How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - S18, Ep4 Arlo Parks on the impossibility of perfection

Episode Date: September 27, 2023

Arlo Parks is a singer, songwriter and poet. Her debut album, Collapsed in Sunbeams was released when she was just 21 and earned her two Grammy nominations, a BRIT Award and the Mercury Music Prize. Her second, My Soft Machine, came out earlier this year. This month also marks the publication of her first volume of poetry, The Magic Border, a collection of never-before-seen poems and song lyrics. Parks joins me to talk about her faiure to create a perfect piece of work, her failure to save others, her failure to fit into what other people think of her - and why Phoebe Bridgers epitomises 'big brother energy'. I loved talking to this beautiful human - her thoughtfulness and her lyrical expression will soothe you and make you think. Enjoy! -- Arlo's poetry collection, The Magic Border, is out now. -- I'm going on tour! To AUSTRALIA, mate! You can now purchase tickets to see me live at Sydney Opera House on 26th February 2024 or the Arts Centre Melbourne on 28th February 2024. -- How To Fail With Elizabeth Day is hosted and produced by Elizabeth Day. To contact us, email [e-mail] -- Social Media: Elizabeth Day @elizabday How To Fail @howtofailpod Arlo Parks @arlo.parks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. I am so excited and not a little astonished to announce that I am coming to Australia. I will be live in the Sydney Opera House on the 26th of February 2024. That's never a sentence I thought I would say. I am so, so lucky and so grateful. I know that Taylor Swift is playing that night, but if you have failed, see what I did there, to get tickets to see Tay-Tay, come and see me at the Sydney Opera House, 26th of February 2024. And then on the 28th of February 2024 I will be at the Arts Centre

Melbourne at 8pm. I am so grateful to all of my lovely Australian listeners you have been with me from the start of this crazy endeavour and I am really really giddy with anticipation at the thought of meeting you all. I can promise you an evening full of laughter, full of discussion of life and love and failure and everything in between. You'll get a chance to ask your questions and to have your book signed. And I hope I get a chance to meet you all in person and to say thank you in person. So you can book your tickets now, either via the websites for Sydney Opera House or the Arts Centre Melbourne, or you can go to my website, elizabethday.org.

I have put links in the show notes and I just cannot wait to get to your fine country and to say hello in person. See you there. Hello and welcome to How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, the podcast that celebrates the things that haven't gone right. This is a podcast about learning from our mistakes and understanding that why we fail ultimately makes us stronger. Because learning how to fail in life actually means learning how to succeed better. I'm your host, author and journalist Elizabeth Day, and every week I'll be asking a new interviewee what they've learned from failure.

asking a new interviewee what they've learned from failure. Arlo Parks is a singer, songwriter and poet. Her debut album, Collapsed in Sunbeams, was released when she was just 21 and earned her two Grammy nominations, a Brit Award and the Mercury Music Prize. Her second, My Soft Machine, was released earlier this year and is a deeply personal work, a narration of Parks's experiences as she navigates her 20s. Now 23, she is still extraordinarily young to have managed such success, but her music and her lyrics have always signalled an older soul. There is a candid tenderness to her sound that gives it a sweet kind of power. Little wonder perhaps that her fans now include Billie Eilish and Lily Allen. On tour she has opened for Harry Styles and played the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury. She was raised in West London

to a Parisian-born mother. Parks could speak French before she learned English. She now lives in Los Angeles and perhaps her ease in multiple spaces and cultures is what makes her music so translatable to our own intimate moments. This month marks the publication of her first volume of poetry, The Magic Border, a collection of never-before-seen poems and song lyrics. Florence Welsh has already called it an embrace of a book. I would never want to prescribe a particular reaction in my readers, Parks writes in the introduction, but I would hope for your responses to be in the realm of softness. Arlo Parks, welcome to How to Fail.

Hello, thanks for having me. It's such a pleasure. I wanted to start by asking what softness means to you. Something I've been thinking about a lot recently, actually, especially having done like my first readings in the last few days. And I think for me, I equate softness with tenderness and I think especially in a world that has a lot of hardness within it I like the idea of kind of remaining soft allowing myself to be moved by things and moving through the world in a way that expresses wonder and is still in touch with my inner child as well and yeah it's just at the core of my work and at the core of who I am I think. How difficult is it to retain that softness, that sense of wonder,

when you are working predominantly in a music industry that isn't renowned for its respect of softness? Yeah, I don't know. I think it comes from the community, the people that I've kind of drawn in. And I feel like you kind of, I don't know, you attract what you give out in that sense. And I think a lot of the artists around me have that sense of sensitivity and being emotional and I think artists in general are very kind of sensitive people and I think even though the industry as a whole can be quite a harsh urgent place I feel like the people within it are often very gentle and lovely. Does that resonate with you that idea of you being an older soul in a younger person's body? I guess yeah I think in a way I think I don't know I've been in the

music industry technically for six years even though I am only 23 I don't know I like to think that I still have a sense of youthfulness and playfulness but I think having been surrounded my whole life by older friends and older people I've kind of absorbed a bit of that energy definitely well congratulations on the magic border which is a beautiful book both in terms of its content but also how it's presented it looks beautiful and you collaborated with your friend, Daniel, didn't you? The photographer. Yeah. Would you tell us how that collaboration came about? Yeah. So we actually became friends because I was just such a fan of his photography and the romance and the intimacy. And I saw a little article in ID magazine, I think, that he had done this kind of documentation of his friendship with this other person.

