S18, Ep4 Arlo Parks on the impossibility of perfection

0:00It's Jonathan Van Ness from Getting Better with Jonathan Van Ness. It's easy to feel hopeless, but we don't have to stay there. I'm all about finding places where we can turn that energy into hope and into action. One of those places is Americans United for separation of church and state. Americans United, or AU, is this quiet but mighty force, working every day to preserve freedom without favor and equality without exception. I am so obsessed with that tagline. And let me tell you something, honey. That wall between church and state, paper thin. It's got a leak, honey. It's one of the last safeguards protecting so many of our rights.

0:33So right now, from bodily autonomy to LGBTQ plus rights to the future of public schools, to me, this is about creating a world where everyone gets to live as themselves as long as you're not harming anyone else. Now is not the time to curl up and hide. It's the time to link arms and stand together for a better future. Join Americans United for separation of church and state and their growing movement because church-state separation protects us all. Learn more and join the fight at au.org slash better. Let's go, Americans United! I am so excited and not a little astonished to announce that I am coming to Australia.

1:11I 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.

1:55I 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.

2:46Hello 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. 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.

3:32Her second, My Soft Machine, was released earlier this year and is a deeply personal work, a narration of Parks' 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.

4:18She 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.

5:02I 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?

5:49Yeah, 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.

6:24I 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.

7:39So 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.

8:17I 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.

8:55I 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.

10:34There'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 know 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 in 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 or 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.

13:02Yeah, 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...

13:41It'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.

14:14But 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 like practical domestic language being 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 getting perfect grades. But juxtaposed with that, I was also a very sporty kid. So I was playing hockey at a very high level, doing cross country, doing athletics, balancing those two things.

14:52But 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. Yeah. 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 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.

15:35So 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 artsy kids and creating community. One of your friends and now collaborators is Phoebe Bridges. And you've described her as having a big brother energy. Yeah. How does that manifest itself?

16:13She 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'm 19. And she was like, really good. You're really good. And I think that having those little moments of affirmation, I think especially when I was still figuring out who I was 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.

16:51Well I love Pegasus the song that features her it's so beautiful. Let's get on to 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 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.

18:05And 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 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 sometimes 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 regret 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.

20:27I 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 Disc 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. 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.

21:04Definitely. 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 a 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 am 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 haha 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 there 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.

25:50And 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 learned 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.

27:20I 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 there like how do you know when it is right for you to say no I think 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 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.

28:30And 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 really 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 yeah 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 you guessed it it's me jonathan vaness from getting better with jonathan vaness Okay, babes, can we just take a moment to talk about how special our dogs are?

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32:17your 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 okay when there are things that I can't make okay or that maybe will never be okay 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.

33:54And 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 especially being like quite a a porous person emotionally just also finding like maybe I was 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 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 I'm carrying a lot and maybe I shouldn't be.

34:58I 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 or 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 yeah exactly are you quite unique in your family?

36:38I think so I'm definitely like the 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 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.

37:21Were 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 I know we know that if she is gonna do this she is gonna 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 in 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 so 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?

39:10I 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 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 savior instinct tells me use your hands to drag her to peace that sense 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 bruiseless is such a beautiful word do you genuinely wish you were bruiseless 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.

40:48I 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 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.

41:35Your 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? yeah 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 a 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 you 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 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.

44:58I 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 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 and 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 within something and just did a little love heart.

46:45I 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.

49:06So 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.