Photo credit: Ben Wearing
The title of the new single by Tess Parks is called ‘Koalas’. It’s a great title,after all,who doesn’t love a koala? The delivery of the lyric is coolly understated as the voice flows over acoustic guitar and piano. If you can’t play along on an instrument or sing like Tess, there’s a nice bit of whistling involved you might like to try. It’s cool and we like it. Watch the video. It feels like we should be dancing.
Written and recorded between London, Toronto and Los Angeles, ‘Pomegranate’ is the new album.It gets released on October 25th. Tess teams up with long-term band member and close collaborator Ruari Meehan, who assumes production duties here and co-mixed the album alongside Grammy-nominated engineer Mikko Gordon (The Smile, Gaz Coombes, Arcade Fire).
On the new single, Parks says: “In November 2020, Ruari was in London and I was in Toronto and he sent me the music for ‘Koalas’. At this point, we hadn’t seen each other in over a year. It would be another year before we saw each other again. I was suffering from severe PTSD at this point in my life, and to be honest, I couldn’t bring myself to listen to the song properly until early February. When I finally did – it was one of those moments when you hear a song and you know it’s going to be one of your favourite, most cherished songs for your whole life. It’s the most beautiful music I’ve ever heard.”
She adds: “Ruari sending me this song instigated the making of this album – a daily back and forth correspondence where he would send me music and I would sing some words over it and then he would sing other ideas back to me. It was a true lifeline at what felt like the end of the world. I don’t know who I would be without these songs, this song particularly, and waking up everyday looking forward to what he was going to send me next.”
DeClunk 