Interview: Tayla Parx Enters a New Phase With 'Many Moons, Many Suns'

Tayla Parx’s third album ‘Many Moons, Many Suns’ is a musical token of a personal journey as she embraces rural life and revisits her Southern roots.

‘Many Moons, Many Suns’ – Tayla Parx

I share everything. You can always bring it back. You gotta go all the way there in order to bring it back.

The clock strikes 7 AM in Nashville.

Contrary to the natural line of thinking, singer, songwriter, and producer Tayla Parx isn’t headed to the studio. She’s getting up and getting things in order at the ranch – a passion project years in the making, just like her newly released album Many Moons, Many Suns.

Many Moons, Many Suns - Tayla Parx — Many Moons, Many Suns – Tayla Parx

The album began four years ago, when Parx was still toggling between her home in New York and her prospective place of residence in Nashville.

“I’d been looking for this location for years and years and years and years,” says Parx. “So coming back here and developing it literally from scratch, some of the songs were written in New York and the rest of them were done here in Nashville.”

The noise and movement of LA and New York dissipated in the stillness and slowness of life in rural Nashville. The contrast in environments prompted reflection in Parx.

“I do think that spending time between New York and Nashville over the past year or two has added so many different layers of me asking myself constantly, ‘Okay, what is the thing that we want? What is my idea of happiness? What is my idea of success now that we’ve achieved all of these other things?’”

Her achievements aren’t sparse. Parx is a four-time Album of the Year Grammy nominee and a credited songwriter on songs like Ariana Grandes’s “7 Rings” and Fifth Harmony’s “BO$$.”

Tayla Parx 'Many Moons Many Suns' © Justin Ayers — Tayla Parx ‘Many Moons Many Suns’ © Justin Ayers

Now, as Parx has entered her 30s, she’s settling into a new chapter that she’s keen to highlight on her latest album.

“There’s been many moons [and] many suns for me – that means [there’ll] be many days,” Parx says. “And that’s many days for things to go right or many days for things to go wrong and then get back right. I found hope in being like, ‘There’s always tomorrow.’”

Juggling the polarities of life as a farm owner and an artist proved to interact in productive ways. The structure of the early mornings allowed Parx to adopt a more grounded mindset.

“[My] whole morning is taking care of something other than [me] – my dogs, my chickens, my goats, all those other things, and not even turning on that creative sense until a certain time,” Parx says. “Having that moment to be very intentional in the morning time [and] not having enough time to just be scrolling on my phone in the morning cause the animals gotta eat, it just gave me a different type of responsibility.”

When it came time to get creative in the studio, Parx found the flow of ideas easier to come by now that her days weren’t centered around herself and her musical endeavors.

“I think that being able to think about things other than music and get creative in other ways in life have allowed me to be even more focused when I am in the studio,” she says.

Parx’s studio sessions usually involve the same tight-knit group of collaborators, and Many Moons, Many Suns was no exception.

“Most of the time, I am doing things in house with my writers and my producers. I like to keep it quite small,” she explains. “You’ll see a lot of the same names throughout the whole album. The same three producers or the same three songwriters.”

Closeness begets a sense of freedom in the writing process that Parx leans on as a seasoned songwriter herself. She’s picky about who’s in the room.

“It either has to be somebody I’m super, super comfortable with or just somebody who I know will push me creatively,” she says.

She names one song in particular where she felt a push into quite personal territory. The chorus of the album’s final track, “I Don’t Talk About Texas,” uses Parx’s delicately sweet tone to recall a hard learned lesson in love: “I dated someone who loved God more, who taught me that I should be with someone who was sure about me.“

“I wrote that with an artist that I’m a huge fan of and then another artist who is a singer/songwriter and both of them don’t typically write for other people, actually,” Parx recalls. “It’s the only song I wrote with them, however it happens to be one of my favorites.”

Parx seems to be drawn to that which doesn’t hide itself much.

With tracks on the album like “This Was Supposed to Be Our Wedding Song” or “Emotional Support Ex,” Parx is sparing no details.

“I share everything. You can always bring it back. You gotta go all the way there in order to bring it back,” she says.

For Parx, all defenses need to come down in the songwriting process. If she’s protecting herself, that insinuates a sense of secrecy, which isn’t something many people are in the market for these days.

“My generation is kind of over the whole idea of, ‘This song is a song that sounds like it could be from anybody,’” she explains. “I think that we’ve had a lot of that over the past however many years and we’ll always have artists like that, but I think this new generation, my generation, and the one after me, we’re looking for different kinds of lyrics that aren’t an artist that’s playing things so safe.”

The sounds of this album blend Parx’s usual musical influences of pop and R&B, but make the intention of taking us back to her Southern roots, a place she’s been happy to return to both physically and musically. It’s added a layer of grittiness to Parx’s sound, which may otherwise fall in line with the sugary sweet sounds of pop classical pop music.

“My last projects have been very brighter pop elements or R&B elements but this one I think is more moody than my previous projects,” she says. “Actually being in places that have fall and not being in LA 24/7 helped with that.”

Although her typical disposition is quite happy, the less sunny side of Parx is one she’s proud to showcase on Many Moons, Many Suns. She’s not blind to the criticism some have of her seemingly continuous state of joy (“I’m just a happy person, what can I say,” Parx laughs), but with the help of blending punchy lyrics with easy to swallow melodies, she creates the needed and very realistic balance.

“It’s my way of making it empowering by saying, ‘We’re gonna sing this like an uptempo type of song this time,’” she says.

Empowering is the perfect encapsulation of this era of Tayla Parx. With identity changing life moments and an album, four years in the making, as a souvenir, Parx has a new wind under her, calling her creativity to a different level.

“This album really for me is a moment of fearlessness and boldness in my sonics and in my lyrics,” Parx says.

Her fans, or as she endearingly calls them, her “TaylaTots,” can get the full experience of what Parx has been crafting as she embarks on her US tour.

Not shying away from what she brings to the stage, Parx promises fans a show where she’ll have “all the energy in the world and [be] singing it down.”

Parx also plans on putting on her dancing shoes and leaning more into her skills as a professional dancer.

“I’ve been exploring a lot of the different ways that my movement can look and feel like my sonics,” says the former Debbie Allen Dance Academy student. “And I think that that’s something that we’ll still continue to see evolve over the next few months. You guys will start seeing me incorporate a lot of the things that I’ve been picking up because it’s been something that I’ve been very intentional about.”

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