Arlo Parks has opened up about the “therapeutic” side to her songwriting and the meaning and themes behind her third studio album, Ambiguous Desire.
The British artist, 25, will release her new project next week (3 April). She explained that the title was inspired in part by the “soup” of feelings she explored while clubbing around New York, LA and London.
“I feel like I was inspired a lot by like liminal spaces and being in the ‘inbetween’,” she said during an appearance on the Good Vibrations podcast.
“The ‘ambiguous’ part comes from this fluidity and also this sense of exploring feelings that you can’t quite put into words like, like a chemistry or these weird full-circle feelings.”
As for the “desire” part of it, Parks said this was fuelled by “yearning and lust and wanting… I feel like you learn so much about people through what they want, and that was kind of the heart of the record.”
Going to clubs helped her understand the intensity of those feelings, Parks said: “Because you’re also experiencing so many fleeting moments with so many different people… and there’s so much romance in that, I think.”
During the same conversation, Parks – who won the Mercury Prize in 2021 for her debut album, Collapsed in Sunbeams – spoke about the time it can take to “unpeel yourself” when entering a new relationship.
“When you are close to someone or in love with someone, they hold up a mirror to you and it is difficult… there are things you have to face about yourself,” she said.
“And so I do think it takes me a while to unravel, and that’s not that I’m necessarily a closed person. But it just takes me a while.”
Parks said she found songwriting therapeutic as a “self-reliant” person who enjoys spending time alone in her own world, at the same time enjoying the communal experience of being at a nightclub.
“I feel like I write or make songs to kind of remind myself that I was like here and I was alive and I was feeling this on this day or at this point in my life,” she said. “A big part of [songwriting is] to sit with my journal and just document all those little details.”
She shared that a friend told her there’s a lot of “anonymity” in her songwriting: “I feel like so much of my music is sharing how I would to a friend, or if I were completely unobserved,” she said.
“And I do like that feeling in the club that everyone is having their little private moments, no one’s really judging anyone or paying attention to, what anyone else is doing. I think that’s the magic of it.”
Parks releases her third album, Ambiguous Desire, on 3 April. Listen to the full interview on Roisin O’Connor’s Good Vibrations from 27 March on all streaming platforms.
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