Words by Anton Spice

“I get most of my inspiration from my relationships,” says Brittney Parks, on the phone from her home in Los Angeles. Her latest album as Sudan Archives, Natural Brown Prom Queen, is a deep dive into personal and musical connections - a raucous tapestry of stories that reveals the singer, violinist and producer at her loosest and most expressive.

By the time we speak, it’s almost ten months since the album’s first single Home Maker was released. She has lived with this record for some time now, so it’s no surprise that our conversation drifts from composition to performance. For Parks, they are two sides of the same coin, her energies zoning in on how to bring the record to the stage in as joyful, vulnerable and unadulterated a way as possible.

“I haven't really contemplated how my relationship [to the album] has changed because I'm focussing more on performing the music now,” Parks says. “I like how it's challenging me as a composer to step outside of that and be a performer as well.”

It’s obviously working. Variously adorned in a frosted mullet or a headdress of white roses, she holds herself like a rockstar, shredding on her violin and making wild forays into the middle of sweaty and indulgent audiences. When a show is sold out, she’ll play an Irish jig on the fiddle mid-set to celebrate because, why not? If there’s a guiding principle to Natural Brown Prom Queen it’s that if it feels good, do it.

In 2017, Parks was featured in a short online film about Stones Throw’s new recording studio, in which she talks about her self-titled debut EP and her fledgling relationship with the Los Angeles label she now calls home. She recalls how she arrived in LA from Cincinnati, Ohio with little more than her violin, a handful of outfits and an iPad on which to make beats. It’s hard to believe little more than five years have passed.

Shortly after the film was published, she released the video for Come Meh Way, the EP’s lead track and her statement of arrival as Sudan Archives. Like so much of her music since, it evokes the full breadth of the violin’s sonic properties - a twinkling percussive beat that nods to the fiddle’s finger-picked rhythms, and vigorously bowed melodies that anchor an infectious chorus.

The response was as good as instant, her audience beguiled by a sonic palette that was finding new ears, but which Parks knew just needed to be heard. She has spoken regularly of her fascination with West African stringed instruments, such as the goje - traditional to the grassland Sahel and Sudan regions on the edge of the Sahara. On the back of her 2018 EP Sink, Parks pays tribute to “the great African fiddlers of the past”, while 2019 album Athena makes explicit her reframing of the classical tradition, the vinyl edition featuring a notated sheet music score of ‘Black Vivaldi Sonata’.

Alongside these more acoustic instruments, Parks has also referenced the influence of artists like Cameroonian electronic pioneer Francis Bebey, who established a practice of incorporating drum machines and synthesisers with traditional instruments like the sanza (a form of thumb piano also known as a mbira or kalimba).

Having subsequently bought her own, the thumb piano is tied into the DNA of Natural Brown Prom Queen even where it might not be audible. “When I was writing the album, there were moments when I would go back to that thumb piano and just kind of play around with it and draw melodies," she explains. “It's a really unique instrument and I feel like I don’t get those sounds from other instruments.” The staccato rhythms bounce like hip-hop beats when translated in the studio, the essence of its ancient sound transposed and extended with contemporary technology into something wholly new.

The musical touchstones that coalesce on Natural Brown Prom Queen are so varied and vivid that it would miss the point to try and take them apart. In an interview with Fader she called it a “mixed-media” approach, and that the opening moments of the album sound like a cassette deck being loaded only adds to the sense that Parks is bringing together a mixtape’s worth of life experience. Her approach to writing and performing is intuitive and resonant.

“When I did the Tiny Desk Concert there was a point where I actually beat on my violin like percussion,” she says, recalling the session she recorded for NPR in the summer of 2020. Towards the end of an acoustic string-quartet rendition of ‘Nont For Sale’, Parks begins to keep time by bumping the chinrest of her violin against her chain link necklace. “It's something I feel like I do because it feels good, and it's interesting hearing how people are like 'oh wow, this is being played in a very unconventional way', because when I'm doing it I don’t really think of it that way.”

For something so dry, ‘convention’ is a slippery term - repetition interpreted as truth, an agreement of how things should be that depends on an awful lot on who is doing the agreeing. As Parks explains, “I think people are used to seeing the violin in a more classical setting, and while that influenced me growing up, I was taught a lot of Irish jig at the school I went to where they had a music programme, I feel like those same influences I've incorporated into my playing.”

To describe something as unconventional then does little more than support the notion of there being a right or wrong way to play, a musical norm that is being subverted. Parks has been navigating and challenging these expectations for several years. “I found violinists who looked like me in Africa, playing it so wildly,” she told The Guardian in 2022, “It’s such a serious instrument in a Western concert setting, but in so many other places in the world it [the violin] brings the party.”

