“When I graduated, all the music in my life came to a halt, and that’s when I realized I couldn’t live without it.” – Heather Park
ISSUE: Winter 2010
DEPT: Personalities
STORY: Anna M. Park
Soul Barer
It’s just a girl, a sheet and a camera.
That’s Heather “Ah” Park’s video for her lead single, “Trust You,” off her latest album Stay.
“It’s about waking up at your love’s apartment after a night of debauchery, and picking up your things and leaving,” explains Park. “The song is really about knowing you should leave this person, but simply being incapable of prying yourself away from him.”
And though the 31-year-old says it was intimidating getting in her “skivvies in front of a team of people,” she seems to have no problem baring her heart and soul in her music. “Stay almost reads like an autobiography of my life over the past four years,” she says. And it’s a story that is obsessed with love — “New love, deep love, twisted love, love lost and finally self-love.”
The Korean American started singing as a child in her native Brooklyn. “My family always says that I sang be- fore I learned how to walk,” she says. Though she sang throughout her tenure at Bowdoin College as a member of choirs and bands, it wasn’t until she was about to move to Taiwan for a graduate program that she had a revelation. “When I graduated, all the music in my life came to a halt, and that’s when I realized I couldn’t live without it.”
Since then, Park released her debut album, Dream in Pictures, in 2005 to international recognition. She has performed all over the U.S. and the UK, opened for Common at last summer’s Fort Greene Festival, and was a finalist in the Emergenza NYC Battle of the Band competition. Though she’s just released her sophomore album — a mélange of R&B, hip-hop, soul and even folk — Park’s already thinking about her next album. And while we may not find her stripping down any time soon (she says she still blushes when she sees the “Trust You” video), she is considering stripping the music down further to “something fully acoustic.” — AMP
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first heard about heather park through soulbounce and been hooked ever since. she’s got an amazing voice. i hope she gains wider recognition so that other asians and asian americans living in the states can look at her and think, “that can be me, too.”