Festival connects

and a millennial rapper who made her start thinking about adding music to the words she had been writing.

“I remember listening to Patti Smith, Redondo Beach, and also listening to Earl Sweatshirt’s album Doris. Those are two very different artists, but there’s something very vulnerable about the way they wrote and the way that they used their words, especially Patti Smith. The way she combined poetry with instrumentation was really inspiring and it really drove me to try it for myself.”

Parks’ musical tastes encompass indie and hip-hop. Not so unusual, she suggests. “I’ve always explored music from all kinds of genres. I think that’s what’s fun about making music, especially now. The idea of genre has kind of dissolved and you can go anywhere.”

What is striking is how open she is for one so young. Her writing is full of warmth and compassion, but it’s also very honest and vulnerable.

“I think there’s a strength that comes with being vulnerable, especially in public,” Parks suggests.

“Maybe I will feel exposed in a way, but the message behind the song and the conversations that it has the potential to open are more important. They outweigh that sense of fear. I always feel a little bit scared before I put things out and I think it’s a good thing. It means I am operating at the fringes of my comfort zone.

“Yeah, I definitely think there’s a strength in vulnerability. It’s not really the same as fragility in my eyes.”

Presumably once you’ve put a song out there you can feel a sense of solidarity, too, when people respond?

“Definitely. And those messages make me feel so warmed and like I’m on the right track. To have my music – something I dreamed up in my head in an apartment in London – have a real, tangible, positive effect on people’s lives is really special. I think music is quite a powerful thing.”

Given that Parks released an EP entitled Super Sad Generation, there is a temptation to position her as a spokeswoman for her generation.

She’s rightly wary of the label. She’s also wary of generalising about what people of her age are like.

“Of course, there are threads that tie us together, like social media. But even when I think about the people I went to school with … Every single person had their specific anxiety and ways of seeing the world. I can only speak for the people around me, but I definitely feel that things like social media have aggravated that anxiety, just because you can compare yourself to almost anyone in the world.

“There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors in social media. I think that leads to people feeling a little inadequate sometimes.

“But,” she adds, “I definitely feel there’s a lot of hope in our generation as well. I’m not sure I could say this generation is specifically sadder or happier than the last.”

PARKS has talked of suffering from imposter syndrome in the past. Is that ebbing away now that she is on the verge of releasing an album? “No, I think it’s something I will always carry with me. But it’s not necessarily a bad thing. I think it’s just more an awareness that I have a long way to go in my journey and I find it quite humbling and grounding, because I think the worst thing that can happen is becoming complacent or feeling like I’ve done everything I’m going to do. Like, ‘I’m already great.’ That kind of mentality is more damaging.”

What else can I tell you about Arlo Parks? She likes psychological thrillers (“Hitchcock films and When A Stranger Calls”), she’s been listening to Solange and Blood Orange a lot lately and she has become friends with Glaswegian singer Josef. She’d also like to write a novel and maybe go into acting and directing.

“I feel like I’ve got a lifetime to explore all of that.”

What else? “Something that people may not know,” she says, “is that I’m actually quite an extroverted human being, even though my music is introspective.

“I’m actually somebody who feels very energised by people and I’m quite mischievous … I don’t know if that’s the right word, but I love being out and around people.”

In short, Arlo Parks is perfectly capable of making her own introductions.

Collapsed In Sunbeams, by Arlo Parks, comes out on Friday on Transgressive Records

Celtic Connections Opening Concert Keith Bruce four stars

FOR its 28th edition, Glasgow’s Celtic Connections festival has been reinvented online, and while the consequences of the pandemic are not what anyone among the players or its vast loyal audience would have sought, there are upsides.

With a huge number of musicians poised for January action and well-versed in what is expected of them, creative producer Donald Shaw had to find the mechanism to bring them together. But it was back to first principles for the potential global audience – and not far short of 50 countries tuned in for the opener.

So the opening event was successful in doing a great number of things all at once. As well as pleasing the aficionados and explaining the Celtic Connections idea for first-timers, rarely has the Dear Green

Place looked so well onscreen, from the opening shots of pipers assembling to stroll up Buchanan Street to the festival’s Glasgow Royal Concert Hall HQ, to the venues exquisitely lit for the occasion – and in sparklingly clear audio to match.

The cross-programming that has always been part of the festival, with musicians popping up in different contexts during the event, was incorporated into this first concert so that it became a sequence of trailers for what was to come.

The invitation to “Come Away In” that Karine Polwart and her cohorts extended from Glasgow City Chambers was also to their full show going out on Monday evening, and fiddler Duncan Chisholm’s partnership with the Scottish Ensemble and a group of Scotland’s finest traditional musicians at Kelvingrove with the appropriate tune “A Precious Place” was just one of the highlights of a programme broadcast on BBC Alba later on. Just as apt was the spangly Kinnaris Quintet, filmed at the Old Fruitmarket, with the bouncy optimism of “This Too Shall Pass”.

The global reach of Celtic Connections was well represented, in the familiar form of Montreal’s Le Vent du Nord, who also have a full concert, filmed at home in Canada, and a moving performance from Gambia’s kora virtuoso and singer Sona Jobarteh.

That internationalism was as evident in the unique sound of the Celtic

Connections Big Band, anchoring the whole show from the concert hall and bringing traditional, jazz, and classical musicians together in superb arrangements of tunes from distant lands like the Armenian “Shaloka” and the colossal, closing “Karabach”. Those with the longest memories of festivals past know that it is this combination of talents that is the most eloquent expression of Celtic Connections in its robust maturity.