“It will never not make me cry thinking about how much this music kept me alive.”

Tess Parks‘ new record Pomegranate represents much more than a body of music, for the London-based musician, it was everything in a time when she felt nothing. Written and recorded between London, Toronto and Los Angeles during a time of emotional turmoil for Parks, it was only when she began sharing ideas and sounds with close collaborator Ruari Meehan over email that she began to consider making music again. “I went through a long period of feeling like I never wanted to make music again”, Parks says, “What is the point of singing? Everything is pointless. I was taking refuge making paintings, sitting in silence for hours.”

Through Pomegranate, Parks finds new light, breaking through the shit to find moments of rejuvenation, resilience and hope. The musician’s husky, hypnotic voice reverberates more than ever, imbued with new feelings and a sense of triumph. Following the joy of completing the album, this year had another reward in store for Parks: Tim Burton picked her track Somedays as part of his Beetlejuice Beetlejuice soundtrack – an accolade much cooler than any metal statuette.

Alex James Taylor: Congrats on Pomegranate, Tess, can you tell us about where this album started and how you wanted the album to sound and feel?
Tess Parks: Thank you so much. I have never been more proud of anything. Ruari Meehan and I have been writing songs together since 2017, and we’ve been friends since we met at a Neil Young concert in the summer of 2014.  We’ve known each other for a long time now and he’s pretty intuitive, so he could clearly see that I was in a bad place and not making music anymore. He started sending me music he had written, in a very subtle way, just extending a hand and seeing if I would respond with anything. The first song he sent me was the first track on the album, Bagpipe Blues, in January 2020. I had written something and had a melody but just left it and then obviously 2020 was crazy and by November 2020 I had had several experiences that led to suffering from PTSD. That left me almost developing a stutter amongst so many other crazy symptoms where you’re like, “Wow, I can’t believe my body is shutting down and trying to protect me in all of these really irrational ways.” I wanted to be in silence – no music no headphones – needing to be able to hear if there was someone that was going to come up behind me, needing to make sure I wasn’t in danger. It’s really sad. I just started painting dots in silence every day, morning until night. Anyway, Ruari sent me Koalas in November 2020 and when I eventually listened to it, it was the most beautiful music I had ever heard. Words came to me right away. I will always love Ruari because he helped bring me back to myself and encouraged me to keep singing in a time when I really wanted to totally give up. So then we started sending each other songs from London to Toronto and every day we would be singing back and forth to each other – it was honestly so beautiful. It will never not make me cry thinking about how much this music kept me alive.

AJT: Did you almost have to coax yourself back into it? Were there particular things/actions you used to help this?
TP: I was always still creating despite everything. I found writing every day a very important way to process what I had experienced. Having love and encouragement from people you trust is really important, also. Having safe nervous systems to be around to co-regulate with. During the process of making this album, I was going for early morning sunrise walks with my mother daily too, rain or shine, which I think was so integral to my healing. Looking back, I can’t tell you how much this whole time period meant to me. I honestly feel like I had died and I was born again.

AJT: How do you feel now the record is done?
TP: A lot better! Every album takes as long as it takes to complete… This one ended up taking about four years. But Ruari is the heart of this album. He wrote all of the music, and I just feel honoured that he let me sing over the top. I think he’s such a genius. I have never seen someone so meticulously or passionately complete an album with such attention to detail and so much enthusiasm. I am in awe of what we achieved here together. And I am so fiercely proud to be who I am and where I am today and not where I was four years ago.

“Getting into that kind of flow state has been so healing,  getting lost in a little world you are visually creating.”

AJT: Koalas is such a beautiful song, it really does give you goosebumps and transports. Can you talk us through that particular track and the feelings behind it?
TP: Thank you! I know, it’s literally the most stunning music I’ve ever heard. To me, it’s our Wonderwall. Koalas did start the eventual process we developed making the album: Ruari would send me the music, then I would sing something and send over lyrics, he’d hear something and sing something back. We didn’t see each other for two years. It felt like the end of the world on so many levels. On Koalas particularly, I think you can really hear and feel that. To me, it’s this universal sound, no matter what genre of music you like, it’s impossible to not love this song. And then Francesco added this beautiful piano part a few years later, and Marco and Ruari recorded the drums and caught lightning in a bottle, it’s like God Only Knows or Wouldn’t It Be Nice? by The Beach Boys. I can’t reiterate this enough, this song kept me alive. And also, Koalas eat eucalyptus and they say the cross that Jesus was crucified on was made of eucalyptus trees, which is a fun fact I found out much after this song was titled and written.

