But Parcell’s experimentation always remains rooted in a sense of emotional honesty, and for all his innovation, it is this commitment to sincerity and modesty which shines as the most notable feature. Boundary pushing not as some search for novelty or exercise in aesthetic formulation, but a way to more fully communicate what lies at the heart of the work. A deep, varied engagement with ideas of sincerity and humbleness which stands as proof that within compassion lies genuine artistic and political utility.

Within this wider mission, releases under the The World Without Parking Lots moniker have tended to lean toward the intimate, straightforward folk end of Parcell’s body of work. Songs more overtly personal which position themselves alongside acts like Mount Eerie or Talons’. The trend continues on You’ll Have To Take My Word For It, a brand new TWWPL album out next month on Dear Life Records featuring intimate, domestic songs which are characteristically humane.

Today we have the honour of sharing the lead single and album opener, ‘Rotten Bouquet ’22’. It’s track of marbled sentiments in which vulnerability is matched by quiet assurance, and disbelief is leavened by a slow-dawning wisdom. A sense of understanding which builds gradually but builds nonetheless. “Would you believe it’s only just become clear?” as Parcell sings in the song’s final verse, “I need a lot of people and a handful of people need me.”

I’m not tired
at least not in that way
I’ll hang it upside down
my rotten bouquet

The song comes complete with a video by Parcell himself which you can check out below:

We also took the opportunity to ask Parcell a few questions, so read on below to hear more about intentions behind The World Without Parking Lots, his sources of inspiration and the impossibility of Cuphead.

Hi Ethan, thanks so much for speaking with us and congratulations on You’ll Have to Take My Word For It. Does the experience of releasing music change from record to record?

Thank you and thank YOU for speaking.

Short answer: on the surface, it’s basically the same, same pacing, same second-guessing, ebbs and flows of confidence, and then same rush of letting go, processing and moving on. Internally, it’s definitely different just in the sense that I’m in a different place in life, creatively and otherwise.

So I suppose the experience does definitely change from record to record for me – mostly in the sense that my life and worldview keeps changing a little. On the purely musical side of things: my relationship to the medium is always developing a little further. I always feel like a goof saying it, but I really believe in the idea of recorded music – it doesn’t feel like I’m lacking anything by making an album of songs, that is (somewhat arbitrarily) typical LP length. What can I say, I love it – I love records as they exist as cultural artifacts and sometimes feel like I have a slow and steady decrease in interest in pushing the medium any further or anything. My relationship to performing has something to do with it, I’m sure – I’m less interested in this band existing as a performing entity as I am making the record.

Anyway, more importantly, things feel different now for personal non-musical reasons too- things just look and feel different since my last public releases: I’ve gotten married, my priorities and work are different, my habits and day-to-day concerns.

The album sits at the simpler, solo folk end of your stylistic spectrum, slotting alongside previous World Without Parking Lots releases. Could you talk a little about the thematic and/or aesthetic qualities which mark something as a WWPL release, as opposed to something for your collaborations or to be released as Ethan T. Parcell?

The main unifying thought behind The World Without Parking Lots is that I sort of haphazardly declared to myself a long time ago that I would use this name when I’m using a recording project to sort of mark time in my life. No matter my musical predilections or style signifiers, I thought it would be interesting to sort of deal with the consequences of my taste and ideas changing through every iteration of the band being sonically pretty disparate from the next. Our first release technically turned 10 years old last year, but at that point The World Without Parking Lots was a sort of youthful free jazz orchestra? I was 19, I was enamored (still am) with Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, and the European large ensembles in that vein, like Globe Unity and Instant Composer’s Pool. Needless to say, I’m not exactly itching for anyone to check that music out, but I’m all-in-all glad that it is documented and under the same umbrella.

The Focus Group LLC/Solutions releases, and the things under my given name have some sort of specific narrative or conceptual thrust to them that feel less diaristic, and in turn a little less tethered to the particulars of my actual life. With WWPL, I felt like I needed to mark time with what was on my mind musically and textually, so it ended up as another singing album. Sometimes singing feels best – who knows what it will be next.

I definitely didn’t know it at the time, but I’m constantly mentioning the artist/critic David Antin, who has a book and essay called “Radical Coherency” that helped me understand my own urge to do this a little better – when you explode all possible context, it helps to realize how inherently linked everything is, especially everything you can make as just one person with one body.

Your bio lists “smallness, hospitality, and union” as themes central to your work, and I wondered if you could expand a little on how these manifest on the new record? There’s a kind of humbleness to it, a domesticity?

