Yes, Wes Parker Can Feel Something Shifting Too
- Amanda Mack
- 4 hours ago
- 17 min read
Wes Parker’s FilmFreeway account is pretty easy to come across in an internet search. There’s only one credit listed – a short film from 2022 that he served as producer, writer, and director on called “Stranger in the Night.” There are hints dropped in his bio about the other lives that he lives. There’s a mention of his old band, Camp Howard, and of his comedy sketches that would have been starting to take on a life of their own on TikTok around that time.
The life that Parker is living when I meet him is that of a road and coast warrior. A few weeks prior, he was playing opening dates with Liz Cooper on her West Coast tour supporting her album New Day. After a few weeks off, he started his headlining tour on the East Coast. After another break, he will hit the road as support for Shakey Graves for a short run of shows that will cover parts of the Midwest.
I had a chance to catch up with him in Asheville, North Carolina, a few stops into his headlining dates. The venue for the evening was Static Age Records: a small, independent record store with a bar attached that feels like a location primed for more than a few “I saw them before they blew up” regalements.
He spots me almost immediately outside the store and makes his way over. We’ve only exchanged a few DMs on Instagram prior to meeting, but Parker is immediately warm and open. It almost feels like we’ve met before. I assume some of this is rooted in his restaurant industry background, something he lightly skewers in some of his TikTok sketches. But he’s also a proud Richmond, Virginia, native which feels like a good hometown for developing strong southern sensibilities. We chat a bit about the stage being too small to set up his keyboard for the only song he uses it for, “fantom,” the title track from his last EP. Since I’m also photographing his sets, I’ve already peeped the room at The EARL for tomorrow night through photos on Google and can confirm that the stage there is bigger. I don’t know if he’s as relieved as I am to know this. I’ve been looking forward to finally seeing “fantom” played live for weeks.
According to Instagram, I started following Parker in January of 2025 after liking several of his videos that came across my feed – the comedy ones and the music ones. That tracks pretty well with a memory I have of commandeering a friend's living room TV to show her the music video for “Splinter” sometime that May. She isn't really on social media, so she’s never had a simulated experience of waking up next to Parker after a one-night stand. I watched her as she watched him. Her head bobbed, her heel tapped along to the beat. I smiled the whole time. When it was over, she declared, “He's really good.” My response: “I know.” She had determined that from just one song. I’d spent several weeks with his debut solo EP, Splinter, and the singles he’d been releasing since 2024. I knew he was more than just “really good.”
His writing is sharp and visually striking with quiet, bleeding honesty woven in. His lyrics had completed countless laps through my headphones, which feels like the only way to listen to them and truly unpick their layers. Some of them broke my heart. All of them made me excited to see what he did next, though. That next thing turned out to be fantom, which took everything I admired about Parker’s lyricism and poured it into a haunting, partially themed EP that he released, quite appropriately, on Halloween last year. Alongside songs about attachments to unhealthy relationships and insomniac thoughts about death, he works in an extremely reimagined, obsession-driven version of Lucifer’s expulsion into hell from heaven by God. I don’t know how, but it all just works. The leap in tone between the indie-folk textured infectiousness of Splinter, and the 90s alt rock fever dream composed from the abyss that is fantom displays a level of versatility that doesn’t make Parker’s swinging creative pendulum between comedy and music all that difficult to wrap my head around. Of course the same guy writing from the point of view of a character with an unsettling fixation on a deity can also play an affable, unbathed “crust punk” with trash bongos and zero ability (or desire) to recognize social cues.
Static Age fills up steadily. Each glance back reveals a new swath of bodies in the room. Slow Funeral is his support for the first four dates on this leg of the tour. It’s the bedroom-grunge solo project of South Carolina-based musician Mary Norris. She and Parker are good friends. They seem like they have a lot of fun together. As she hits the stage, there’s little room for me to turn to glance back anymore. When Parker’s set starts, the crowd is pushed back to the entrance. It’s probably a fire hazard, but it’s also effectively a sold out show.
On stage, Parker sings a majority of the verses with his eyes closed. He never feels like he wants to escape the room or the moment, just like he needs a little time alone with some of the words he’s written before he gives them away to the crowd that night.
