Pictoria Vark On Charting ‘Parts’ Unknown With Her Debut LP

If there is a sense of displacement that runs through The Parts I Dread, the recent debut full-length album by indie singer-songwriter-bassist Victoria Park (who goes by the spoonerism of Pictoria Vark), it is coming from her personal experiences. The song “Wyoming,” for instance, is a reference to her parents’ surprising decision to move from New Jersey to the Equality State in 2019 as Park was studying abroad in Paris. Such lines from the song as “A childhood home set on fire” and “I’m an island in this family” convey the narrator’s concern over her parents’ relocation.

“There were some family stuff and all sorts of nuttiness about New Jersey that I think was driving them up a wall,” the Iowa City-based musician explains, “and they were like, ‘We can’t deal with this anymore. We gotta get out of the rat race.’ They were looking at a few different places and ended up liking Wyoming the most. Then they called me one day and said, ‘We’re moving to Wyoming.’ They just decided that without asking for my opinion. I was like, ‘Okay, what the hell is this?’ So writing that song particularly helped me process that feeling especially.”

That rhythmic track, with its quiet-loud dynamics, is emblematic of the heavy emotional terrain across this bedroom-pop-sounding record such as feelings of melancholy, dislocation, and anxiety complemented by the music’s intimacy and Park’s wistful singing and prominent bass playing. Since its release in April via Get Better Records, The Parts I Dread has generated critical raves and Pictoria Vark has been on tour to promote it.

On the themes of her record, Park explains: So ‘parts’ [in the album’s title] is referring to—if you think about Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown, it’s conjuring a geographic place. But it comes from the lyrics in “Demarest”: “There’s more to you than the parts I dread,” referring to an emotional territory…of having this move to Wyoming from when I was 19 unravel these emotional depths about my relationship with my parents, friends and home–and then kind of finding some sort of resolution by the end of it.”

Similarly to “Wyoming” and a couple of the other songs on the album, the dark Gothic-sounding “Out” verges between subduedness and intensity; its lyrics imagine someone who commits a murder followed by the immediate aftermath of the deed. “In my head, I got curious about this idea, ‘Let’s say you’re this terrible person and you do this heinous thing.’ There are three seconds of time where you’re there, you did what you did, and someone is probably going to catch you eventually. I imagine the time [during those few seconds] feeling like molasses–slow and heavy all at once–and also using that to express my own feelings of being stuck, slow and restless. I really also wanted to push myself like writing something darker and doing something outside of my comfort zone.”

Lyrically, the album’s haunting and ethereal opening track “Twin” might suggest Park is singing about a sibling, but that’s not the case. “Yeah, fully based in fiction, a story of imagining two people growing up together and playing music together. And then one person makes it and the other doesn’t. I’m telling that story of growing apart from one another and a family relationship that becomes terse, and also the image of someone moving on a tour bus and watching them from the rearview mirror disappearing.”

Amid its emotional heaviness, the album concludes on a somewhat optimistic note with the folkish “Friend Song,” whose lyrics reference her New York-New Jersey roots (“Missed the connection to the 1 train”) and includes actual sounds of people in the background. “That one is very New York-specific,” Park says. “I feel like I wanted to ground it in a real place and have it feel very geographically concrete. And so we incorporated some of the city sounds and the rain to build that atmosphere. And then all of the friends in that middle portion–we called it the ‘friend collage’ in [the software program] Logic–that’s all the little samples we have. They’re from videos of me and my friends hanging out over the years. So it’s just real moments and memories from my life, which feel really special.”

Co-produced by Gavin Caine and Park, and recorded remotely in 2021 due to the Delta variant resurgence, The Parts I Dread marks musical progressions from Pictoria Vark’s 2020 EP Self Titled. “That was the first time I had recorded any of my own music,” the singer recalls, “so it was very novice just trying to figure out how to sing comfortably in front of a microphone. I didn’t even know what I wanted from a mix, and so learning from that experience to make this record and thinking more intentionally about production and mixing and instrumentation to really make something that was more deliberate and thoughtful in that way.”

Park acknowledges that writing and recording the material for The Parts I Dread was overall cathartic. “I think “Good For,” (and “Wyoming,” too) was one of those where it was like I had this feeling and the only way to really deal with it at the time was through writing because I didn’t wanna talk about it with other people. And then some of the other songs were crafted in more like a heavy kind of space. “Twin,” for instance, is a fully fictional song, you got to use an allegory to introduce some of the themes of the record. And so [it was] really kind of crafting the little vignettes like an imagined scenario. There were definitely some moments that were extremely cathartic and personal and others that were less so.

Hailing from Bergen County, New Jersey, Park grew up performing music first on the piano and then on the guitar before taking up the bass; she considers such legendary bassists as Carol Kaye, James Jamerson and Jaco Pastorious as her favorites. “There’s more room in bands to play bass, and I really loved it too in high school. And so that became my primary focus. As I was starting to write, I felt most comfortable playing bass. So that made it easier for me to explore ideas and write because I just didn’t feel like such a novice at an instrument. That has been my primary way of writing, too, as of right now.”

By high school, Park was into such alt-rock acts as Neutral Milk Hotel, Mitski, Frankie Cosmos, and Coheed and Cambria. Before attending Iowa’s Grinnell College, she had an inkling that she wanted to become a full-fledged musician but was uncertain about whether it could be a possibility. Then a big break came when Squirrel Flower (the moniker of musician Ella Williams, who was also a fellow Grinnell student) invited Park to tour with her.

“I remember applying to colleges and I really had no idea what I wanted,” says Park. “And while I was [at Grinnell], I ended up doing so much music–playing in different bands, getting really involved in the concert program and student music organizations, and doing record label internships–and slowly having to admit to myself that I really love this thing and I want to do it clearly. And the spring of 2020, I made a big decision where I was going to take that semester off to go with Squirrel Flower on her first headline tour in the U.S. after she signed with Polyvinyl. I was like, ‘This is it, I gotta do it. I have to do this now.’”

In addition to previously headlining her own shows under the Pictoria Vark moniker, Park is currently touring across the country as an opening act for the Michigan post-hardcore band La Dispute. It’s been an experience that Park describes as a dream come true. “Honestly, every show we’ve played on tour with La Dispute has been unreal and unbelievable. I really was never imagining playing for 1,000 people in any of these cities or getting to do this for six weeks at this scale. I feel so grateful so lucky–it’s something I get to experience, trying to really take it all in and enjoy it.”

Now with the release of The Parts I Dread, has Park’s outlook since writing and recording those emotionally turbulent songs? “In some ways, it feels the same,” she says, “and in some ways, it feels different as life happens. I think being on tour so much has also impacted some of that because it’s like, ‘Yes, home can be anywhere that you think it.’ However, not spending anywhere long enough to make a home can also feel really sad and lonely in its own way, even if you’re surrounded by people on tour. So I feel like that’s been something I’ve been thinking about a lot in contrast to this record especially. But I really like ending with a more optimistic note and I think that it is true of how I feel–kind of moving beyond the sudden upheaval of my life.”