Of those three things, smallness is always the one that feels like an ongoing quest. I think it’s different than being specific, or making art about particular things – “small” is something else, and I still have a hard time articulating it. Sometimes it definitely manifests how you’re suggesting – humility, domesticity. Most of these songs are definitely swimming in that water. I think I became interested in spoken text years ago in Focus Group LLC because it seemed smaller than singing (I’m not sure it actually is).

I think in general, my ambitions to be small and hospitable also have to do with my working methods – whether an orchestra, or a band of my closest people I always want make sure the working environment and feeling is hospitable and unified. My hope is that the concerns that motivate my methods also show up audibly in the work. This time around, it resulted in the delight of just writing down the personnel on the album – my brothers, my spouse and my oldest friend.

Dear Life is a gem of a label. How did you end up working with them this time around?

I love that you asked this because the answer is literally YOU. Michael Cormier-O’Leary reached out a couple summers ago after hearing Plays from Operas Alone, thanks to your write-up on it. Of course, it’s a small world, I love Friendship (which Michael is in) and had seen them play here in Chicago a few months before that, and adore so much of the music coming out from Dear Life right now. It’s been a treat having them alongside.

Where would you position work within the contemporary music scene? Are there any artists (musical or otherwise) you particularly admire or see yourself in conversation with?

I’m honestly not sure – I really am inspired by my most immediate peers, my longest musical and personal relationships are with Alec Watson, whose music is DPCD and Kenan Serenbetz. The volleying of support we do for each other has really helped us all individuate our own creativity in a way that I’m always grateful for – so I suppose we are literally always “in conversation,” but that’s what comes to mind first.

Otherwise, I’m always in admiration of those taking big swings for the love of the game. Or better yet, I find myself new inspiration and admiration by paying attention to the various non-all-consuming ways people seem to fit their music-making into their broader life as people. I suppose that’s what has been on my mind the most – where does this fit in to everything else? At this particular moment I’m excited whenever Jim O’Rourke puts out another Steamroom release, Cyrus Pireh changed my life years ago and has a new one coming out soon with a perfect title. George Lewis’ book on the AACM shifted things around a lot in me in this regard too. I teach and find a lot of inspiration in that work, so I hope to continue to be in conversation with people in that realm too.

Do you have any idea where the future leads in terms of your music?

More of it, God willing! This Summer here in Chicago we are fully staging the second Focus Group opera, Wasted Light for the first time ever, which I’m very excited about. Otherwise, lots of ideas and projects are in the pipeline but I’m taking my time and making sure it all stays fun.

Finally, for a bit of fun, ‘First and Last Name’ references a final boss and it has me curious. What’s the toughest boss you’ve encountered (from a video game or otherwise)?

Oh man how exciting to be asked. To be honest, I had some collegial relationships that seemed absolutely impossible at the time of writing, though I definitely also had Earthbound on the brain. I’ve accepted within myself that I will never reach the end of Cuphead, though I have also started Disco Elysium recently – which might not have a final boss besides my own psyche, which rings pretty true.

You’ll Have To Take My Word For It is out on the 27th May via Dear Life Records and you can pre-order it now.

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The New County Choruses is the new opera by Ethan T. Parcell—a composer, songwriter and performer (and sometimes visual artist) based in Chicago—along with his experimental opera ensemble, now operating under the slightly updated name Focus Group Solutions. If you’re not already familiar with it, Parcell’s music (under his own name, the moniker The World Without Parking Lots, and the operas with Focus Group) is quiet in volume but large in scope, what we’ve described previously as “far-reaching but incredibly personal, an accumulation of life’s modest details that works, paradoxically, to distil what it means to be alive.”

As operas, the work produced by Ethan T. Parcell and Focus Group is evidently narrative-based, but the stories it tells are singular and surprising, and the manner in which it tells them is continually ambitious. World Record explored performance and culture through a treatise on the past and future of world record attempts, complete with phone conversations with a renowned world record holder. While Wasted Light used a lecture on a broken LED billboard to talk about themes as grand as making meaning in one’s surroundings and the inherent sadness in the passing of time and space.

If the descriptions of these pieces don’t square with the idea of “opera” in Western culture at large, well it’s not supposed to. “There’s some oppositional energy at play on my part,” Parcell said of the opera tag when we spoke to him last year. “That I know and love all the images and sounds that come to mind that when one hears the word ‘opera’—and which of those we play into and which we transgress.”

