The Real Life of Arlo Parks

Her character-driven songs have won wide acclaim. Now she's embracing a new transparency

- BRITTANY SPANOS

When arlo parks set out to make her second album, she wanted to make sure everyone knew that she was singing about her lived experiences, and no one else’s.

“The first record was attributing a lot of things to characters and to people in my life,” says the British musician, 22, who has won widespread acclaim for her novelistic songwriting, with characters who burst into vivid life in each verse. “I wanted to be brave in the sense of being very clear that I was talking about the world through my eyes and my heart — [with] the sense of joy and pain and confusion and real kind of melting pot of emotion coming from me.”

Parks first began writing her new album, titled My Soft Machine and out this spring, before she released her Mercury Prize-winning debut, 2021’s Collapsed in Sunbeams. Recording the new LP took her 18 months, with “sporadic bursts in the studio” in between her opening slots on Clairo’s, Harry Styles’, and Billie Eilish’s tours as well as her own headlining trek. Along the way, she worked with a “kaleidoscope of collaborators,” including Ariel Rechtshaid (Vampire Weekend, Haim), Buddy Ross (Frank Ocean), and Brockhampton’s Romil Hemnani.

“Because I made the first record in the pandemic, I was really craving that sense of being able to jam and be free with many people in the room,” she says.

The experiences that color this album are a true whirlwind: The past two years have often felt like one big, ongoing party in Parks’ honor.