The lyrics to “Tattoo” are the first to be let go. “I know where to find salvation / Down behind the Greyhound station, yeah / No, I don’t wanna go home / ’Cause they’ll never leave me alone.” It’s a song that depicts Parker’s isolation and paranoia during his past struggles with opiates. But he doesn’t let himself stay in that mode for long. There are parts of songs in the set that feel explosive by design to shake him back. They jerk out of him when he plays them. He can barely get the last words of the chorus out on “Splinter” because the fuzzy, raucous guitar lines pull him away from the mic. Between songs, he is banter-ready. He has a bit about the world’s oldest tortoise turning 194. He also has a dedication to Taco Bell which, naturally, gets applause. In Atlanta, as he leads into “spider legs”, he will passively call them insects before he is swiftly corrected by Brian Larson, his drummer, and their engineer on tour with them, Sebastian.
While Parker tunes his guitar or changes instruments, Chandler Brooks, who plays bass, grabs the reins of the crowd until he’s ready. He and Parker met doing improv, so the ability to carry and complement each other has been built into their friendship from the start. Brooks seems to find his fun in accidentally turning the audience against him. He takes a sip from a can and holds it up. “This is pretty good. Mountain Time? You rockin’ with that?” he innocently asks the crowd. The love for Mountain Time is seemingly not in the room with us. “Damn, we’re not rockin’ with that. I thought this was local!” He’s right and wrong about this. Mountain Time Lager is based in Colorado but has a major brewery in Asheville. He’s back in their good graces by the next banter break.
The set concludes with “Salute (The Show)”, a song written by Parker and Brooks in exquisite corpse-esque fashion for the Splinter EP. It’s a method that gives the track the unique trait of having three protagonists with three different stories (or perhaps two protagonists and an antagonist…). It’s a fan favorite in Parker’s catalogue, and a few people in the room know what happens during the live performance of it. He has already assessed the stage and figured out where he’s going to land before he suddenly drops and rolls onto his back. His legs flip above his head, and he lightly kicks the air and then the crash and ride cymbals on Larson’s kit. This is the modified version of this particular antic. When he has the space for it, he balls into a crumpled, contorted heap on the stage for an uncomfortable amount of time, tangled in cords, but somehow still playing the guitar he’s folded around. This version will happen the next night in Atlanta. When he gets up, he makes sure to thank the Asheville crowd with a few blown kisses. Southern sensibilities and such.
It turns out that the keyboard isn’t the only thing the venue doesn’t have room for. There’s also nowhere for Parker and the band to set up merch. They announce that they’re selling goods out of the back of their van. It’s lost on no one how this sounds.
It’s a Saturday night in downtown Asheville, and Static Age also lacks a private, off-street area for them to park. They did load in while parked outside the front doors, and now this is the location of their makeshift merch tent. Brooks and Parker make a very unideal and hectic situation work. They’re a team here just as much as they are on stage. Brooks takes payment and pulls orders from boxes while Parker does something of a meet-and-greet further down the way. Despite the situation, he listens to people’s stories. He’s the first concert for one teen girl, there with her mother, who could not peel her big, heart-eyes off of him the entire set. He’s a repeat-see artist for someone else. He turns each photo request from a fan into a mini photoshoot. Serious face. Silly face. Wild hand gesture. Silly face again. He’s really good at this.
I didn’t properly sit down with Parker until the next evening, before the show in Atlanta. He suggests we sit on the edge of their van’s cargo area to talk. It’s the quietest place we have access to, and on this night, it’s not doubling as a merch booth. Before we begin, I tell him there will be no Barbara Walters moments from me. I don’t have any notes from him or his team about anything that’s off limits, but it’s my way of assuring him there are parts of his life I will not go into the weeds on. He’s been a documented public figure of some kind for a while, and there’s already so much of his life on the Internet.