And I reached out to him. I was like, I just think what you do is beautiful. We arranged to have like a long walk on the Heath and it ended up being like four or five hours long, became friends in that sense. And I think when I was bringing the poetry book together, I immediately thought, wow, there are actually these poems that feel like spiritual twins of some of Daniel's photographs. And I was like, it might be interesting to have something that is kind of multimedia in that form so we just sat down we just put on some ambient music and we went through his archives

20 years of photos and just kind of selected photographs that felt somehow bonded to certain poems and I think it gave it this additional dimension of feeling and all these characters that he'd kind of photographed over his lifetime lovers parents friends he no longer knew I think it really resonated with the essence of this book and how does it differ if it does your creation of a poem contrasted with your creation of a song or a piece of music is there a difference in how you create it definitely definitely I think because I'm not very concerned with traditional form within poetry I think for me it feels like a more fluid I guess stream of consciousness adjacent practice but then with songwriting

because I guess I kind of work within the more structured world of like pop music I guess well you know there's a verse there's a pre-chorus there's a chorus you have to be economical with your language you have to distill what's often something massively complicated into a few lines and so I guess I see poetry as something where I can edit myself a little bit less I can whittle at the marble a little bit less I can be a little bit more raw so I think that's the main difference. So when you're doing a song lyric, is there a lot of editing involved? Yeah, there is.

Because, you know, often I'll start from poetry as well sometimes when it comes to my songwriting. So, you know, I'll have these pages and pages and pages of words surrounding a memory or a person or a topic. And then I have to really comb back through and select specific lines that I feel are essential to the story and it takes a lot of crafting definitely well I'm about to do that embarrassing thing where I quote some of your poetry lines to you because I was so struck by them in your poem soft to your impact you write I have always considered myself difficult to hate and difficult to love now I'm not making the assumption that all of the poems written in the first person are about you but I wonder if that is something that you think about yourself yeah I think it is in a

way and I think it actually came from a conversation with a friend where they said almost that exact thing and then I thought of myself and also it being something I learned at parties, which is like the second part of that line. And I think that sense of not feeling like you're someone who people have active animosity towards, but also having those kind of undertones of questioning why people love you

and what they see in you. And I think that there is this kind of back and forth in my mind and in a lot of people's minds I think about you know feeling like what they're doing and who they are is something that's worthy of love and appreciation than maybe having those days where you find it harder to see what people see in you I guess in a way there's a sense of detachment yes that you're observing yourself yeah well I personally think you're impossible to hate and incredibly easy to interactions I've had with you in simulcrum you asked the question how do the badly loved

undo which I thought was so beautiful how do you undo that knowledge and how do you learn to give yourself is that what you were getting at with yeah yeah yeah exactly I think I don't know the answer to that question to me is that you can enter into a practice of healing and trying to kind of undo damage and scarring from the past but ultimately you can't undo anything that you've done or said that has happened to you it's very much about moving into the future and kind of reframing your perspective and trying to surround yourself with people who love you well and to try and love yourself well and approach yourself with compassion yeah and I think the answer to that question is that you can't and that's a difficult thing but also a beautiful thing in

terms of the lessons that you learn you will carry with you forever in a way it's very like the message of this podcast but it's an interesting thing talking to you given that you are 23 i'm 44 and it's taken me until my 40s to understand the difference between bad love and good love and to understand that there are some things that we've been socially conditioned to believe are romantic but actually I would now put in the bucket of bad love so that idea of someone paying you an inordinate amount of passionate attention and things being slightly unstable but you're sort of drawn in and you think that that's part of the passion actually now I understand that that can make you feel insecure and can sometimes be evidence of narcissism exactly how would you

distinguish between bad and good love I think that for me it's honestly about sitting down alone and checking in with yourself how does it make you feel in your body does it make you feel insecure like you're kind of on unsteady ground all the time walking on eggshells all the time feeling like the love might be withdrawn without any reason or if it's something that makes you feel secure and you feel safe is that is there that underlying buzz of anxiety that you're kind of mistaking for excitement you know are you trying to convince yourself that this is something that you want I think when you sit down and really sit with yourself and journal it out you can come to a lot of conclusions about whether it's bad love or good love yeah you need to start with loving yourself and that starts with knowing yourself exactly

a few more questions before I come on to your failures because your failures are so brilliant and profoundly expressed I can't wait to talk about them Do you think that speaking French first when you were little has changed the way that you look at the English language, that sort of sense of remove that we were talking about when you see yourself? Do you think you have that about English? Definitely. I mean, I guess I don't know what my approach to language would be if I hadn't learned French. But yeah, that sense of detachment, that sense of kind of not being as deeply familiar with the structure of the language and having, it's not that I feel like I don't have a grasp of it, but I think that it has given me this playfulness when it comes to the language and maybe not adhering as clearly to the rules of the English language. And sometimes the rules of the French language kind of making their way into the way that I approach English and just this general fluidity, I think, with language and also a love of language.