No exception to this style, The New County Choruses creates a rich narrative through unexpected means. The songs come in two forms—the songs alone (i.e. just music and Parcell’s singing) and a second version that features “equivalent commentary,” a stream of observations, remarks and general narration voiced by Errol McLendon. “Songs with running commentary that says too much about songs that say too little,” as Parcell puts it.

Which is an apt description, because while the album’s sincere gentlenesss sounds relatively modest, there is far more at work than first impressions suggest. These are efforts in world building, conjuring not only place but an entire mythology, coming to represent what Parcell describes as “a fictional document and record of a fully-formed county materializing and disappearing.” For the titular New County is a new location, complete with its own geography and culture, that appeared out of nothing yet lacked not even the smallest detail, complete with its own histories and contradictions and flaws.

The county did contain families, education, kissing,
fatigue, weather, and what we might call culture.
And, at least eight songs and their related materials.
We now have named them the New County Choruses

The commentary tracks are therefore a document of the document. McLendon’s narration investigates the songs it overlays as if they were primary sources, ruminating on vague lines as Parcell sings them, contemplating their wider meaning and philosophical connotations in the manner of an historian or literary scholar. The result is a peculiar replication the strange, preternatural event of the narrative. A historiography of a town manifest from thin air, now serving to bring the place to something like life through study and speculation.

And the phenomenon continues. The narrator, like every historian, is himself always slipping into the past, allowing the personal to bleed into his interpretation. In doing so, he invites us, the listener, to do the same. So perhaps the most important layer of meaning in The New County Choruses lays in the relationship between the choruses and their narration, a kind of meta-context that explores very intimate themes of observation and interpretation, the importance of memory in a world of constant flux and loss. “None of this is about permanence,” the narrator notes on ‘The Seventh County Chorus’, but permanence is not everything. “It visited, and sharpened our senses—mine at least,” he continues on The Eighth. “As if it were built for this exact purpose—and to sharpen our senses, and leave us with a memory that convinces us that our memory is stronger than it is in every other situation.”

These are my new pros and cons
How can I help you?

Parcell says his work intends to “explore ideas of smallness, hospitality, and union,” and this is true not just in content but form too. With every new listener comes the possibility for fresh interpretation, new versions and new meanings of the New County brought into the present. “Well, what I can tell you is that it wasn’t built by nothing or nobody,” the narration continues on ‘The Eighth,’ “but it also didn’t appear by the hand of one person.” This is not Parcell’s creation, nor that of the narrator, but a shared conception. One still growing and fading, evolving and changing, but destined to continue as long as there is someone to listen.

The New County Choruses is out now and available from the Ethan T. Parcell Bandcamp page. You can also get the opera as a paperback book.

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One of Parcell’s main focuses is leading an experimental opera ensemble Focus Group LLC, with whom he has written and performed three operas—World Record, Wasted Light, and Witness Reunion. The group sees Parcell joined by a host of collaborators, including Hannah Bureau, Bekah Dotzel, Kenan Serenbetz, Eric Hollander and Alec Watson, as well as Illinois’ Elgin Youth Symphony Orchestra on Witness Reunion.

Earlier this year, Parcell released Plays from the Operas Alone, a collection of songs from the three productions. From the soft pealing guitar that begins opener ‘Raise Awareness Happy Birthday’, it’s clear that these are not the opera songs you may be imagining. As its title suggests, the record sees Parcell take songs from the operas and strip them right back, playing and singing them by himself in a style reminiscent of the World Without Parking Lots album. “The ten pieces here are some of the more plainly song-oriented moments from the operas,” Parcell describes. “Moments that I wanted to revisit after learning more about them from realizing them in their original operatic forms, and living with them on record for a while.”

And what is opera anyway? Even in their most fully-realised form, these songs do not conform to the medium’s stereotypes. It’s something Parcell is aware of. “There’s some oppositional energy at play on my part,” he says when asked about the ‘opera’ tag. “That I know and love all the images and sounds that come to mind that when one hears the word ‘opera’—and which of those we play into and which we transgress.” In the end, he settles on a definition by composer Robert Ashley, who described an opera as “characters in a landscape telling stories musically,” something the work of Ethan T. Parcell and Focus Group LLC undoubtedly lives up to.

