Nashville Singer-Songwriter Elliott Park Spent Quarantine Making an Album with his 3 Teenage Daughters — And it’s Perfect

21 Oct Nashville Singer-Songwriter Elliott Park Spent Quarantine Making an Album with his 3 Teenage Daughters — And it’s Perfect

by Marisa Torrieri Bloom

The first few months of pandemic life and quarantine may have been the most difficult in many ways, as we grappled with the unknown.

Yet this period of uncertainty spurred creativity among musicians, who found themselves writing new material for the first time in months. 

Nashville singer-songwriter Elliott Park is among them. Over the spring, Park and his three teen daughters Anna, 18, Autumn, 16, and April, 14, created an acoustic, 12-song collection —  Songs With My Daughters  — that is beautiful and compassionate, with the daughters’ gorgeous harmonies intertwined with jazzy pop-rock tunes, like “To the Moon and Back,” and nostalgic tributes (like “Blue Skies Over the Rainbow” — my favorite).

It’s like hearing Jack Johnson but better, because daughters make everything that much more awesome.

We caught up with Elliott in one of his rare free moments to talk about the new record, and life in this crazy new world. 

Rockmommy: Talk to me about this album! When and how did the idea to do a quarantine album with your three daughters come about? 

Elliott Park: Well it wasn’t really intended to be a quarantine album. I had been planning a new family album for several months but midway through recording process the pandemic hit and I started feeling like the songs I was producing didn’t quite fit the mood of the times. So I put my nose back on the grindstone and reworked it with a little different vibe. Still quirky but with a little more intimacy and organic feel.

Rockmommy: Who wrote the songs? Was there any teenage angst about lyrics (kidding, kind of) or musical direction? 

Elliott Park: I wrote all the songs except one, Blue Skies Over the Rainbow… which is a mashup of two of my favorite classics; Blue Skies and Somewhere Over the Rainbow. The girls and I collaborated on that one. It was a ton of fun coming up with the parts. There was not TOO much angst haha, but at times it was a little difficult to pull them away from what they were doing. I’m proud at how hard they worked.

Rockmommy: How long have you been playing music? How has that influenced your girls? 

Elliott Park: I was raised in a musical family but never learned an instrument. I was always too shy to sing. But when I went to college something clicked. Almost every evening after basketball practice I would sneak over to the music department and tinker on the piano. That went on into my twenties and then I started singing and writing music at around age 30. I found I had a knack for songwriting and it sort of developed into a career. My girls have grown up with it as well. We have an old Magnivox record player we call Maggie. She’s sung us all to sleep a few thousand times and still does to this day. I’d like to think they’ve developed their musical interests from listening to all those old records. Sweet Maggie.

Rockmommy: These songs are so sweet — do your daughters and you have similar music tastes? 

Elliott Park: Thanks! Well I think we have overlapping sets of musical interests. But I really dig a lot of the stuff they listen to. I think it surprised them one day when I was singing along to a Billie Eilish… It kind of crossed their wires there for a few seconds haha!. Likewise they REALLY love the old classics, and I don’t just mean rock. If you look at their personal playlists you’ll see Sinatra, Billie Holliday, The Carpenters, some Gershwin tunes… a lot of different genres. I think those overlapping interests shape this album and I love it to pieces. They can mimic the elevator voices on a Percy Faith track or knock off the Andrews sisters like nobody’s business. 

Rockmommy: What was the recording process like? Did you do this DIY with a good DAW, or with an engineer? 

Elliott Park: I had a lot of it remotely recorded, but it all came together in my bedroom using Logic Pro X on my old iMac. Towards the end of the project it would crash about three times an hour no lie. We did all the vocals in my bedroom. I had to yell through the walls for silence many, many, times.

Rockmommy: Obviously the pandemic sucks. But is there some level of gratitude for the time with your daughters that you had BECAUSE of the pandemic? 

Elliott Par: Definitely! We made the best of it. I’m proud of us all for staying at it all the way through. 

Rockmommy: Are you planning a social distance concert or parking lot shows?

Elliott Park: Not at this time. I’m not huge on performing and honestly I’ve used this pandemic as an excuse not to perform. It’s awful and I need to change that about myself. That’s some bare bones honesty right there haha.

Marisa Torrieri Bloom is the editor and founder of Rockmommy.