You know, I think that I've always had this really distinct love of language. And I think that comes from having learned another one early on as well. Would you ever write a song in French? Yeah, I've tried to, you know, it's something that I'm really practicing. But because I was taught French by my mum at home, my grasp of it isn't very poetic, if that makes sense. It's all very practical domestic language. Clean your room.

I'll be home at this time, clean your room, that kind of energy. But I'm trying to read a little bit more and watch a lot more French films and stuff to kind of get myself in that mode. What was school like for you? I was a very studious child. I was very much a perfectionist I was very much someone who was focused on like getting perfect grades but juxtaposed with that I was also a very sporty kid so I was playing like hockey at a very high level

doing cross-country doing athletics balancing those two things but I think I was always someone who was like very highly disciplined and driven. And I think in a way that made me quite hard on myself. And I think that's something that I'm always trying to temper in a way. But did you find school easy? Because you strike me as someone who is so empathetic and porous in many ways that you take on other people's energy. And sometimes school isn't very forgiving to to that kind of person yeah definitely I think I found good people around me quite early which was really nice but I did definitely find myself especially or just mixing with so many

different characters and people who are like a lot louder and more abrasive or people who you know aren't super kind so I think that absorbing that and feeling that kind of turbulence of school and being somebody who yeah as I said before was very sensitive was interesting but then I think having had music as an anchor meant that I was kind of drawn to like the weirder more creative artsy kids that would just kind of hang out in the library and stuff and I think that I very much built a little refuge from that chaos we're talking about arty kids and creating community one of your friends and now collaborators is Phoebe Bridgers and you've described her as having a big brother energy yeah what does that

how does that manifest itself she does her and like the rest of the Boy Genius lot as well. I don't know. It just feels, I can tell that she is just looking out for me. And the first time we met, she asked me how old I was. And I was like, oh, I was and as an artist and having her join me on stage and her being very much like my cheerleader and giving me space you know to come to her whenever with whatever I think has that yeah that kind of big brother energy of somebody who you feel is looking out for you is really nice well I love Pegasus the song that features her it's so beautiful let's get on your failures. Your first failure in your words is your failure to create an undeniably perfect piece of work. Tell us about that and about whether you find that quite crippling. Yeah. I think that I've always been somebody who has looked for a very solid and specific bar of success being like when

I get here I will feel successful and the world will see me as successful and I will be like I don't know this sense of when I'm here I will be anointed as this and it will be solid and I'll be able to feel it and know it completely and it will never be objective in that way you know art will always be subjective there'll always be people who don't like it and who love it and know it completely. And it will never be objective in that way. You know, art will always be subjective. There'll always be people who don't like it and who love it and who think it's the best and who think it's ignorable. And like, I think that it's something that I've wrestled with a lot, especially being the kind of child that I was telling you about before, where it would be like, you would get an A star in this subject. And that would mean that you were at this kind of level of achievement. And also inspiration coming and going so freely is that you can sit down at your desk every day for X amount of hours and it still might not come.

And that acceptance that things are kind of outside of my control is definitely something that I've wrestled with. But I don't know. I think for me, it's been a practice. And I think I'm really getting to a place where especially feeling like I want to have a career that is a long career, the fact that there will be certain records or books or things that I create that will be received differently and that it's a journey of ebbs and flows, I think has really helped me get to a place where I just want to create something that feels good in this moment rather than something that everyone will see as perfect because that doesn't really exist, you know? Yes. And if something actually is perfect, it's also clinical. There's a separation from what it is to be human. When something is perfect, we can't relate to it in a way because we're all imperfect humans. And so much of your work strikes me as being about the intimacy of being flawed. Exactly. And I think even in the way that you might record a song,

for example, a lot of my songs were just recorded in an apartment and you can hear like imperceptible little like creaks of couches and breaths and like plosives. And I think when you listen sometime to a pop song where a lot of the kind of human imperfections of a voice have been smoothed out and the drums are like perfectly quantized and on beat it can feel a little bit cold like it doesn't have that same human warmth and as you say I think even in what I speak about in my songs that sense of kind of

talking about moments where I was wounded or where I was in the wrong things that I still haven't quite figured out or regrets I think it's a lot of it is about kind of exposing those flaws and also thinking about the music that I love and the musicians that I look up to they all have that element of rawness you know when you listen to a Joni Mitchell song or you know even when you listen to the production of someone like Pharrell like there is these it just feels rough around the edges because someone has put themselves into it and we are all kind of complicated so yeah love the word plosive just had to say that is there anything that you consider to be a perfect work of art that someone else has produced that's interesting

because now I feel like I shy away from the word perfect in general but perfect to me it might be perfectly imperfect in a way yeah no exactly and that's exactly what I'm thinking about I think Blue It's by Maggie Nelson is a big one for me that I truly truly love I think as you say it's this balance between something that feels I don't know I just think it hit me in my spirit in a really specific way. And it's a book that I can keep revisiting and just constantly mine new nuggets of gold from. And I think that there's something for me that feels perfect, something that you could, you know, desert island this mode where you can choose this album like Post by Bjork, maybe where I think that I can learn something from it and I can do so for the rest of my life. learn something from it and I can do so for the rest of my life I think that there's something beautiful in that something that feels like it has almost endless layers to it and that you can never quite get to the bottom of it definitely and where do you think that drive to want to create