AJT: Molly Lewis features on Koalas, we’re big fans of hers, can you tell us about how that collaboration came about? When did you first hear Molly perform?
Molly Lewis happens to be Ruari’s cousin! It’s a small world. She was in London to play a show and the album was already pretty much done, so it was a spur-of-the-moment decision, but yeah, damn, have you ever heard a whistle more perfect in your life??? What a crazy god given talent.

AJT: I love the video for Crown Shy, it’s so brilliant. What was the idea behind that? I hope you kept the outfit!
TP: I literally had nothing to do with it. I had eight days to find a new sublet this summer and was kind of panicking and didn’t feel like I had time to be part of this one. So, my incredible friends Tree and Adam Carr stepped in to make this beautiful video. First of all, Tree is a High Priestess Witch, the most intuitive and healing person you could ever hope to meet. I think it’s perfect that Tree is starring in the video too, because the concept of ‘Crown Shyness’ is trees that grow alongside each other, but their leaves never touch, forming a beautiful river-type shape among the tree tops. Tree also art directed the video and put on this space suit and basically… They came up with this concept because I always find the strangest most synchronistic stuff on the street. So in the video, they gathered up a bunch of stuff I’d found and given them or that we’d found together while walking. For example, the envelope she picks up in the video that says ‘Extreme Oracle’ was a poem that literally blew up towards me by a poet named Joseph along the Southbank river outside the Tate Modern the day after I met Tree for the first time. It was the Virgo Full Moon of March 19 2022, Saint Joseph’s feast day. And then inside the envelope was a poem that was dated on the day that Tree and Adam first met, and I didn’t know any of this at the time, but they also met in Toronto where I’m from, around the corner from where I recorded my first album. It turned out Tree used to live on the same street that my first album was recorded on. And the other night for example, after I shot the California’s Dreaming video with them I found a crown on the street and then a pair of Dr Martens in my size, and when I was saying goodbye to them, there was the full moon behind Tree and some sunflowers in a window behind her. I could go on and on…

“It got to the point where I felt speechless and words weren’t enough to describe how I was feeling.”

AJT: You mentioned finding peace through painting rather than music for a period of time prior to the record, can you tell us about the differences in what painting offered you compared to music? Your artwork is really great, nature is a key influence for you… Can you also tell us about this?
TP: It got to the point where I felt speechless and words weren’t enough to describe how I was feeling. I didn’t want to make sound. It felt like a simpler, more expansive and autonomous outlet to be able to have the biggest question of the day be, “What colour should I use next?” And it felt empowering to be choosing what flowers look like to me, what does my sky look like today? I get to be ‘God’ in this scenario, or seeing a clear visual imprint of what eight hours worth of dots look like that day. It really surprised me that I had developed that level of patience, but at the time, it also felt like time was moving differently. It felt like I had all the time in the world to let time pass that way, I felt like a human hourglass, like one dot per second. Getting into that kind of flow state has been so healing,  getting lost in a little world you are visually creating. People have asked me if I had been counting them [laughs], for the record, I wasn’t, but that would be pretty interesting.

AJT: Who are some of your favourite artists?
TP: Oh so many. Chagall and his blues are unreal, Picasso’s line drawings of flowers and peace doves, Corita Kent, Degas, Van Gogh, Klimt, Hilma af Klint (incidentally died on this day, October 21, 1944), Yoko Ono, Miró, Mattise, Norman Laliberté, Gareth Southgate…

AJT: I have to ask about Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, it was so cool to suddenly hear your music in the film! That’s such an amazing thing to be able to say your music was used for! How did it come about and how was it watching the film and hearing your track?
TP: Totally surreal. I only found out the day before the movie was released, it turned out an old friend of mine, James Balmont, was the music supervisor, and you want to know something crazy? This is how awesome life is: I met James on July 12 2014, we were playing the same festival in Ladbroke Grove, I was playing during the day, but later that night when his band played, I heard that the floor where the stage was had collapsed! But I left before that, because later that night, I went to see a Neil Young concert in Hyde Park, and that’s where I met Ruari.

Tess Parks‘ album Pomegranate is out now.
Follow Tess on Instagram.