Quotes from Arlo Parks

Creativity hits me like a lightning bolt. For two weeks ideas overflow and spill from me, before a period of nothing. The prospect of it suddenly just leaving me one day scares me. I'm terrified that every song I write might be my last.

I always found that really helpful; talking something through and vocalising what's wrong. I've found that internalising things just makes them come up in uglier ways further down the line, so it's definitely something I've tried to maintain throughout my life.

There are so many individuals. We're not going to all have the same ways of being or priorities or personalities. You can't have this umbrella thing. Even if you look at other artists my age, people are making completely different music and have different goals.

My attention span was quite short and I just wanted to use a lot of beautiful words. When I read a poem like 'Howl', or 'Lady Lazarus' by Sylvia Plath, I felt myself being moved - I wanted to do that for other people.

When I was younger, there was that desire to be cool and to fit in and to look a certain way. And I was quite an introverted kid who wrote plays in her spare time, so I didn't feel very cool.

You can tell when a song has come from the heart and is genuine, and it moves you more when you can tell the person really feels what they're saying.

Minneapolis has always been a mythical place for me because my mom is a massive Prince fan.

Poetry doesn't necessarily need to be some erudite thing. Your mom telling you a story is just as much poetry as some old 17th century thing that no one really understands. I think that those boundaries should be broken down!

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.

Normally in life there are all these distractions but in lockdown all that stuff was gone. You were forced to just sit and think. Creatively, it had its benefits.

To be a good artist, you need to be sensitive to the world around you, you need to be curious, you need to listen, you need to be willing to learn from people. A lot of great art is about people being moved by something or seeing something that stops them dead.

I really wanted to have a name that was double-barreled. I think at the time I was listening to a lot of Odd Future - like Earl Sweatshirt and Frank Ocean - and I wanted my name to have a ring to it.

Sometimes I'm just giving, and giving to people who aren't always deserving. But I've learned to listen and approach people without judgment. I've had so many conversations with so many different kinds of people - it's opened my heart, which is useful when I'm writing songs.

Sometimes you can feel like the only person in the world to have struggled in a certain way and there is a shame around that. The way we deconstruct it all is by talking about it, by listening and even within our circles of friends and checking up on each other, making sure that if someone is going through something, they have someone to talk to.

I've definitely seen the rise of more charities and Mental Health Awareness Week, and people in general seem a lot more open about struggles that they've faced.

Super Sad Generation' was essentially about the struggles that you go through when you're growing up in the world and trying to figure out what kind of person you want to be.

As a person I'm often overwhelmed by emotions, so I write them down.

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

At the beginning I wasn't really rapping. I had poetry, so it was a spoken word vibe. Then I found beats that you could sing over - lo-fi, ambient stuff. So I was singing over them and trying to put things into practice.

As a child I had a wild imagination; from the age of seven I'd sit and write epic stories.

The way that I write is very instinctual and based off raw feeling--I'm a very emotional person and I think that comes across in my writing. Also the songwriting that I enjoy, for example Elliott Smith, Leonard Cohen and Nico tend to be both photographic and visceral.

I asked a lot of my artist friends and just friends in general what their favorite albums of all time were. I made this massive list and I just listened to all of them, all the way through.

We need to let the people around us know that they're loved.