something of an exceptionally high level comes from because hearing you talk I feel albeit I'm absolutely not a singer songwriter or a lyrical poet but I can relate to a lot of it like I think I have that kind of drive where I believe or hope or have done for so long that one day I will reach certain level and then I can relax and then I would have proved something and for me I think it comes from an existential fear of being unlovable and I wonder where it comes from for you and if you've thought about that. Yeah, I'm not sure where exactly it comes from, but I think I can almost equate it to wanting to earn love by being like, if I'm useful and if I try this hard

and if I'm this productive, then I have kind of attained like lovability in a way. And that doesn't really make sense because when I think about the people in my life that I love it's not because they do x amount of things for me or they are like this good at their job you know it has nothing to do with that but I think it's always been something that's very disconnected from anyone around me or how I was treated by my parents or friends or anything like that just always been this like inner thing that I struggled to dislodge I'm not sure where it came from really well I think we all live in a society that

encourages us to believe that we are capitalist units of production it's quite hard to dismantle yeah all of that or to understand how much of it is you and how much of it is them yeah exactly and I think also just within music something that really stresses urgency and you know when you have this kind of wave and you seem like you're having a moment it's like oh well we have to ride the wave whilst we have it it may never come around again you know you may never have this opportunity again and that creates a sense of urgency and working to the point of burnout but i think when you trust that things may come around again and that you know if you want to be doing this for a long time it has to be in a sustainable way

I think that that's when I don't know anyone who's fully got to that point though of like knowing themselves and being in touch with their bodies enough to maybe reject huge opportunities for the sake of preserving their peace but that's something I kind of aspire to god knows if I'll get there but when you were growing up did you ever feel like you would have to do a more conventional job yeah definitely what kind of things were you thinking of I was thinking of being a lawyer I was thinking of being a journalist I knew it would be something in like words in some capacity I was going to do English literature at UCL that was my path very much and yeah I think that just from the teachers around me and the people around me I remember a boy in my class saying that he wanted to be a producer like a music producer and everyone in

the class and including the teacher were kind of like ah ha ha yeah okay but like what's the real plan and so I often felt like saying that I wanted to be a creative person was something that was almost impossible so it was this very like secret little hope that I kept just for myself though I did always feel like maybe I would become somebody with a different job that would always be quietly whittling away at songs or a novel or something in my spare time and I never felt like it was going to be my whole life. How do you feel now that it is? I think maybe because it was approached in that sense of it might be an impossible dream I still have that sense of like it may just all crumble like maybe I just had this moment in and I'll look back on it as being a moment that I had like in my youth

and then it kind of all dissolved so I think I find it really hard to not want to hold on to it frantically because I feel so lucky to be here and I think I'm gradually learning to have the confidence to even claim myself to be a poet even here as a writer like you holding my book and me like struggling to fully claim that yet but I do know that there's nothing else in the world that I want to would want to give myself to in this way so I just feel lucky and it's complicated basically you mentioned that about the pressing urgency the sort of need to say yes when big opportunities present themselves and you very honestly and courageously in September 2022 you cancelled a lot of your tour dates and you said publicly I am burnt out can you tell us

a bit about that time in your life how it was feeling and and why you decided to do that yeah I think that you know I went from the pandemic where we were all very much at home feeling like you know we were in our little bubble with our families or whoever to touring the world relentlessly you know to doing like hundreds and hundreds of shows in a year and I just had no time to replenish in any way and I was just working to the point of it would be you know play a show fly at like 3am arrive at the next place do press all day maybe like write a little bit of a song play a show again and you know I felt so lucky to be there there was this intense sense of gratitude but also this intense sense of like knowing that I couldn't work at this pace forever

linking back to what I said about being a child, I wanted to show that I was grateful for where I was at and I wanted to seize every opportunity. And I wanted to, like my biggest nightmare was to be like, okay, I didn't get to where I wanted to be because I didn't work hard enough. I think that was something that I really kept at the back of my mind. And I did get to a place

where I was just completely exhausted. I just had not even a drop of energy left and I knew that I just had to go and rest and just come back to myself because I felt like I had lost myself a little bit like the person behind the artist and had kind of been forgotten and I had to go home and just come back to myself and be in the garden and be with my people who kind of make me feel seen and happy and then I came back feeling more refreshed than ever just I think I just had to put my foot down and kind of advocate for myself and for my happiness in a way that I hadn't really before and I really learnt my boundaries and I try and move forward in a way

now that is a way that is very boundaried in a way that it wasn't before I read something very interesting that you said about boundaries which I'm probably going to mangle unless I can find it in my notes which is about how when you're creating work that's it you said the best work is the truest work and you have to figure out how to set up boundaries after the fact because when you're creating the work you can't be boundaried and I thought that was such an insightful explanation because I like you often struggle with boundaries and I think sometimes if you're trying to connect and understand what it is to be human it is very difficult then to try and ring fence things for yourself. So how do you do it? How do you know when it is right for you to say no?

