Charlie Cummings

Music

arlo parks is lovesick on “second guessing”

December 9, 2019

Arlo Parks’s soft, stirring voice sounds like the Ghost of Young Loves Past. The 19-year-old singer and poet from London recently released her Sophie EP, a tender and emotional project on which she displays a vulnerability usually reserved for teen journals and the type of self-awareness you would find in memoirs written by people in the twilight of their lives. One of the best examples of this exposition of self on the project is “Second Guessing.”

“I always bite my lower lip when I cry/ I know you hate it when I say I wanna die/ But I’ll tell you something/ I’m trying hard/ To be the girl you kinda liked back in March,” she sings, balancing the momentary gravity of losing a lover’s attention with the much realer seriousness of her own suicidal ideation. “Second Guessing” is like a photo in an old scrapbook — a faded Polaroid snapshot of all-consuming youthful infatuation and angst.

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