Patrick Park Shares EVERYTHING FALLS APART and Announces New Album Out 4/26

Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter Patrick Park is set to return with a new full-length, Here/Gone, due out April 26, 2019. For Here/Gone, Park tapped producer Rob Schnapf (Beck, Kurt Vile, Elliott Smith) for the first time since 2007's acclaimed Everyone's in Everyone, and the pair distilled Park's introspective folk songs to classic voice and guitar combinations highlighted with string arrangements by Bobby Halvorson (Van Dyke Parks) and occasional guest vocals from Warpaint's Emily Kokal. With the sparse production allowing Park's lyrics to remain front-and-center, the tracks on Here/Gone materialize as letters to his newborn son and aural reckonings with the brevity of life. The album's first single "Everything Falls Apart," which is out today, explores the human tendency to focus on appearances rather than substance, yet approaches the subject from a hopeful, as opposed to nihilistic, perspective.

LISTEN: Patrick Park's "Everything Falls Apart"

After wrapping up the tour for his 2014 album, Love Like Swords, the weight of touring alone in a van for months, partnered with the financial realities of being a musician, began to take its toll. Park turned to writing songs for other artists, but, despite having success, he wasn't receiving creative fulfillment from the routine. Instead, Park found solace from the existential dread through meditation and working as a counselor on the suicide hotline. During this time, he began to write music for himself again, and the songs that emerged encapsulate the incessant urge to chase things in life that only bring the most fleeting sense of fulfillment. The resulting Here/Gone contains some of Park's best work yet, in a stripped down format that allows his soothing vocals to shine through and proves that raw talent need not hide behind overproduction. The charming ten-track set is a reflection upon how much is poured into hurrying time along when sometimes the most substantial form of fulfillment comes from simply letting go.

"When I play live, I'm always 'exposed' in a way, but I've never made a record with that same feeling," Park divulges. "It just seemed like this was the record to do it with, and these were the songs to do it with, and this was the time to do it."

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