I think it's kind of what we were talking about before about the difference between bad and good love. Like I've become a lot better at checking in with myself at the end of the day. And that can be in a positive sense, being like, I had had a great day like I want to make a note of it I want to freeze the moment and I want to know what it is that makes me feel good or checking in with myself if I feel just really drained and maybe it's about restructuring a day maybe it's about figuring out what leaves me depleted and what replenishes me. But as you say, I think as someone who I just like love speaking with people and I love making things and I love to give and give and give. And I think that it's kind of against my nature in a way to kind of put a stop to that and kind of put up a boundary. But I think even getting to that place last year where I felt so under-resourced kind of reminded me of the

importance of that and I'm still figuring out how to do it in my way yeah I've been lucky enough to see you perform twice once on Sunday brunch which as we were talking about before was just like a fever dream of a TV series yeah that was something truly it was. But the thing that strikes me about your performance is that wherever you are performing, there is a truthfulness to it. Thank you. It's such a beautiful thing to witness. And I can only imagine that you have to bring

a certain amount of personal energy to that every time. And so it must also be very depleting if you give that kind of performance in a massive stadium or on the pyramid stage at Glastonbury do you then need to go home and have a massive bath with loads of Epsom salts and just like kind of detoxify yeah in a way definitely like I honestly just I have to just be completely silent for at least like two hours and just put on a podcast or put on my music even after a show I'll usually go back to the tour bus and I'll just watch a documentary I'm

watching that one about centenarians right now the blue zones one in Netflix which I love but yeah I do have to do things afterwards to replenish myself and just to kind of ground myself because it is just such like an adrenaline fueled two hours where you are so perceived and especially on stage I'm always just like running around and it's hot and people are kind of sending you all that energy and I'm meeting fans afterwards and it feels just like a very extroverted pursuit I do have to just kind of like curl up by myself and just do things that bring me back to my body in a way yeah and is your partner respectful of that because yeah she also is a performer yeah no she is and I think that being

with somebody who has the same job means that we both kind of understand that need for space or that need for just solitude at times and also what it feels like to be an artist and to make an album and those moments of kind of creative block or being excited for the other when things are flowing and it feels really good and yeah it's really lovely Peyton it's happening we're finally being recognized for being very online it's about damn time I mean it's hard work being this opinionated. And correct. You're such a Leo.

All the time. So if you're looking for a home for your worst opinions, if you're a hater first and a lover of pop culture second, then join me, Hunter Harris, and me, Peyton Dix, the host of Wondery's newest podcast, Let Me Say This. As beacons of truth and connoisseurs of mess, we are scouring the depths of the internet

so you don't have to. We're obviously talking about the biggest gossip and celebrity news. Like, it's not a question of if Drake got his body done, but when. You are so messy for that, but we will be giving you the B-sides. Don't you worry. The deep cuts, the niche, the obscure. Like that one photo of Nicole Kidman after she finalized her divorce from Tom Cruise. Mother.

A mother to many. Follow Let Me Say This on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new episodes on YouTube or listen to Let Me Say This ad-free by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Hi, I'm Matt Lewis, historian and host of a new chapter of Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit. Join me and world-leading experts every week as we explore the incredible real-life history that inspires the locations, the characters

and the storylines of Assassin's Creed. Listen and follow Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hit wherever you get your podcasts your second failure is your failure to save people tell us why you chose this one yeah i think that it's a big part of my personality to kind of see somebody in need and and it's not even necessarily a friend or someone close it can be a complete stranger and just have that real urge to be like okay what can we do we can do this and that and

kind of try and construct a plan because it's always very plan-based with me but then realizing that there are things that people have to come to themselves and I think a big one is you know if I have a friend who maybe wants to be a creative and I see their potential and I'm like we can do this that and I can put you in this session and blah blah blah but also knowing that people have to get there in their own time and obviously being a supportive friend is one thing but then kind of trying to create this plan based on maybe what I would do as well, not what they would do, I think is sometimes counterproductive. And I think having to kind of control that urge to make everything OK when there are things that I can't make OK or that maybe will never be OK or that someone has to heal from in their way. It's something that I found quite difficult, I think. And I still always have that urge to kind of save people that either maybe don't want to be saved or can't be saved

or putting myself in positions where I'm putting a lot of energy into someone who maybe isn't necessarily very kind or maybe has things that they have to unknot themselves. And I'm kind of like receiving, I'm on the negative end of them kind of healing and expelling energy so something that I'm learning to balance but I haven't yet got there I don't think and has it ever led to a situation of resentment where you

have been trying to do this for someone and they've actually rejected it in some way is that the is that what's led to this realization? Honestly, no. I think it's just been me being like completely exhausted at times, especially being like, oh. Especially being like quite a porous person emotionally. Just also finding like maybe I was carrying other people's sadness in a way where I would just find myself feeling really depleted and sad and low or even really anxious and being like, this doesn't feel like it's coming from me. It feels like maybe it's something that I've absorbed from another person. And then also maybe becoming a person's sole support system and really feeling that weight of responsibility on my shoulders. support system and really feeling that weight of responsibility on my shoulders and again having done more of those check-ins based on my professional life doing that a little bit

more in terms of my personal life being like oh I'm carrying a lot and maybe I shouldn't be I recently sat next to Elizabeth Gilbert at dinner and she's a hero of mine she wrote Eat Pray Love and she is also someone who is an extraordinary empath and who takes on other people's energies and she said that she had been given this piece of advice which is when someone is sitting next to you perhaps they meet you at one of your shows and they want to share their story and often their story can be quite traumatic because your work has opened up something so honest in them and she said that she now mentally says to herself I acknowledge your magic and I don't need to take it on she'll like say that in her own head

just to ensure that there is a sort of psychological separation because otherwise you're right that it does get to be beautiful, but so draining. Yeah, definitely. And I think that you can hold space for that person's story and be grateful that your art or what you've created has moved them in that way. But I think that it can leave a residue on you if you don't then kind of have a little bit of a cleanse and not carry all of these stories with you.

