Making her highly anticipated first trip to our shores since the release of her radiant debut Collapsed in Sunbeams, London-based Arlo Parks sat down with Grace and Al on Friday Arvos to chat world stages, lightning bolts, ‘Dream Fuel’ and wholesome comment sections.

With the first teasers of Collapsed in Sunbeams trickling into the world in early 2020, Arlo Parks has had anything but a traditional release path. Zooms, self recordings, at-home concerts and live streams marked the first year of her journey to Collapsed in Sunbeams. Now able to take her music to the world, Arlo has shared the stage with some incredible artists, relishing the community around her on tour.

“It’s exciting honestly. I feel like it adds another dimension to the music to actually be able to share it with people, it feels like less of an insular thing I did in my room, it feels like it’s reaching… I feel like the most beautiful thing about music is being able to share it with people.”

A true globe trotter, Arlo’s world has expanded beyond the confines of her bedroom to some of the world’s biggest stages. On her writing process, Arlo said she finds joy in taking mundane moments and making them whole in song. With an international schedule, Grace and Al asked Arlo how she continues to find the mundane in such an exciting world.

“It’s been a lot of overhearing snippets of conversation. I spend a lot of time at the airport and a lot of time in motion and travelling… and speaking to different people from different places about their lives and how they connect with music, their different subcultures and scenes…speaking about cuisine and punk music, just learning so much and writing down all those fragments and have those feeding into the music.”

Already proving herself as a poet and musician, Arlo Parks has added the notch of radio host to her belt with her new series Dream Fuel. Interviewing a slew of incredible artists including Finneas, St Vincent and Ocean Vuong, Arlo described the impact that connecting with artists across mediums and genres has had on her creative process.

“Everyone has a very unique approach to what they do. I think it’s also interesting to learn about what people love outside of what they’re known for, like what Finneas likes to cook or that Ocean likes to ride his bike around the countryside, just random little nuggets. Something that ties everyone together… is there’s always that really pure love of what they do at the core… I feel like you can only really do something everyday relentlessly if you really love and I think that was something that was really inspiring and lovely to see.”

From all these sources of inspiration, Arlo Parks has connected on a deep level with her audience through her words and music. Writing about personal experience and sometimes under-explored terrain, the comments of Arlo’s videos reveal a fanbase that feels seen and heard by Arlo – an experience that she cherishes.

“It’s indescribable… I found one of my old journals from when I was a kid and it was a list of things I wanted out of life as a whole and it was like, I want one person who I don’t know to listen to my music and connect to it… and then that’s happening on a scale of hundreds of people, thousands. That’s happened to me so many times as a music lover before anything and being able to do that for someone else is one of the purest forms of connection you can have as an artist, it’s really beautiful.”

Want to hear more from Arlo Parks? Listen to her full interview with Grace and Al up top! You can also see what went down in the studio below.