As her success grows - Natural Brown Prom Queen was voted #2 in Pitchfork’s albums of 2022 - Parks’ music only further confounds the lines between those spurious generic tropes. “When I was growing up I was in this pop duo with my twin sister and I actually left because I was like 'I don't want to make pop music’,” she remembers. “So now looking back at that and where I am now, I'm evolving and people are starting to label the music I'm creating as ‘pop'. It doesn’t really bother me per se, because I just feel like I want to make good music. Whether that's perceived as folk, RnB, or pop, I feel like that's up for the interpreter.”

Because, regardless of what it’s called, Parks is very much operating on her own terms. “I wanted people to kind of feel like they were getting to know me more with this album,” she explains. Throughout, her lyrics are humorous, compassionate and whip-smart. “Especially with certain songs like 'OMG Britt', I was just really letting go, and letting myself capture all my feelings and different memories in more of a fun way.”

Elsewhere, that personality comes through in moments of studio spontaneity that show just how much Parks is growing into the production side of things. The violin might take centre stage, but don’t let that distract you from the work she puts in behind the desk too.

“On ‘ChevyS10’, you can hear me laughing a lot in the background, and I think in a more commercial sense, some people might cut that out, but I'm like ‘no I want to keep that’ - because it just gives insight into my personality.” What it also does is point to the value she places in having an immediate relationship with recording.

A self-confessed “home-body” with a love for nature and animals, Parks says that Natural Brown Prom Queen emerged from a period of intense domesticity brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic. Making home in her violin-lined basement studio, and joined by her dog (and pet python), she would write and record just to keep her mind from bubbling over.

“I feel like there's so much going on in my head at one time,” she laughs. “It can be overwhelming. So having the studio so accessible, I feel unlimited to record what I feel right when I feel it. It's like ‘phew, OK, now I can move on to the next idea’ and it makes some more room for me to be creative.”

Not only does this thread her music-making into the fabric of daily life, but it also goes some way to explain the sense of urgency that electrifies the album. Natural Brown Prom Queen feels like it reaches into all corners, unfiltered and sometimes a little unhinged, but in the best possible way. As a result, every track takes a path of its own and Parks is there to follow where they lead.

“Sometimes I'll have a melody in my head and I'll just play around in my studio and I might record it. And then I'll just go back and make a beat on top of that melody. And then I might go back and play a violin track on top of that melody. And then sometimes, it may not be the melody that came to me first, it could be the violin, so it's kind of dependent on what mood I'm in or what's going on in my head that day.”

And sometimes even she is surprised by the result. “Someone described my vocals as ‘ugly’ in a review but they were saying they were ugly in a nice way and it was funny because I'm like 'yeah, that's how my emotions felt!' So you hear the emotional, distressed vocals and me laughing, it's literally like all these different colours of my personality.”

Another crucial component for Parks in making this album feel more personal was the inclusion of her family, not just in the vocal snippets that pepper it, but in the compositional process too. That her sister writes on ‘Yellow Brick Road’ and ‘Copycat’ feels like a resolution of that teenage pop project, now coming from a place of intention. “I'm all about teamwork, I love building relationships, and I really like working with people that I already have relationships with,” she explains. Many of the producers on the record have been collaborators long enough for them to feel like family too.

“I feel like If I'm going to write a song, and it's going to win a Grammy, hypothetically, I might as well have my family and friends on that album too, so we all won a Grammy!” she enthuses. This feels less hypothetical by the day. “It’s not about me, it's about who grew up with us.” The album’s final track ‘#513’ could be something of an acceptance speech in waiting - a love letter to Cincinnati aka ‘Nasty Nati’, the complexities of home, roots and staying true to yourself when ‘hollow’ Hollywood comes calling.

Apart from anything else, from the videos and live performances to lyrics and beats, you get the sense that Parks is having a great time pushing Natural Brown Prom Queen as far as it will go. “I’m so in the headspace of enjoying being on stage and it's been really fun to see people's reactions to this new music because it's more danceable,” she says. Where previous releases might have invited a more static appreciation of her sound, this one feels like a string of homecomings, for performer and audience alike.

“It's a different energy,” she elaborates. “Usually when I’m on tour, people will just stare at me while I'm on stage and I like this tour because the people are more engaged, as far as showing their personality. They're dancing, they're laughing, it feels like a party and I love that.”

That connection, that sense of letting others in and getting to know one another a little better, seems to be flowing both ways. “I think if our intention is to do what feels good, I think it ends up resonating with people more,” she says. “And then as a result of being authentic to yourself, I think that inevitably translates to the music.”

Whether or not that music transcends or transgresses convention is really of no interest to Parks. “Sometimes people may be calling me a composer, sometimes people may be calling me an artist or musician, but I don’t really like labels. People can call it however they want, I’m doing whatever I feel like doing, and I feel like that always changes.” Just try keeping up.