Because I think most artists have that sensibility or that ability to kind of take on just be easily moved and easily affected and I think I've had moments where I found myself feeling really low just because of incredibly traumatic stories that have kind of been shared with me so I think it's not about being ungrateful for the fact that people are sharing it with you but maybe just not taking it on into your own life and through your own day. Yes, you can see it, but you don't always have to feel it. Yeah, exactly. Are you quite unique in your family? I think so. I'm definitely like the emotional one for sure.

And like the kind of like more woo woo creative one. I think that there isn't really anyone in my family actually that has a creative job in any way. And I think I've always very much been the sensitive one and the person who wanted to pick up the guitar and go to the record shops and write the poetry. And my brother is a philosophy student and my parents are both teachers. It's interesting because there was very much this culture of conversation and love and my dad would play audiobooks and play jazz but I think that that drive to write and to express myself did very much come from within and yeah I definitely think that I'm like the unique one I guess in the family were they and are they worried about you no honestly no because I think that because of the kind of child that I was even the fact that Were they and are they worried about you? No, honestly, no.

Because I think that because of the kind of child that I was, even the fact that I was launching myself into a space that was very unfamiliar to them, they were like, we know that if she is going to do this, she is going to do it like as hard and as well as she can. And I think that I've always been quite a grounded person. Like I don't think that they ever thought that I was going to be lost in like quote-unquote like showbiz I guess and I think that they always very much trusted me to just make my own decisions about who I was going to be which I really love

and respect them for and they come to my shows and they came to my reading last night and you know it's nice to include them in my world because I think it can feel quite abstract at times so yeah they've kind of just allowed me to be which is nice and your brother's a philosophy student you must have great conversations with him yeah about the meaning of life oh yes no we do we very much get into that yeah and it's beautiful to see he's my younger brother and to see like his passion for something that's slightly outside of my realm. But just to learn from him. There's something beautiful about learning things from an older, younger sibling.

Sorry. And like seeing them kind of growing up and grow their own interests, which are really nice. Time for me to quote your song lyrics again. All right. Let's do it. In Bruiseless, you sing, I wish I was bruiseless. Almost everyone that I love has been abused and I am included I feel so much guilt that I could not guard more people from harm and that to me just completely dovetailed with this failure and as well as being so lyrically expressed almost everyone I love has been abused and I am included

where did that line come from I think that it's from looking into myself and looking around me and all these people that I hold so close to my heart and people that I genuinely feel have given me just a wave of love a consistent wave wave of love, have been hurt by somebody and hurt by somebody quite deeply. And usually it's a wound that they carry with them that I cannot heal. And I think that the process of writing this album kind of brought that up in me, the fact that, you know, whenever I'm describing characters in my songs, there is always this sense of, you know, wanting to save, wanting to save, wanting to heal things that maybe can never be healed. And there's another song called Purple Phase, where the lyric is, saviour instinct tells

me, use your hands to drag her to peace. That sense of of like wanting to physically bring someone closer to peace closer to healing but knowing that it's impossible and I think that acknowledging the pain in myself and the pain in others and you know being there to support them through their journey but not being able to physically use my hands to drag anyone anywhere because it's a very personal journey and I think that was all encapsulated in those few lines yeah that concept of being bruisless is such a beautiful word do you genuinely wish you were bruisless or do you appreciate as we were touching on earlier that all of the wounds have led you here I think that it's both you know because I think sometimes pain can just be pain I don't think it always has to be useful or have led you anywhere I think you can just be

like this that I was hurt and and that sucks but I do think that in general the lessons that I've learned have kind of brought me to a place where I feel more sure about myself and where I understand myself better and where I move through a world more gently and I attract people to me who treat me with that same respect and whenever I feel like somebody isn't giving me that I'm confident enough to kind of move away from that person I think learning lessons means that you can kind of curate your life in a way that you have good people around you and that you can recognize when someone maybe doesn't have the best intentions your album is called my soft machine I understand that's a line from a Joanna Hogg movie what does it represent to you, that idea? My soft machine to me is, it's my body, it's my soul, it's my eyes.

And I think that a lot of this record is just about reality filtering through me in the way that I experience things, not necessarily describing things as they are, but things as I've seen them, kind of like visual. The visual snow that kind of clouds the way that I see things and I think that's very much colored by the things that I've been through and the people that I love and the experiences that I've had the conversations that I've had kind of inform the way that I see the world your third failure is your failure to fit into others assumptions of who you are and of what you make because of what you look like and how you present such a good failure because

in so many ways it's not yours it's theirs but explain to us a bit more what this means to you yeah I think that people even when it comes to know, what kind of music I make, people assume that it's hip hop or R&B. You know, I remember being a child and talking about listening to audiobooks with my dad in the car. And people were genuinely surprised, kind of in that sense of like, oh, I didn't know that like black people did that you know it was very strange and I was always super perplexed by it because you know I love listening to like folk music and alternative music and heavier music and I love like dressing in this kind of androgynous way and having my hair dyed red and making soft music and for me that was just who I was I didn't know why anyone would expect anything else from me and you know when it comes to my music being categorized in like a lazier way it used to be something that made me quite sad because I was like why would why would you think that have you

