Colorado-born, Los Angeles-based neo-folkie singer/songwriter Patrick Park is not prolific but has now made seven records since his debut in 2003. As he did on his most recent Love Like Swords, he once again, five years later, on Here/Gone highlights his voice as the number one instrument. It ebbs and flows throughout this record and he masterfully changes the tempos around it, using mostly just an acoustic guitar and relatively light string arrangements. Although he’s employed complex sonic productions in the past, this time he just retreats to what’s necessary. Park has a voice like Elliott Smith’s and has had some of his songs used in TV series. Yet, he remains just a bit under the radar. Sadly, a deep thinker and thoughtful songwriter like Park is just not conducive to mass appeal.
Park tapped producer Rob Schnapf (Beck, Kurt Vile, Elliott Smith) for the first time since his 2007 Everyone’s in Everyone, and the pair distilled Park’s introspective folk songs to voice and guitar combinations highlighted with string arrangements by Bobby Halvorson (Van Dyke Parks). With the sparse production allowing Park’s lyrics to remain front-and-center, the tracks materialize, some as letters to his soon-to-be-born son and others in both an existential and mortality vein. Because Park has worked these songs out on his own, and had performed many of them solo, the album was completed in just two days.
Park didn’t intend to take five years between albums. There were lots of starts and stops. He began to do some songwriting for other artists, which he acknowledges “took a lot of time from my own songwriting but was kind of a necessary thing at the time. He also had a son, now 19 months old, and dealt with some health issues of his own. “It was just a lot of things piled in there,” he says. He also spent part of the time working as a counselor for a suicide hotline. He doesn’t draw from any of those stories here but feels that the empathy poured out in those experiences helped. “These songs are more about just moving past that stuff,” Park explains. “They’re kind of for people who have had that experience — which, honestly is everybody at some point. It’s about how about can we be? OK, this experience is painful, but what is this experience? Who is it that’s having this experience? Where did it come from? The more you’re open to it, it starts to lose its power a little bit. That’s where a lot of these songs are coming from.” If there’s a theme to Here/Now, it’s the extension of the title, that we constantly chase things in life only to find that the sense of fulfillment we get quickly dissipates, creating a repetitive cycle of urge to brief satisfaction and then on to the next quest. Much of what he writes about is the superficial aspects of life – trying to look good, trying to impress without a true foundation of substance.
This is the essence of one of the key tracks, “Everything Falls Apart,” because sooner or later everything does, yet Park (as you’d expect from his role as counselor) doesn’t take a negative approach but rather a hopeful one. Park describes “Love Lover Love,” sung with friend Emily Kokal, as a song about “staying open” but in the context of present times and contemporary external factors. “Park explains. “I don’t think that’s a moment we can have a conversation about or get through if we’re not willing to let go a little bit and say, ‘This is my opinion, this is what I think, this is the way I look at the world — but this is not what makes me human.’ We really do have way more in common than any differences, just fundamentally as human beings. But these days especially it’s hard to remember that.”
The ten song set is a reflection upon how much is poured into hurrying time along when sometimes the most substantial form of fulfillment comes from simply letting go. This is an album where you absolutely must hit repeat. You won’t catch all the lyrics the first, second, or maybe even the third time but it’s worth it to keep trying. Park’s soothing voice certainly makes that process easier.
Photo by Mia Kirby
