Arlo Parks, talent and sensitivity of a unique singer-songwriter

Arlo Parks reconciles with Turin and its Todays Festival, which she should have headlined in 2021, the year of her debut album and the related victory of the Mercury Prize, before Covid-19 forced her to cancel the tour. Today she returns to honor that promise of a concert in the Piedmontese capital and does so with a second album in her pocket (“My Soft Machine”, 2023), the experience on tour with Harry Styles and Billie Eilish, several notable collaborations – from Clairo to Phoebe Bridgers – and a love to tell.

Compared to the dazzling “Collapsed In Sunbeams”, in the second album the soul component and the black roots fade in favor of an indie-pop attitude that strengthens and becomes more glossy. The change is not only in the sound and production, but also in the intentions. For a young artist with her compositional talent, being relegated to the archetype of the sad London singer-songwriter is extremely limiting, for this reason the exit from that still brand new comfort zone does not seem premature, but rather necessary. The inner voice, however, is always the same, just a little more introspective and focused on the path.

Arlo is a unique singer-songwriter. She embodies the sadness, the discomfort and now also the fears and hopes of her generation, but her great gift is in being able to do so without resorting to any lever, neither human, nor artistic, nor commercial. Her marked sensitivity has allowed her to immediately build a poetics capable of hitting exposed nerves with the accuracy of a sniper. Visceral love, the fear of abandonment, self-acceptance but also self-sabotage. Add to that the overwhelming feeling of having created unreal expectations and of having to work hard to deserve that place of honor that lies between the refined ears of the good living rooms and the worn headphones of the poster-covered bedrooms and it is easy to realize that on the stage of Todays there is a young Atlas who supports her world.

All this, live, translates into a very warm performance, both for the bewitching power of her voice – never over the top, never out of place – and for the great spontaneity of her movements. She holds the stage with the strength of someone who has great music and an excellent band watching her back, but with the naturalness of someone who lives her little daily dramas within the walls of an impenetrable room. That bedroom which is both the abstract place that hosts her adolescent worries, and the concrete space in which she composed most of the songs of her debut, forced like all of us into lockdown. But Arlo came out of that bedroom, she also faced a burnout and recomposed her own pieces before finding the ideal condition to appear on this stage. For this reason, her gesture of spreading her arms, dancing and simulating flight is even more significant: because it smacks of a freedom conquered with awareness and gives us a splendid image, to attach to her powerful songs.

The setlist is the same as her other headliner slots and in just an hour and a quarter she offers almost all the most significant songs from her still meager production. Some, like “Hurt”, “Caroline” and “Weightless”, denote Arlo Parks’ great desire to explore her potential as a performer and, almost lost in a poetic reverie, the English artist presents very light and almost imperceptible interpretative variations that do nothing but enrich the performance. Other songs seem to have already been created to be live highlights: an example of this is the hip-hop interlude of “Blades” or the electricity of “Devotion”, as well as the perfect closing of “Softly”.

Her words of thanks to the Italian audience – not very large but certainly full of affection – also exude a certain lightness that comes from the conclusion of a long and complicated summer tour. The Todays in Turin is precisely the final stage of the European promotion of “My Soft Machine” and leaves us with the extreme desire to discover the next chapters in the story of Arlo Parks, one of the most talented singer-songwriters of her generation.