Arlo Parks

“When things started to take off, I had more and more to do, and things were happening but I didn't quite have the time to process it or enjoy the positives and think about how far I've come.”

“I'm up around 11am to my alarm. Without it I'd sleep into the afternoon.”

“When I started making my own music I was listening to people like Erykah Badu and Elliott Smith. I think I always gravitated towards slightly more understated voices because it felt like I could really connect with what they were saying. It felt more like a conversation.”

“But I think for me, writing poetry when I was younger really helped me to condense an idea or a story into only so many words, because in a song you really only have three, four minutes to have a complete world in this song, so I think it definitely taught me to be concise.”

“I definitely think social media does cause this desire to be perfect. It can make kids feel like they've got quite a lot of the weight on their shoulders in terms of how they're supposed to be and what they're supposed to like and how they're supposed to act.”

“Yeah, it can be dangerous to kind of try and target your art to a certain type of people! You don't know who's going to gravitate towards your work, you never know what people are going get out of the work. So I try and just create music that feels true to my taste, and then see what happens.”

“I've always felt very connected to people.”

“What I want to do with my music is to just encourage vulnerability, and to talk about things even if they're uncomfortable. Everyone has mental health - everyone has a mind that works in different ways and goes through highs and lows.”

“I feel like people who are older have lived longer and it's harder to impress them. So I always feel super flattered when I see an older couple at my show. I'm like, okay, I must be doing something special.”

“I realised that being sensitive means you can connect to all kinds of people. I think I've learned that it is a gift as well.”

“I picked up the guitar when I was about 14 or 15 maybe, and then I started just messing around with loops on GarageBand, and just building my own beats in my bedroom and then just releasing that on SoundCloud.”

“Reading the dictionary helps me express myself better. I can spend hours flicking through a thesaurus, too. It's not about expanding my vocabulary, it's just that I have a very specific taste with words. I'll sit and write lists of them to help me better describe my life.”

“Know that you can move past things that have happened to you and that healing takes time. Take the lessons you learned in the past and hold them close, but move forward and try not to get trapped in what was.”

“I think 'Black Dog' came out at a time where a lot of people were feeling quite low and confused in quite a chaotic space.”

“I would say I'm an outlier. Nobody in my family does anything creative, though my dad loved jazz and my mum likes Prince and 1980s French pop.”

“I realised that what I loved was descriptive writing rather than something with a plot.”

“I want to be that person that kids can listen to, and feel energized by because they've never felt like they had someone that they could listen to and see themselves in before.”

“As I'm writing a song, I focus on the music and try not to let my mind wander too much, but if I do think of any visual moments or references that I think would connect nicely, I'll make a note of it.”

“How many artists to pick as my obsessions? The four I listen to all the time are Phoebe Bridgers, A Tribe Called Quest - I'm being very selective, here - and then probably the Cure, still; and then The Internet - I love The Internet.”

“When I first started writing in the beginning, it was very much surrounding the idea of escape and of fantasy, then when I got a little bit older it very much became a way of looking inward.”