Arlo Parks on Burning Out, Taking a Year Off, and the Record That Came After

Three records in, Arlo Parks has figured out that the only way to make the fourth is to stop making records for a while.

We met Arlo Parks in a cafe in Peckham, south London, in July. She was wearing a blue slip dress and reading a Clarice Lispector novel. She had just finished the final mix on her fourth album, Minor Rooms, out this month. The record is her first since 2023's My Soft Machine, and it followed an eighteen-month stretch during which she stopped touring, moved out of her London flat, and lived with her grandmother in Nigeria for seven months.

Reflektor Mag: What made you stop?

Arlo Parks: I was really tired. That's the honest answer. I'd been touring on Collapsed in Sunbeams for about eighteen months when My Soft Machine came out, and then I toured on that for about eighteen months, and at the end of the second tour I couldn't remember what my own flat looked like. I was sleeping in hotel rooms five days a week.

I think if I'd kept going I would have made a record I didn't believe in. I knew the signs. My therapist knew the signs. My manager was already circling the idea. I just needed someone to make it official.

RM: Who made it official?

Parks: My grandmother, actually. I went to visit her in Lagos for what was supposed to be two weeks and I ended up staying for seven months. She didn't tell me to stop. She just made it very clear that she thought I was tired, and then she made me a meal, and I stayed.

RM: Did you write while you were there?

Parks: Not for the first four months. I didn't touch a piano, I didn't open my laptop, I didn't journal in a way I was going to use later. I read a lot. I helped my grandmother with her garden. I wrote some poems in a notebook that nobody will ever see.

In month five I started writing songs again, almost by accident. One of them became "Rooftops," which is on the record. One of them became the opening track. One of them was terrible and I threw it away. The point is, the songs started coming only when I had stopped trying to make them come.

RM: Is the new record about Nigeria?

Parks: Not really. It's about rest. It's about what you notice when you stop. There are references to the house I was staying in, to my grandmother's garden, to a specific birdsong I kept hearing in the mornings. But I didn't want to make a Nigeria record because that's not really what it was. I was there to rest, not to collect material.

RM: How is this record different from your first three?

Parks: It's quieter. There's much less drum programming — a lot of the record is just piano, voice, maybe a cello. I think of it as an acoustic record even though it isn't technically acoustic in the Mercury-rules sense. It's also shorter — nine songs, thirty-six minutes. My previous records were all over fifty minutes. I wanted this one to feel like a conversation that ends when it should.

RM: Will you tour it?

Parks: Yes but not in the same way. I'm doing about forty shows. All in theaters. No festivals. No support slots. I'm bringing my cellist and my piano player and we're playing the whole record and then some older songs stripped way back. It's going to feel more like a reading than a concert, I think. That's the hope.

RM: Final question. What are you listening to right now?

Parks: The new Nala Sinephro record on repeat. Also Grouper's entire back catalog, which I've been working through since February. And a lot of Fela Kuti, because my grandmother played him constantly in the house. All quiet music for various values of quiet.