Before the TikTok virality, Parker and Larson were part of Camp Howard, a Richmond, Virginia-based band they both spent their teens and a majority of their twenties in. There are relics of their history on social media still. There’s an Instagram account and Facebook page still intact with the exact pictures of band life you’d expect from four guys building momentum in the music industry while becoming old enough to drink. They built enough of it to share stages with the likes of Backseat Lovers, Illiterate Light, and Stone Temple Pilots. He admits he loves the chance to play in front of new audiences as an opener, even if the new audiences don’t immediately love him back. The STP crowd could be especially rough. “I remember there [were] times we got out on stage, and people booed before we even played a note. They were like, ‘You aren't the band we’re here to see!’ And then other nights, we had people just cheer like crazy and be really, really receptive and come and give us a lot of love.” On YouTube, there’s an Audiotree performance still up that features a much blonder Parker who seems, at least compared to his confidence now, a little mic shy when the band ends their set with “Juice,” on which he takes lead vocals. I consider an Audiotree performance to be a marker of how good Camp Howard was. “They let us play once, anyway,” he says with a laugh.
Being in Camp Howard taught him the indie band grind: how to operate within the ecosystem of a band, perform, and most importantly, tour. “Nowadays, [there’s] a common story of bands with some sort of virality blowing up and then getting sent on tour with no experience, and I think that can be really bad for everybody involved ‘cause it’s just too much at once with no experience.” I sense he doesn’t want to sound like the authority on the respectable amount of humiliation a band should have to endure or accidental virality, though arguably, he could speak to both. “But not to hate on those bands either! I think it’s just a situation that is happening nowadays that [maybe] didn’t used to as much.” It’s a story that maybe could have been his if things had aligned a bit differently.
After Camp Howard officially disbanded in 2021 (it’s worth noting that they did a one-off reunion show around Christmas in 2023), Parker felt lost. He turned his TikTok channel into an outlet to cope. For several uploads, he tried several different approaches and ideas for sketches that didn’t quite land. But eventually something finally did, and in a big way. “When I first wrote Skunk, the one thing that I remember thinking was, ‘All he does is live for house shows and the music scene and that kind of thing, but he just wants friends.’ People are nice to him, but he doesn’t really have a solid friendship that goes very deep.” And though he mostly places the character at house and basement shows in sketches, encounters with people like Skunk happen outside of those spaces too. If anyone should know, it’s him. “[I’ve] played a lot of house shows, drank a lot of 40s, smoked a lot of cigarettes, and hung out with a lot of people […] That person exists outside of house shows, too […] I think that person exists in all areas of our life, and it’s someone who is just fully themselves and isn’t super self-conscious.” He adds, “[They are] in ways they shouldn’t be and aren’t in ways they should be.” The first iteration of him appeared in May of 2022.
Parker started out using a voice and mannerisms closer to his own for the character, but the essence of Skunk was firmly in place from the start – the pulled forward hair that creates his “skunk tail” marking, the refusal to wear a shirt underneath his jean jacket, and the desire to leave the basement show with just one real friend. Even as Parker was working Skunk out in real time, the comments on the earliest videos reveal that he hit with viewers viscerally and immediately. Some people wanted to be his friend or shield him from rejection, but everyone seemingly knew a Skunk or considered themself the Skunk in social situations. By his seventh or so appearance, his signature traits and idiosyncrasies were in place. His main theme song was established (“Basement Scene” by Deerhunter), and Joni Rotten, his broken-tailed pet possum, was born into the lore. In September of 2025, he finally succeeded in joining a band. It was Lucy Dacus’s. Parker was invited by Dacus to take the stage with her as Skunk and perform part of “Night Shift.“
Parker has a stable of well-meaning, endearing characters that all feel a little too close to someone you know. Every sketch that features the guy who’s doing a bad job at being secretly in love with his co-worker has personally given me PTSD. He never punches down and rarely even punches up. They instead feel designed for him to punch himself. Despite shifting trends and the ease of being mean-spirited for views, his uploads on TikTok alone have amassed over 13 million likes at the time of this writing. The amount of views he’s received on those videos is simply incalculable. I didn’t even attempt.
Although his videos were doing well, he was still broke. He took a friend up on a job to be a door-to-door salesman in rural Illinois, some twelve hours away from Richmond. “I was supposed to be there for two weeks. I lasted two days.” He realized quickly the job wasn’t for him. The whole ordeal left him feeling like he’d failed. The drive back to Richmond was a brutal one. “I remember I was listening to this Alex G record, and this song “Ain’t It Easy” came on. I tell you, I started crying. I cried hard. I don’t cry very easily. I cried so hard. It was historic-level crying for me.” It wasn’t the prettiest wake-up call for Parker, but it was what he needed to push through his fear of embarking on a solo music career.
