ABOUT WES PARKER Countless artists drop confessional albums to air their dirty laundry. Wes Parker, however, is not one of them. Part of the allure of listening to the skillfully melodic songs on his album, Super Rare (out June 5th, Big Machine Rock), is figuring out where his characters end and Parker begins. This narrative obscuring lends a unique palette to Parker’s work, which subtly pendulates between cautionary and escapist. “I don’t want to be ham-fisted, and I hesitate to say a song is about one thing or another,” he says, thoughtfully. “I might write with something in mind, but it’s like a cloud in the sky. People are going to see different shapes in it.” So that makes you, listener, a pivotal part of his storytelling process. And Parker is right there alongside you. Super Rare — the Richmond, Virginia, native’s first solo album (his previous band, the indie-rock Camp Howard, amicably split in 2021) — is a mix of curiosity, observation, vulnerability, and an almost zen acceptance of the messiness that comes from simply walking this earth. “It’s a lot of vignettes of people or personified emotions in my life,” he says. Those tableaux inhabit an array of aesthetics: humbled reflections underscored by Americana, folkie parables about eccentric strangers, and heartbreaking tales filtered through art-rock. To balance it all out, his character, DJ Charlie Horse, also makes a few appearances (more on that in a moment). The earthy, indie-rock “Tattoo” kicks off with a harmonica, clearing the way for Parker to modestly navigate “an opiate past and the characters in that, and where I would maybe be if I hadn’t dragged myself out of that.” The anthemic “Split Ends” is the ultimate sing-along for anyone who’s ever been heartsick, joining “Little Birdie,” a harmonic nugget of wistfulness, on the receiving end of dejection. And the off-kilter lament “Dinosaur Park” recounts the tragic, true-crime story of Susan Powell and her disappearance in Utah in 2009. Parker was haunted by her story after hearing it on a podcast during a road trip with his friends. “I hesitated to write a song about violence against women,” he says, “but I was moved by the story, which was just so tragic.” To that end, his repeated lyric, “Mommy stayed the night where the crystals grow,” is possibly the most gutting moment on this album. “This album is super raw. It’s completely unfiltered,” Parker says, explaining why he named it Super Rare. “A lot of the songs are definitely in a place of longing. I write a lot about obsession, too. For some reason, I just find that interesting, to really long for something and not be able to let that go, you know?” That theme is most potent in “Spider Legs,” an oscillation between assertive rock riffs and a transcendent, Radiohead-esque chorus. Here, he opines on being caught in someone’s web, romantic or otherwise. Super Rare can get deep, but it is no bummer. Brief interludes from Parker’s baritoned radio DJ character offer cheesy bon mots such as, “If you’re now just joining us…the water’s just fine. You can just slip on in here like a piece of spaghetti.” A handful of songs follow in spirit. “Sushi King” is a banjo-laden ballad recounting the (imagined) story of a man so obsessed with sushi that he dies from mercury poisoning. There’s a satisfying bedroom-pop cover of Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s “Murder on the Dancefloor.” And “Bad Doggie,” a sonic dead-ringer for ’90s midtempo indie rock, manages to be a little cheeky about and a bit guilty over, he says, “having a lot of impulses and not really liking that part of your nature.” Mingling the weighty with the absurd is central to Parker’s power as a storyteller. When Camp Howard disbanded and the pandemic descended on us, he figured, “Alright, I’m down in the dumps. I’m basically gonna give myself therapy by making comedy about the music scene.” Parker created a community of lovable characters he’d met in Richmond: chief among them, Skunk, a superfriendly, idiosyncratic punk rocker. “I was obsessed with the idea of giving them a slice of humanity, something that makes you root for them.” It worked — and his TikTok following exploded. After a year, he picked up his guitar again and began writing solo material. This re-entry into music felt full-circle. The artist grew up around his brother Alan Good Parker, a studied jazz guitarist, alongside his dad and extended family, who were exceptional bluegrass musicians. “You know, pedal steel and mandolin and banjo stuff? It was the most frustrating thing to watch them play music together on the porch and not be able to join in. It was like they were speaking a language I couldn’t.” That changed after Parker was suspended a few times from school (for trying to make his classmates laugh) and had the house to himself while his dad was at work. “That time alone, he says, “gave me the space I needed to experiment with instruments and write music alone in the house.” To this day, “most of Super Rare’s songs came from being at home, sitting on the couch.” In 2025, he put out a pair of acclaimed EPs, Splinter, then Fantom. Parker is all about obsessively writing when inspiration strikes. He wrote and recorded Super Rare over two years, often recording a demo at home (playing the bass, drums, guitar, and piano himself), then listening to it over and over in his car to figure out lyrics and musical tweaks. Later, he recorded the music live with his band in the studio. The album’s spectacular coda, “Split Ends,” is the one outlier in this process. “I was hanging with Jake Cochran” — his good friend and vocalist-drummer of the indie rock band Illiterate Light — “and said we should write a bad song together sometime,” Parker says, laughing. “I like the idea of how freeing it would be.” It was his only collaboration on this self-produced album. “But then we thought, ‘Damn, this is a good song!’ I’ve lost the original meaning of it, but like ‘Little Birdie,’ it was a metaphor for the death of love between two people.” Still, any time you think Super Rare has finally cleared the haze between art and artist, it’s as if Parker asks himself, “Where’s the intrigue in that?” He admits: “There are a couple of things in my life that I have never healed from, ever. I don’t know that I ever will, and that’s worked its way into my songwriting. But this is an ensemble of characters.” And in this highly evocative narrative, Parker happens to be both character and messenger. | 
