What she found, with shut associates and heartbroken strangers, was a form of hyperreality. Every side of life – pleasure, despair and all the things in between – co-existed below the strobe lights.
“Everyone’s guard is down, and everyone’s equally vulnerable. There’s all these little snippets of conversation and fleeting, really intense, connections.”
Those vignettes grew to become supply materials for her new music. A poet earlier than she was a songwriter, Parks has a knack for dropping you into tales that really feel immediately acquainted.
On the charming, glitchy membership observe Heaven, external, she transports us to a gig by Kelly Lee Owens, below the sixth Street Viaduct bridge in Los Angeles, the place “bodies in the summer breeze” are surrounded by concrete and the scent of gasoline.
In the confusion and the noise, she’s making an attempt to find her good friend.
“And she was like, ‘Look down. I’m wearing the pink Adidas’,” remembers Parks. That tiny element slips into the lyrics, bringing the tune to life.
Get Go, external is a homage to London, with snatches of pirate radio and a crisp two-step beat, articulating a narrative in regards to the therapeutic feeling of dancing with strangers.
It was impressed by “a friend of mine who’d just broken up with her boyfriend,” she explains.
“I was like, ‘Let’s just go dancing. Let’s be flooded with loud music, and you can cry, and we can just release this.'”
Blue Disco shifts focus to an afterparty at Park’s home, the place somebody’s cousin has thrown up and “everything smells of chips and gin”.
“I’m always the host because I love to cook and I love to DJ,” she says. “Sometimes I’ll put my decks on my living room table and just do a little set for my friends.”
Learning to prepare dinner, it transpires, was the second strand of her plan to reclaim some normality after the whirlwind of her early 20s.
“I was like, ‘I want to get good at this’, because when you’re coming down, you need to eat,” she laughs.
“I do a really nice roast chicken. I love doing a spread of tacos and salads… but the best hangover cure’s a proper English breakfast. That’ll get me right in the morning.”