even listened to what it is that I've made but I think over time I've just kind of accepted that there are people who will do that and it has nothing to do with me really just seeing something like that and being like that isn't mine to hold because that's something that you're kind of putting on to me and one of the most beautiful things about doing what I do has been seeing like kids coming up to me in the street being like oh you've inspired me to write poetry or oh I'm black but I make like experimental strange electronic music and I've always felt like I couldn't make that kind of music and that people wouldn't take me seriously and then them kind of starting the adventure of putting that music out and being themselves so I think by being

myself and by not paying attention to those assumptions not putting any weight in them whatsoever it's just kind of made me stronger in who I am and it's one of my favorite things about myself I think do you think you went through a phase of feeling that you had to explain your identity no I don't think I ever really did I think I was asked it a lot in interviews in terms of what is it like being queer in music or a woman in music or black in music and I started kind of not really wanting to answer those questions anymore because I was like I can just be I don't really feel like I should have to explain myself to you or what my place is in

the creative world I think that it's enough for me to just be myself and make things and I feel no obligation now to kind of explain it to someone outside of my world what it looks like and what it means to me I think it's enough for me to just be. Can you tell us the the high snobiety is that how you pronounce it? Yeah I think so yeah I can't remember what the exact title was but I think it was like 50 best women in hip-hop or something like that and I was included on that list and you know my initial response was just like oh god not again but I kind of twisted it in a way when I posted about it to be like if you're a black person and you're making electronic music you're making rock music you're in a band you're making things that are outside of what people would expect then keep doing that

it's like you have a seat at the table like the way that we kind of rile against this misunderstanding is just by continuing to be ourselves continuing to kind of build community around ourselves and just being unapologetic and I think it was important to kind of maybe not approach that with hostility and like how could you outrage more as a call to kind of empower people who are doing a similar thing to what I'm doing and just kind of affirm their place in the creative world. You tweeted about it and then and it was a very kind of to the point, eloquent, powerful tweet. They replied with a love heart yeah I know you were like yet again yeah you're not seeing what I'm saying yeah it was very yeah it was exactly that the love heart was really the cherry on the cake I do feel like maybe an intern had hold of their

twitter and just had seen that I had tagged them in something and just did a little love heart I mean we started off this conversation talking about the importance of having the right people around you. Has that always been the case for you professionally? Have you felt seen and supported for who you are rather than having projections of who others think you should be within the industry? Always. You know, I've had the same manager since I was 17 for the last six years and even at the beginning before I was signed I would go into meetings and people would be like you're going to be the next Rihanna I was like what I mean not that I have anything I love Rihanna but um it was yeah but I think that in those moments the people around me were always like

you know only you know what you want to be. And the idea of someone being like, we want to make you a carbon copy of this successful black person was just very strange. And I've always been surrounded by people, especially being on an independent label, I think, who just allow me to be and very much kind of make the effort to facilitate my vision rather than kind of imprinting anything onto me I think I've always had a very clear sense of what I want to do and who I am and just like a clear sense of vision no one's ever tried to kind of crowbar me into something else so I think they know that I'm just very stubborn so I just wouldn't listen in the first place what was the process like of being interviewed when your debut album came out because for all that there are wonderful newspaper and magazine journalists out there and I used to be one of those journalists but there are certain lazy questions I imagine that come up again and again and again and did

you was it exhausting were you drained having to explain yourself I definitely think I did get to that point especially the fact that I was young you know I was 18 and it was also during the pandemic which was such an emotionally fraught time and I was doing all of the press remotely kind of doing hours and hours just like at my laptop in my parents house but then I think after a while I really felt like I built up a sense of assertiveness enough to be like actually I don't really feel comfortable answering that and I think setting up that boundary really gave me a different approach to interviews and it felt like it was something that was constructive and interesting and that it felt like an exchange rather than

someone probing and me feeling obliged to answer so I think very quickly I found the right kind of language to set that boundary up. Why do you think there is this obsession with asking probing invasive questions that are often very personal? I honestly don't really know. But I guess maybe it's about people wanting to always know a little bit more than what you've told them and that sense of kind of wanting to have at least a tiny new fragment of information that can maybe drive people to read the article but I'm not sure honestly especially when people have are creating work that clearly says what they want to say that idea of kind of wanting to really push further into something or you know

especially pushing people in a way where they're clearly uncomfortable I don't really know where that comes from but I also think not everybody does that like I think I've encountered so many journalists who just have a true love of journalism and ask very like respectful insightful questions so I don't think that it's everyone you now live in LA and we've chatted about how much we both love LA yeah and I wonder if part of the reason you love it there is because you don't need to fit into the same assumptions like there's something do you find it a freeing place to be definitely I think it's definitely a very freeing place to be I think it also just attracts so many people from so many different parts of the world and I think it also just attracts so many people from so many

different parts of the world and I think there are also so many creative pockets whether that be in film or music or literature sculpture whatever it might be and I think the community that I found as well is full of like oddballs and eccentric creatives and I think that I've just found people who accept me truly as I am and that's been so beautiful especially with the nature surrounding California and the sunshine and just that sense of being able to you know have a peaceful life but also dip into the slipstream of like work and excitement and moving fast it's just been the perfect place for me to be really what's your favorite hike my favorite hike I think okay so there's one there's one that's a secret hike that

