For as long as she can remember Purple has been Su Alexanian’s favourite colour. Su gets Purple’s cosmic connection, its creativity, and its inherent anarchy. "If there was more Purple in the world everyone would be a pacifist," insists Su, who last year was on the organizing committee for the Artists Against War concert in Toronto.

Su Alexanian’s artistic resume is as broad as the reverb in the Portland Street warehouse that she and her piano once shared. A composer, singer, multi-instrumentalist, ethnomusicologist, and media arts teacher, Su creates music and videos for bands, films, theatre and dance. All these experiences inform the cinematic approach she takes to songwriting.

Su Alexanian’s intimate story songs were nomadically wandering the world when producer, and brother, Brian Alexanian captured them using the oddly congruent tools of precision and happenstance. Snippets of studio choreography, electronic trickery, world rhythms, dub influences, and a folk singer’s need to tell a good story make Purple Songs a singer/songwriter album and a pop album.

According to Su and Brian "If you write a song and listen to it, it will tell you what it needs." So Brian, the studio ringmaster, hand picked musicians whose personal style would complete each song. The musicians listened, improvised, jammed and took the songs to exotic places. The key was finding where a song could be at home by itself and with the others. "In the end Brian and I wanted to take the listener on a journey."