After years of being in bands (including one with his brothers called Ruth Good), he went at it alone full steam. In February of 2024, he released “Why Won’t You Pick Up The Phone?” and dropped a music video for it that was, either in service of the song or the budget, filmed on an iPhone. He followed up with a second single “Annie Moore” in March, “Burn The House” in May, and in June, he released “Tattoo” with a music video directed by Colin Earner who he would go on to collaborate with on the videos for “fantom,” “Splinter,” and a new, recently filmed music video from Super Rare that he seemed careful not to give away the title of.
I derailed the interview to hone in on “Annie Moore.” A few days into his headlining dates, Parker announced his first full-length solo LP, Super Rare, slated for release on June 5th. It’s his first label release, and there are two released singles from it, “Little Birdie” and “Bad Doggie”, that I should be talking about. The Shakey Graves supporting dates are a huge deal and worth discussing as well, but I’ve been fascinated by the music video for “Annie Moore” since I first saw it. Thankfully, Parker is happy to indulge me on this. It’s clear that he loves the video too.
The setup is simple: we are dropped into a time and place to observe the relationship between Parker and his partner, played by actress Allison Joyce. It’s shown through a montage of intimate moments that happen between couples when no one is watching. “It was an acting challenge for me because I haven’t done a lot of kiss scenes,” he confesses. “I’ve done a few. I did a Rocky Horror thing and did a kiss, so I was a little nervous.” But the tension between them arrives, and the relationship ultimately dissolves. The last shot is of Parker, writing a note to his ex-partner at the kitchen table, using lyrics from the song: “After all this time, what was any of it for / If you don’t love me anymore?” Joyce is considerably older than Parker. It’s not something that’s lit up by a neon sign in the video or even given context. It feels like it’s meant to be noticed, but not considered a catalyst for anything that plays out between them. After all, their complex dynamic still suffers a mundane fate that other unscrutinized relationships do – things stop working, but only for one person.
“Annie Moore” is a deceptively upbeat song about being denied closure in a relationship. “Why Won’t You Pick Up the Phone?”, Parker’s first single, is also about not receiving closure in a relationship, but there’s a slight, obsessive pursuit of it, backed by a few bright and jangly synth solos. It could be argued that “neck” is probably a bit more buoyant than it should be, considering it’s written around the anxiety-induced insomnia he gets at night when his thoughts drift to dying. Watching people dance to “Den” when it’s played live is a very curious experience to have, but that’s an inevitable response to it. I also found myself bobbing along to it at the Asheville show. The guitars sound joyfully picked atop a sun-soaked haystack, but the lyrics allude to Parker cycling through ways to self-destruct as he watches someone leave his life, drugs being the frontrunner. This is kind of his forte – sunny devastation. Clocking it feels like a reward for anyone who breaks the surface of his goofy-guy internet presence, and cares enough to get an honest glimpse into the messiest parts of himself.
There are older tracks on Super Rare that round out the 20-track (with interludes) listing – “Eggshellz” and “Salute (The Show)” from Splinter EP, “spider legs” from fantom, and “Tattoo.” He felt they still had a lot to say outside of the original timeline of their release. “It felt right as part of an overarching story of this music project,” he says. But for him, collectively, Super Rare doesn’t feel quite as autobiographical as his past work. There’s more of an effort to write about things in the world outside of himself this time around, even if those things are senseless. “There’s this song, ‘Dinosaur Park,’ that is about the disappearance of this woman named Susan Powell.” It’s one of the new songs he’s been playing live. “She was likely killed by her husband in Utah in 2009. It was basically a true crime story, but I don’t listen to true crime, and it messed me up. I didn’t even mean to write a song about it — it just happened.” He also highlights the song “Cut the Grass,” featuring Jessica Lea Mayfield, which is about his parents’ divorce when he was younger. "I wrote the song ‘Cut the Grass’ specifically about my dad staying at home and living with [him] through that. I love my mom, too,” he quickly clarifies. Because of how we’re sitting, eye contact between us has been somewhat infrequent. This is one of the things Parker makes sure to look at me to say. “But I lived with my dad, so I saw that side.”
