Arlo Parks

I'll never take it off.

There was something about that jacket that I still think about it.

I still want to wear things that make me feel like that denim jacket made me feel.

Yeah, I think the urge to write came from within, but my love of literature, you know, my dad would play audio books almost constantly, maybe even more so than music.

And it would always be, you know, books that he wanted to read.

It would be Kurt Vonnegut and Graham Greene and Moby Dick, Treasure Island.

And so I think at first my relationship to language was that it was this puzzle and this mystery.

You know, I'd only understand it in parts and fragments and would go to the dictionary to look up words that I didn't know.

And there was something about, felt like uncovering treasure in a way.

And so I think after, you know, having that in my younger years, I just became fascinated with language.

with poetry and literature and, you know, the way that books made me feel.

And I think because I was quite a solitary child, not necessarily unhappy, but I just, I liked to be by myself with my books.

It just became this refuge for me.

And it still is.

It always has been.

Yeah, I think there's something about the white whale.

There's something about this kind of...

the symbol of that and this being, you know, this creature that kind of haunts this person and there is this kind of fascination that, you know, capturing this whale is going to be the thing that, you know, this sense of revenge, this kind of cyclical quality to the book.

I was always fascinated by that.

I think that and mythology and animals and, you know, I was always really inspired by