inertia of ghastly proportions that historians will pine over for eons — Bonifacio speaks to the guarded vulnerability of how we live. How we learn. How we grow. How we fall down. How we pick ourselves back up. How we fail forward. How we cope. How we arrive at our personal truths. How we love. How we find peace. How we organize a sense of order from the landfill heaps of memories, the weights and pressures of the world and how we arrive at a higher state of grace.
Echoes of the artist’s work as Tiny the Dream can be heard in the punctuated vocal edit chops that align the atmospheric corridors of “Mistakes”. Synths and industrial percussion drop in and out of the mix, setting the scene like exploring a haunted gothic cathedral that lies deep within the landscapes and recesses of the soul. Suzanne faces down insecurities, like a psychic battle with a minotaur in a labyrinthine garden of mysteries that reveals mystic and cryptic revelations about society and the self. “Mistakes” trades heavily in confronting the source of all fears. It is a statement against perfection and the human obsession we all share with perfectionism in the world of late capitalism that can be harsh and feel unforgiving and vicious in the applied pressures of exorbitant performative expectations. The key adversary revealed in the track is that we often are our own worst enemy, as “Mistakes” is a plea to give ourselves the space to find ourselves and our step in a blessed and blissed out sanctuary where it is okay to be and make missteps in our journey toward the elusive horizons of potential enlightenment (and other such dreams that may follow in that wake).
Suzanne Bonifacio shared some of the following privy meditations on the brand new single:
"Mistakes" came from a place of self doubt and life transitions, learning how to not get so caught by failures and expectations. Those things shape us and really do make us stronger, yet more flexible as it's our reactions to them that really matter. I was learning that it's okay to start over and get up again.
Exploring the expanses of imperfection and more with Suzanne Bonifacio; photographed by Ken Axford.
I started this track in the winter of 2021 which is the longest I've consistently come back to a song. I would come back to it some nights and just cry cause I didn't know what I was doing [laughs], but it healed me from some things as music tends to do. I was afraid to make music during that time and reflected on it in a way that I never had before. That made me realize all the more how vital it is to my system. I think I'm glad for that time now.
Suzanne Bonifacio’s “Mistakes” will be available everywhere October 6.