Ken Park embraces a new era with fuzzy guitar-wrapped “Nosebleed”

Recently relocated from California to New York, “this is like my first cruel winter,” Park says, he has spent the last few months on tour playing lap steel and banjo for alt-rocker Jake Minch. The weeks of travel have left him in something of a dream-like state. “I have slept in my bedroom probably three times in the last two months.” The feeling, spurred by the rush of travel and time with friends, is the antithesis of the one he felt while writing the lyrics for “Nosebleed” in 2023. “I was totally in a funk at that time, but on the other end of the spectrum. I was isolated. One day I woke up with a nosebleed, and it was this weird catalyst that brought me out of that funk. It was like, ‘hello. This is new.’ I wasn't expecting it. So I wrote this little poem.”

Over a year later, the poem turned into a song. “After moving to New York, I was going through my notebook and I was like, ‘oh, this is neat, and I have this guitar riff that could match.’” The resulting track, the aptly named “Nosebleed”, pays tribute to Park’s inner shift. Recorded in his Brooklyn apartment, and later mixed by friend Mike Fridmann, the song burns with the fire of realisation. “Nosebleed, it cleanses me / of the rot in my blood / like I’ve never bleed,” Park sings, his voice tinged with anguish, a reflection of the pain of change. Wrapped in fuzzy guitars and driving drums, it's a song that feels simultaneously raw and uplifting.

“I recorded the whole thing the same day. It was just three hours of me glued to my instruments and computer. That’s just how I’ve always done things,” Park says. “When I have an idea, I need to see it through, so I sit there until I feel good about it. If you come back to it the next day, it's going to be totally different.” Luckily, hours of dedicated work came with great reward for Park. The self-professed “foodie” went to a Turkish restaurant and treated himself to full sea bass after recording. “I even ate the eyes. It was terrible, but besides that, it was a really wonderful meal. I was still coming back to reality after being glued to my screen.”

While Park says the lyrics of “Nosebleed” were a great reflection of the mindset he was in at the time, the track’s centering on words was an unusual, but welcome, shift for him. His father was an instrumentalist with the rock group Glass – “they were local legends, I hear,” – so the focus on music alone made sense for Park. His impulse to create a poem in the first place was something new. “There's a really early video of me playing the drums when I was three and I’m just yelling out gibberish. I wanted to make a song, but I didn't have words. That’s almost a metaphor for how I perceived music until I had friends who put me on to the power of words,” he says. “At the time [of writing “Nosebleed”] I was definitely learning about songwriting. I was just six months into realizing how powerful words are. I had completely grown up with music, and the lyrics were always second. That's just the way that I listened.”

Park’s views started to change when his friends, inspired by the discographies of confessional songwriters like Townes Van Zandt, Phoebe Bridgers, and Big Thief, began to write lyrics and flesh out ideas of their own. Equally inspired by the lyrical sensibilities of these ‘60s artists and contemporary icons, Park wanted to know more. “I would see their notes app just full of these really cool one-liners and associations with words. I'm like, ‘how do you do that?’ Since that period, it's grown into the words being first. When I listen to a song, it's the words that are very intriguing to me, and I'm very grateful for that and for my friends that helped me with that.”

While Park is indebted to his father’s musical interests and friends’ penchant for words, it always goes back to the music itself. Park spent a lot of time with My Bloody Valentine and The Smashing Pumpkins growing up, but for him, it all goes back to one band. “The music that I listened to in high school was very important to me. My number one was, and still is, Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys. “That’s Not Me” was the first song, lyrically, that I was just blown away by. It's so simple. I didn't have to read between the lines or anything. It's just straight to the point,” he says. “That song aged incredibly for me specifically too because it talks about moving to the city.”

In the years following those initial realisations, Park has been on a mission to flesh out his own lyrics. It’s a journey that has given us gifts like “Nosebleed” and his debut single "Shatter", released in October. Since then, Park has already opened for names like Will Anderson of Hotline TNT, and been added to the lineup at The New Colossus Festival. Clearly, his new interest in words is paying off.