‘Parking Lot’: Indigo de Souza’s study of liminal spaces
A car park might not seem like the most creatively inspiring environment. Never-ending grey tarmac, stringent white bay markings, and the odd shoddy parking job that leaves you tutting as you drive by. Parking lots serve a fairly simple, dull purpose, allowing us to drop our car and venture to a more exciting second location. It’s not an image or an idea that seems particularly lucrative for songwriting ideas, but Indigo De Souza can carve out a beautiful song from even the most unexpected muses.
Last year, De Souza released her third studio record, All of This Will End. The album, once again, reasserted her place as one of the most talented songwriters and singers in the contemporary indie rock generation, producing tales of toxicity like ‘You Can Be Mean’ and nostalgic tear-jerkers like ‘Younger & Dumber’. Somewhere in between, she included a sonic meditation on liminal places, suitably titled ‘Parking Lot’.
Sonically, ‘Parking Lot’ adheres to the stylistic trademarks that De Souza has set out for herself. Her distinctive vocals cut through homesick indie guitars, creating a sound that feels nostalgic and personal to De Souza. Lyrically, she pushes into the idea of liminal spaces, considering the strange effects of parking lots and grocery stores on her state of mind.
“In the parking lot, I feel like I am losing touch,” she sings in the opening, “And the shopping carts keep rolling, barely holding up.” Like the shopping carts she attempts to wield, De Souza finds herself barely holding up, struggling with the mundanity and manufactured nature of these in-betweens. The song is particularly inspired by De Souza’s experience of mental illness, as she explained during a chat with Our Culture.
“Being a person with mental health issues,” De Souza explained, “grocery stores and parking lots have always been kind of a symbol in my life. I get a lot of anxiety in the grocery store…” The singer explained her struggles with the intense lighting and strange interactions that take place in supermarkets, as well as the realisation that both are far from the natural world we once inhabited.
“There’s such a potential for us to actually connect with nature and with each other and to learn from the earth and provide for ourselves from what we’ve been given,” she commented, “but instead, we have created these very structural systems that are obviously unnatural.” While most people wander the aisles and peruse their shopping list without considering these thoughts, De Souza decided to pen a song about them.
And ‘Parking Lot’ captured that feeling of catastrophising your weekly shop perfectly. The instrumentation may sound as warm and familiar as the layout of your local Tesco or as nostalgic as being wheeled around in a trolley by your dad, but the lyrics tell another story. They focus on De Souza’s anxious relationship with these liminal spaces, on the anxious thoughts that ensue when she touches down in a carpark or store.
The monotony and artificiality of her surroundings leads De Souza to reflect on human connection and on her own mental state, spiralling about what might be “wrong” with her. “I cannot breathe, I cannot hold my own head up,” she sings during the song’s final moments, “And I’m not sure what would help, or if there’s anything, maybe I’ll just always be a little bit sad.”
It’s an experience that certainly seems personal to De Souza, but it’s one that many people who have struggled with mental health issues can relate to. Sometimes, wandering the aisles of a supermarket, going through the motions of everyday life, and existing within liminal spaces can lead to much bigger, scarier thoughts inside your head. ‘Parking Lot’ encapsulates this anxiety perfectly.