As he browses the tracklist for Super Rare on his phone, he finds a track that’s the exception to the album’s outward exploration. “‘Bad Doggie’ was something [that] I feel a bit of vulnerability writing about. It sounds like a fun song, but it’s actually a vulnerable feeling. It’s taken me a long time to find a way to describe what it’s about. That’s a tune that is about not liking impulsive sides of my nature. And I feel weird about singing about that, but it’s true.” Sunny devastation.
Super Rare will be his first release on Big Machine Rock. He felt he’d done as much as he knew how to do as an independent musician. He still wasn’t too eager to commit to a label after years of being DIY which, for better or for worse, gave him full control over every detail and aspect of his art. He turned them down a few times until they hammered out a deal that made sense for him — one that let him maintain creative control. He looks at this as a chance to learn in areas where he lacked experience independently, but he also likes the people helping him with this chapter of his career. He admits it’s been nice to let them step in to take care of certain things that are a bit harder with just your own resources, even with the trade-off. “They are super helpful when it comes to affording to go on tour. We don’t have to sleep on floors every night. Right now. For the time being,” he jokes. “But also, it comes with more pressure, more work, more stress. And for me, that means sometimes more anxiety. I’m an anxious person and, you know, it’s just more pressure […] They work hard, and I need to work hard on my end. That can come down to social media stuff, which is a reality for musicians now. There’s just a lot that I try to do that they request, which makes sense because we’re working together.”
I’ve been saying for months that there’s an excitement around Parker – some electrical crackle generating and moving far beyond TikTok and Skunk and the Probably-Harmless-Just-From-A-Different-Time Sound Guy. I see it in the numbers on his music streams and video plays, as vacuous as it is to pay attention to that. They are useless for measuring worth or success, but decent at measuring reach. More tellingly, though, I see it in the way we’ve been gaining mutuals on social media. The people I know are becoming people who know him, and I don’t feel I have anything to do with that. The chance of it not being through one of his characters feels more plausible than ever. I express to Parker that I’m sure the tide will turn over time – that people will very soon start to come into his music directly and that he’ll notice. At the moment, he doesn’t seem too concerned about how people are finding entry points into his music, just so long as they walk through once they know they exist. But he makes it clear to me that he’s not completely cut off from how things are happening for him.
“There definitely is something shifting, and I don’t know what it is.”
This feels modest to me. It will feel even more modest a few days later when he announces that he’s playing the Washington, D.C. edition of All Things Go in September. He’ll be on the same lineup as Mitski, Rainbow Kitten Surprise, Magdelena Bay, Slayyyter, and Ethel Cain. It’s arguably the biggest festival he’s been tapped for as a solo artist, and the booking agents probably aren’t putting him on that lineup because he’s Skunk.
After the Atlanta show, I pick up the Conditions of Trust vinyl from Slow Funeral along with one of their shirts and hang back until there’s a break in the line of people who are meeting Parker. He hugs me when I approach him, and when we part, he tells me to drive safely. It sounds a little like a demand – like I’ll be in big trouble with him if I choose not to be safe. He knows I will be traveling up to Newport, KY, to see one last show on this stretch of his tour. This doesn’t feel like it comes from any part of his southern sensibilities, though. It feels like it comes purely from Weston.
Super Rare is due out on streaming everywhere on June 5th via Big Machine Rock
You can catch Wes open for Shakey Graves on the following dates:
Thursday, June 4 — Tulsa, OK @ Cains Ballroom
Friday, June 5 — Kansas City, MO @ The Truman
Saturday, June 6 — Rockford, IL @ Coronado Performing Arts Center
Monday, June 8 — McKees Rocks, PA @ Roxian Theatre
Wednesday, June 10 — King Of Prussia, PA @ Upper Merion Township Building Park
He has an album release show for Super Rare on Friday, June 12th @ The Camel in Richmond, Virginia.
He also plays at All Things Go on Friday, September 25, 2026 @ Merriweather Post Pavilion in Washington, D.C.
