Arlo Parks sings about her own mental health. Now, she’s working to improve ours too.
In her songs, the London-born musician probes her intimate moments of her life. In her work as UNICEF’s youngest U.K. ambassador, she’s trying to amplify other people’s stories.
The London-born musician and poet Arlo Parks makes indie pop with the warmth and tenderness of folk. And since her 2021 debut album, Collapsed in Sunbeams, she’s become known for songs that are so strikingly candid and familiar that they can seem like diorama boxes filled with life’s tiniest moments. “I just have my notebook for every record,” she says, “and I’m collecting fragments and phrases and nuggets from my life, and that’s where the music comes from.”
Because her music is so possessed by interior life, it can naturally seem to yearn for a reckoning with our collective mental health. Her 2020 single “Black Dog,” for instance, was written for a close friend who she feared was spiraling into depression. As she explains it, “The reason why you’re moved to write something like that is to kind of be like, Is anyone else out there? Is anyone else experiencing this in this way?”
Granting solace to the lost and disheartened has since become part of a larger personal mission. Shortly after the release of “Black Dog,” Parks, 24, started working with the Campaign Against Living Miserably, a London-based suicide prevention charity, and in 2023 she met with members of UNICEF’s Youth Advisory Board to write a poem later released on World Mental Health Day. Last year, she pushed further into activism, becoming the organization’s youngest U.K. ambassador. “I always knew that I wanted to shift the focus from me and my music into something that felt a little bit more expansive, using my privilege and the position that I was in to enact change,” she says. While the world of her songs can be intimate, even insular, she’s finding that the work of a UNICEF ambassador—navigating the effects of harm and giving voice to those marked by it—has to exist on a very large scale.
Her first diplomatic trip took her to Sierra Leone, where she shadowed a series of youth advocates, sitting in on workshops and visiting support groups for addiction and victims of child marriage. “That was the most beautiful thing to witness,” she says, “young girls learning to make sanitary pads and then teaching their younger sisters and their younger sisters’ friends.” Ever the empath, she sees herself as a translator and a bullhorn for their stories. “It’s about amplifying their voices and what they want the world to know about the work,” she says. “I really wanted them to speak through me.”
Parks also intends for there to be a charitable dimension to her music. “I want it to feel like a soft place for people to land,” she explains. “It’s obviously the softness of the actual music and the voice.” But more than that, she says, she wants to create “a place for people to just be and to think about who they are and how they love.” To listen and respond.
