Interview In the studio with… Arlo Parks

It shouldn’t really be a surprise, however, as the young Londoner’s strain of intimate, tender lyricism sits as the perfect aural balm to frazzled brains and bedroom-bound anxiety. “Everyone during lockdown was feeling quite fragile, so I think people wanted music that made them feel held in this time where nobody really knew what was going to happen,” she posits. “I got so many messages from people saying [‘Black Dog’] had brought comfort to their terminally ill parents, saying it had saved their marriages - it made me feel like I was doing something tangible that was having a real, comforting effect in people’s lives, and that art still had a purpose in this world. It really made me feel grounded and motivated to do this for the rest of my life.”

So motivated was Arlo, in fact, that she’s emerged out the other side with her debut record complete and ready to go. Bedding down in an East London Airbnb with her regular producer just as everything hit, she spent the first fortnight cocooned in a writing bubble, taking full advantage of the strange freedom the situation afforded her. “I just wrote for two weeks straight and didn’t go outside. I felt like I was in another dimension because I literally had no other responsibilities on this earth, which I was so grateful for. All I had to do was write music,” she enthusiastically recalls.

“I would just go to bed super late and spend the early hours finding songs and send [my producer] in the next room a very sleep deprived text being like, ‘So the kick drum from that ‘In Rainbows’ song but more crunchy’, and then I’d stumble out in my dressing gown the next morning. There was no glamour…”

Glamorous it may not have been, but excited and inspired it certainly was. Where many artists talk about shutting the world out and turning their speakers off for six months around the making of a record, Arlo explains that she went fully the other way, immersing herself in everything that could possibly provoke a new idea, from hours spent listening to old classics (“‘Rubber Soul’, ‘Baduizm’, Joni Mitchell, Elliot Smith”) to moments where she’d flit happily between Aphex Twin and Miles Davis. “We were just completely in music mode, immersing ourselves completely into so many different worlds, and [the album is] a fusion of all those things,” she explains. “I feel like the only way I can feel inspired is by listening to music constantly. When I’m trying to write, I listen to music even more; I’m just always listening to things.”

It’s an attitude that’s always shone through in Arlo’s music, where this wide myriad of influences is allowed to nestle up and inform the person at its centre. Lyrically, meanwhile, she hopes that her debut will do the same but in reverse: “I feel like my aim is to make the hyper-subjective feel universal; for people to feel immersed in my world, but also be able to see themselves in every song,” she nods, “so I can talk about something that feels very personal to me but it will remind them of a time in their lives or a person and they still feel connected to it - that’s always been my mission statement, as it were.”

Having flourished across the past nine months and made life in 2020 look easy, Arlo Parks’ debut should provide a much-needed slice of musical nourishment to see us through life’s next phase. She’s already sort-of headlined Glastonbury, so you’re in safe hands.

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