Drawing inspiration from numerous sources, including the distinctive folk songs of Will Oldham, David Antin’s talk poems and the work of artist/activist/educator Corita Kent, Parcell’s songs are a kind of audible contemplation, what he describes as “messes of thought” which find meaning as they unravel. Much like Phil Elverum on recent Mount Eerie releases, tracks like ‘Witness Reunion’ feel like they’re working toward an answer in real time, as though each word and sentence is a brick added to the last. Progressing in situ, planned no further than the very next step.

But if this suggests the songs have a haphazard sound, do not be misled. The loose approach allows a more intuitive flow, logic and order not governed by some outside force but something altogether more intrinsic. ‘Tornado ’67’ references the idea of ‘familial sadness’, the thought that trauma is an hereditary, cross generational phenomenon, and the concept speaks to Parcell’s writing style as a whole. As if some force exists beyond the ordinary sense of the world, something to do with memory and emotion and things bigger than ourselves, always available at an individual level yet near impossible to communicate more widely.

Parcell’s work is an attempt to put that right. The narrative of the operas can be summarised as “a singer in the Midwest […] earnestly trying to do some thorough emotional processing,” Parcell explains, be it about the past in World Record, the present in Wasted Light or the future in Witness Reunion. “Inside the narrative of the operas, the singer is reaching for a perfectly sung representation of all this contemplation—sort of planning a great big song or performance in front of us, but the planning is what we hear in the operas—not the performance.”

The result is something far-reaching but incredibly personal, an accumulation of life’s modest details that works, paradoxically, to distill what it means to be alive. Parcell returns to Robert Ashley’s redefinition of opera to make this clear. “I want to take it further and continue to reduce its size,” he describes. “In a metaphysical sense. I think opera can and should be small, about small things, from small voices telling small stories.” And within humble intentions lies something no amount of grandiosity could uncover.

Plays from the Operas Alone is out now and you can get it on a name-your-price basis from the Ethan T. Parcell Bandcamp page. The full studio recordings of each opera are there too, so be sure to check them out.

Photo by R.E. Maley

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Combining the ruminative atmosphere of a Lily Tapes release with the understatedly devastating writing of Talons’, Mount Eerie or early Trouble Books, Seventh Song Counts the Engines sees The World Without Parking Lots make something that’s equal parts sad and hopeful, bummed out bedroom folk songs for the twenty-first century.

The album opens with ‘Famous Horse Race’, a song that introduces this hushed and undeniably affecting vibe excellently. Opening with a despondent bus ride, things grow increasingly opaque, ending with murmured free verse that feels like an Impressionistic portrait of a thousand thoughts and feelings, lending new significance to the superimposed writing of the album’s artwork. “There’s a place where the lightness behind heaviness sits,” Parcell sings, “that I can only hold when the message hits behind an impulse and electric stay-awake but staying awake has it’s limits.”

There’s a lot of emotional abstraction in ‘The Inventor of Common Law Marriage’ too, Parcell’s words creeping sidelong at the edges of a situation, somehow saying nothing and capturing everything with its talk of narrow eyes and rodent-killing vultures.

Perhaps the saddest song you’ll ever hear about the “ever entertaining jewels” of colourful TV, ‘Cartoon’ is stripped right back, just gentle guitar and barely-there vocals. The whole thing is infused in sombre melancholy, but it’s the last line that stands out, a starkly beautiful piece of poetry that somehow feels like the perfect ending, a glimmer among the subdued hues.

“Grey estate, golden age blood moon
tear my winter coat in two”

Rattling around for a minute or so, ‘The Petition on the Emptier Parts’ eventually finds its rhythm as Parcell sings from a post-industrial malaise. “He’s reopening all the old factories,” he sings, “and this town could really use it right now.” ‘Seventh Song’ is a gentle instrumental interlude, guitar softly chiming beneath a layer of radio crackle, before closer ‘Sorel & Mare’ arrives in the rhythmic sway of guitar. Typically oblique, the song is seemingly simple but rendered dense and cryptic with the addition of Parcell’s poetry, packing a huge emotional punch in the process.

“and he counts the engines
one by one by one by the sound alone
by one by one by one
and he weighs his bringings
one by one by one hand alone”

Seventh Song Counts the Engines is a beautiful collection of songs, one which somehow makes a bold statement in a circuitous whisper, deceptively complex instrumentation and ambiguous lyrics capturing decidedly unambiguous emotion. Quite where Parcell takes The World Without Parking Lots next is left unclear, though we cannot wait to find out.

The album is out now and you can get it as a name-your-price download from The World Without Parking Lots Bandcamp page.

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