A native of Purcell, Oklahoma, Parker Millsap has released four records to date. Signed to Thirty Tigers, Millsap will return with his forthcoming record ‘Be Here Instead’ that is available to pre-save here now.
Hello, how are you doing? It must be nice finally gearing up to the release and think this is finally happening?
Very much so.
How far was the project in before the pandemic started? Were these songs that you’d had before it started?
Everything with the exception of the song ‘In Between’ was written prior to the pandemic – and that song was written about a month in, I guess. The record was recorded in April. Time is so meaningless.
Obviously, with this record, your music has shifted sonically. Was that a very organic process or something you had always wanted to do?
I didn’t really plan on it to be super different, but the way that I came to the songs was very different than I have in the past. So, in the past, I would often have a specific idea for a story or a phrase that I wanted to turn into a song and I would sit down with that idea and just play guitar and try to come up with lyrics for that idea specifically. With these songs, I kind of came to them backwards in a lot of ways – a lot of them came music first or even guitar riff first, and then after playing that for weeks on end, finally a melody would pop into my head.
Was that a weird mindset shift? I can imagine it would have been quite jarring at first, having written songs in a certain way for so many years?
It was kind of jarring, but it was also inspiring for me, because I feel like I was reaching a point where I didn’t feel so compelled to write the same kind of stories and songs that I had in the past. I don’t know what to attribute that to, but I just know that I didn’t find myself as inspired when I would sit down with a guitar.
I guess when you’ve released four albums already, you must at some point want to change the inspiration.
I think part of it was that I was just curious what else am I capable of. I’ve mostly focused on this one mode of songwriting. There are all these other ways to do it that are just at my fingertips – one example is a song on the record that was made entirely on the iPad, like in GarageBand – there’s a piano overdub, and a vocal overdub, and some drum overdubs, but like all of a sudden, all the synthesizers and the drum machine loop, and that kind of stuff was all done on the iPad.
Technology these days!
It really is! I realised, I’ve been ignoring all of these tools – like GarageBand. Once, you know, I hadn’t messed with it much, but I thought I’ll give it a shot. I’ve already got an iPad – it’s got GarageBand on it – so yeah, the more I got into GarageBand specifically, the more I realized how powerful that is, because it’s not just like you have 250 synthesizer sounds, you have 250 editable synthesizer sounds, each one of those can be tweaked and manipulated. There’s so many things you can do with it and from a purely musical discovery perspective, it’s exciting.
I know you also worked with John Agnello on this project, what did he bring to the project and your music?
He was the most active producer I’ve ever had on the front end, as far as going back and forth with a song. So, normally when I make a record, there’s one or two leftover songs. With this record, when I started working with him – in different cities because of the pandemic – we were sending tracks back and forth and I ended up sending him close to 30 songs by the time we made the record. He had listened through 30 songs, and each time I would send him something he would send me back really good notes. I’ve never had that in the past, he gave really specific arrangement notes and stuff that were fun, like what if the guitar solo happened twice, but the second time it was twice as long – really practical stuff.
He was really good at taking whatever I had made and giving me some opinions about it, or some outside perspective and a few suggestions, but he always did it in a way that was like, ‘What if you did this’ or ‘It’d be cool if you did this or not do this.’ He’s made enough records that he knows how to bargain with artists in that way.
It sounds like he was a good person to bring in because it’s difficult when you’re opening the music to an external audience.
Yeah, the experience making this record kind of showed me a different way that producers can be effective. A lot of the producers I’ve worked with in the past have been a little more stoic. I think some of that’s because a lot of the producers I’ve worked with came from more of an engineering standpoint than a producer standpoint – the line is so blurry – but John is a very animated and lively person and that made the sessions feel different. You can just see him get excited.
You want people to be excited about your music as well.
Definitely, and I think something that made this record cool is that I was familiar with his work, but I wasn’t what I would consider a fanboy or anything like that. I didn’t decide to work with John, because he made a really great Sonic Youth record. The decision was based on a bunch of phone calls with different people, different producers and he was the one who seemed most excited about the material, but he wasn’t familiar with my music prior to this record. We both come in with pretty much a blank slate. We really got along, and we were able to communicate in a way that stayed positive and he was able to make suggestions without offending me.
‘The Real Thing’ is the lead-out single and I love that track so much, was it a natural choice to be the first single?
I never have any kind of perspective on that kind of thing – that’s the thing that Thirty Tigers and my manager and the radio team at Thirty Tigers help make that decision. It definitely makes sense to me, but I was pushing for other songs to be the lead single effort. But I think they’re right!
I think they are – they did a good job. Can you talk a little bit about that kind of creative process behind that track?
I think I wrote it in 2019 – I was on tour and I was just missing my wife and I was tired of FaceTiming and texts and phone calls – it’s just not the same as being in the room with somebody. The people you love, sometimes just being in the room with them is 100 times better than a two hour FaceTime conversation. That’s what the song originally was written about, but it’s been interesting as quarantine happened. Now, it feels like we’re all on zoom and FaceTime, all day. It’s like a new song, which has been kind of wild. I mean, I’ve had that happen with other people songs where I hear somebody else’s song and it means something to me and then something happens and my perspective change, but it’s weird to have it happen with my own songs.
And even before it’s been released, you may go through that journey again as it gets pushed further and more people hear it?
Yeah, what other songs of mine do I not know what they’re about…
Well thanks so much for the time today and I’m so excited for this record to be out.
Thank you so much. I really appreciate you.