i'll tell you about afterwards because that's like because i am so happy about the fact that that is untouched but this is one hike in topanga called red rocks which is as you would imagine just these like huge ancient prehistoric kind of deep red clay rocks and you kind of go through this valley and it's quite isolated and you get to the top of this hill and you can see like the very far reaches of the city and it's beautiful i like the kind of out of the way hikes because obviously there's the like runyon canyon and those kind of like city hikes but i like the weird far away ones and so many people don't know that la does have this extraordinary nature around it where you

feel like you're so far out of the city and yet as you say you can still like dip back into the city should you want it and also I when I first went to LA and I lived there for three months the end of 2015 I was also that very skeptical British person who was like it's just a walk yeah actually they're not just walks there's a there's a fair amount of gradient I like that I like the hike defending no I feel the same I also thought it's like you go for a walk with some like walking sticks that you don't need but there are some pretty steep ones definitely right are you going to continue writing poetry and do you think you might write full-length prose one day? I would love to

honestly I think it's something that I find quite daunting but it's definitely something that I want to do at some point maybe when I've kind of my existence is a little bit more grounding I think if I were to approach a full-length novel I would really want to like sit and bed in and really be focused on that for a number of months or years but I definitely want to continue writing and just put out kind of regular collections whether that be short stories or essays and what are you working on at the moment I'm just kind of at the beginning I'm at what I call the fueling stage where I'm just kind of collecting fragments and words and memories and hoping that that's going to become the clay for my next projects, but not really working with any kind of intention, just kind of making for the sake of it at this point.

Are you very conscious when you are in that fueling stage of not taking on too much other outside influence in terms of you need to be alive to the world around you rather than being on your phone? Definitely. Okay. How do you manage that? you need to be alive to the world around you rather than being on your phone definitely okay how do you manage that I don't know I think it's just about being very intentional about it like whenever I'm writing or I'm in that creative mode I very much like ring fence off that time like those few months to do only that I don't do anything else and I do just put my phone away and

I don't find that super difficult like I'm not somebody who's that attached to my phone or technology in general and then I just like plunge into being in the world because so much of writing is having things to write about you know you can't write in a void or about being on a tour bus or something like that so I just really throw myself into living life and being around new people and going on little adventures you were talking about Maggie Nielsen and how that might be your Desert Island Discs book. What would be your Desert Island Discs piece of music? Have you thought about it? An album or just one song?

I'm going to ask for just one song. Actually, give me both. Give me both. Oh, just one song is too much. Okay. I'm just going on pure instinct. I think In Rainbows by Radiohead would be the one for me there's this sense of warmth minimalism melancholy passion yearning I think it's

my favorite Radiohead album and Radiohead's my favorite band I just feel like I could find new things in it for the rest of my life and And then song-wise, gosh, that's such a hard one. Maybe my second favourite album is an album called Carrying Low by Sufjan Stevens. And I think maybe I would pick a song called All of Me Wants All of You from that record. And it just feels so delicate. You know, there's a sense of this relationship that's kind of slowly fragmenting and it feels so tender and his voice is just like so light and like gossamer thin over these like sparkling guitars I just love it oh that's my listening sorted for the rest of the

day thank you and I notice as you're sitting opposite me that you have tattoos. Oh, many. Yes, they're all over the place. What's your latest tattoo been? I think it was probably this kind of interesting, strange room thing that I found. A room? It's just, yeah, I like having some of the tattoos that I have are just kind of these little symbols that in the moment for example this one that's this little kind of like star is basically me at the center and then that sense of being having this kind of sense of adventure when it comes to creativity and blossoming in many different directions at once

so yeah I just love to kind of adorn myself in this way I think that it very much tells a story and I can remember exactly where I was and in my life and who I was with when I got each of them so I love tattoos do you have any I do there's sort of cop-out ones where I can hide them if I have one here which says only connect I have a similar sort of star one to you there and an arrow here but they are very addictive it is true although I've loved this conversation so much. It's been meandering and wise in the most beautiful ways. Thank you.

I wonder if I could draw it to a close by asking you if you feel, we've been talking about failure, but do you feel successful? That's an interesting question. I don't know. I don't know if I do. I feel like I can recognize that I've had success but it's hard for me to say with confidence that I feel successful I feel like I'm still reckoning with a sense of imposter syndrome that might never fully go away but I can still be proud of what I've

built I think I think imposter syndrome is such an interesting one I found that one of the things that has really helped is doing more of the thing and because as you get older you carry on doing more of the thing actually that really helps because even if you don't believe fundamentally that you're worthy or you question your own talent the fact is that there's more of it to fall back on that you're like oh well I did do it for all those many thousands of hours so I guess I can and maybe it's a function of your youth albeit with such a wise soul that you still feel imposter syndrome when you absolutely shouldn't you completely deserve to be here and to claim your power within

this thank you yeah Arlo Parks I can't wait to see what you do next thank you thanks for having me thank you for coming on how to fail if you enjoyed this episode of how to fail with Elizabeth Day I would so appreciate it if you could rate review and subscribe. Apparently it helps other people know that we exist.