The Story Behind The Song: Arlo Parks’ tragic masterpiece ‘Black Dog’
Occasionally, an artist releases a song at the perfect time, a skill best exemplified by the Arlo Parks single, ‘Black Dog’. The track was released at the height of the first Covid-19 lockdown and epitomised the dark thoughts felt by many during an unprecedentedly isolated time.
For millions worldwide, ‘Black Dog’ became a source of comfort during those strange times and acts as a reminder of 2020. Of course, the song wasn’t intended to soundtrack a global pandemic when Parks first wrote it. The true inspiration behind the hit is actually a rather harrowing tale, given that it is written about Parks’ best friend severely suffering from poor mental health.
The term ‘black dog’ was famously used by the 18th-century English writer Samuel Johnson in a letter to a friend: “What will you do to keep away the black dog that worries you at home,” he wrote. Furthermore, Winston Churchill was known to describe his cyclothymia by using the phrase.
“It was written for my best friend,” Parks explained to the BBC. “Just witnessing her spiralling and going to these really dark places. I was feeling helpless in the face of her pain, which seemed to be coming at her for no reason. And I think it’s just a documentation of a minute in time when I was afraid to lose a friend.”
When Parks played ‘Black Dog’ live for the first time, her friend was in the audience, which made for a special moment. “She was there in the front row the first time I played it live, and it felt like everybody else in the room dissolved,” she recalled. “And she’s doing so much better now, so it makes me feel hopeful when I listen to it.”
Despite only being a teenager when she wrote ‘Black Dog’, Parks didn’t feel phased by taking on such a sensitive topic, and it was a track she felt compelled to create. “It’s quite a difficult topic, and I’d been approaching it in other demos, but it never felt completely right, or that I was expressing myself exactly how I wanted to, and inspiration just hit when I heard that instrumental,” she reflected to NME. “It’s quite a simple instrumental and it gave me a lot of space to use my words and really deliver a message. I’d been listening to a lot of music that was in a similar vein – I was listening to ‘In Rainbows’ by Radiohead a lot, which uses space in a really interesting way.”
Although the song is extremely personal to Parks, naturally, listeners will interpret the track in their own way. As previously mentioned, fans of ‘Black Dog’ most commonly linked it to their lockdown experience, which touched Parks. In the same interview, she said: “In terms of the topic and the message of the song, I’ve been glad to hear that it’s been helping people out who have been finding quarantine difficult. People who are stuck inside and feeling quite low. I’ve had lots of messages from people saying that it’s helped them, which has been so wonderful.”
Since writing openly about mental health on ‘Black Dog’, Parks has become an ambassador for CALM (Campaigning Against Living Miserably). She’s also launched ‘Arlo’s Art Therapy’ in collaboration with the charity and continues to champion creativity as a tool for aiding mental well-being.
Watch the official video for ‘Black Dog’ by the Mercury Prize winner below.
