Stream: Patrick Park, ‘Love Lover Love’

Zane Roessell on March 29th, 2019

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It’s said that the path of life is never a straight line, and after five years since his last album, Patrick Park can tell you a thing or two about getting around the curves. Park, the Los Angeles based singer-songwriter, is set to return with a self-released sixth full-length “Here/Gone,” out April 26. In the prevailing time, Park, weary after completing a solo van tour in support of 2014’s “Love Like Swords” wrote a collection of songs intended for “Here/Gone.” Ultimately scrapped, Park explains, “They just didn’t feel … truthful, I guess is the word.” The financial realities of being a touring musician took their toll. He began writing and recording for others with success, but wasn’t fulfilled. In addition, he took time tending to some personal health issues and became a father, his son now 19 months old. However, it was the distillation of his experiences working as a counselor for a suicide hotline that informed the creation “Here/Gone.” “[The songs are] kind of for people who have had that experience — which, honestly, is everybody at some point,” he says. “It’s about how 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.”

“Here/Gone” also marks the first time Park has worked with producer Rob Schnapf (Beck, Kurt Vile, Elliott Smith) since 2007’s acclaimed “Everyone’s in Everyone.” The pair stripped back the production to traditional guitar and voice configurations, subtly punctuating with strings arranged by Bobby Halvorson (Van Dyke Parks). The vocal-forward emphasis ensure Park’s lyrics remain the star. His latest single “Love Lover Love” an ode to “staying open” gains warmth via a vocal assist from longtime friend, Emily Kokal of Warpaint.

“I feel like we live in such a crazy time where everything just seems so amplified and people’s discontent and their tendency to hold on to their ideologies and their opinions is at a fever pitch,” Park says of the song. “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.”

“Love Lover Love” lays bare the fundamentals of songcraft, exemplifying the impact of a harmonious collaboration that eschews the overwrought.

||| Stream: “Love Lover Love”