Tomorrow, Parker Millsap releases his brand new fifth LP – Be Here Instead – that offers a new direction sonically for the Oklahoma-raised singer. The record is available everywhere on the 9th April.
Be Here Instead – the fifth studio record by Parker Millsap, takes his music into a brand-new sonic landscape. This project marks a sonic shift for Millsap, away from his trademark high-energy folk sound toward a more experimental, moodier output. The project was produced by the legendary John Agnello (Kurt Vile, Sonic Youth, Waxahatchee) and takes Millsap’s music into brave new territory – a wild alchemic melting-pot fuelled by an instinctual love of music and musical history. For this record, Millsap departed from his usual traditional Nashville writing process toward a more experimental approach, using everything from piano to effects pedals to old-school drum machines (a fascination partly inspired by the early-’70s innovations of Sly Stone and J.J. Cale). Experimental it may be, but Millsap has created an extraordinary, cohesive record that is unbridled in its lucidity and expansive imagination – an extraordinary project that is uniquely timeless and evasive of genre definition.
The record was mainly recorded live with Millsap’s full band and it is this fact that gives the project its lucidity – allowing an immensely detailed sonic palette to come to fruition. It’s a record that should be enjoyed in its entirety, to give the more meandering tracks (‘Rolling’ and ‘Passing Through’) to be placed in their rightful context, and allowing for the more energetic and groovy tracks like ‘Always’ to lift the project. Again, the lyrics themselves should wash over the listener, allowing for them to feel like a stream of consciousness. Millsap himself describes the songs, “Because the lyrics were appearing seemingly out of nowhere and with no prior intent, some of them started to feel like transmissions from my subconscious, rather than the preconceived linear stories or waking thoughts of my earlier songs… They feel like words I needed to hear from myself, and not just things I wanted to say to someone else.”
There are a few stand-out tracks that deserve particular attention, not least the lead single – ‘The Real Thing.’ It’s a lighter gateway track, weaving groovier guitar licks with cascading outpourings of devotion. Featuring Erin Rae on guest vocal, it’s a luminous about wanting real love that is incredibly richly textured, to make it feel like a rounded celebration of love. So too, is the following track ‘Vulnerable’ that is an extraordinary psychedelic exploration into the strength of vulnerability. The complexity of the sonic landscaping of the record should not be underestimated – building into the epic that is ‘Dammit’ that celebrates the ‘nuances of existential frustration’ working into a frenzy akin to the message it describes, where a thrumming heavier rock guitar opens the track and Millsap’s vocal offers a sonorous, raw note. There are certain magic moments though too when this textured landscape is stripped back – so on ‘It Was You’ – a luminescent celebration of love – so on ‘In Between’ his harmonies and tumbling lyrics take centre stage and his vocal is allowed to pine on ‘Being Alive.’
Be Here Instead feels like a meandering exploration into Millsap’s sonic potential – experimenting throughout with different instrumentation and sounds, where the main focus of the record is not the lyrics, for once, but on the lushly created and textured sonic landscape that is almost unfathomably rich and broad. This is the kind of project that can only be created by someone who inherently loves and understands both their own artistry, but, more importantly, music and musical tradition in general.
