Parker Gispert Listened to His Teenage Self for Sunlight Tonight

Reverting to your teenage self isn’t always the best idea. Bad decisions tend to abound in one’s adolescent years, and it’s a pretty safe bet there aren’t many of us who would trust our 17-year-old selves for advice of any kind. But for Parker Gispert, who co-founded the much-loved indie band The Whigs when he was a freshman at the University of Georgia in 2002, his teenage voice was exactly what he needed. 

On Friday, Gispert will release his first solo album, Sunlight Tonight. The eight-song collection finds Gispert trading in his electric guitar for an acoustic and exploring gentler, more nimble territory with his singing voice, making for an album sure to surprise longtime fans of The Whigs’ Southern-tinged garage rock. Where his work with The Whigs belongs squarely in cramped rock clubs, his new solo collection sounds like a long, slow walk through a sun-drenched expanse of countryside.

“I’d been playing in The Whigs since I was a teenager, so I’d been doing it so long that I sort of wrote rock songs by default,” Gispert tells the Scene. “The first step was taking a minute to think about what I wanted the end result to be. I decided I just wanted it to be something that wasn’t really comparable to the band. I wanted it to be stylistically and intrinsically different than the band.”

Part of Gispert’s stylistic exploration involved experimenting with his singing voice, which he’d honed for rock ’n’ roll during his years with The Whigs. Freed from the constraints of a loud rock band, Gispert began tinkering with his upper register, something he’d wanted to do for a long time.

“In a weird way, I reverted to this teenager version of myself,” he says. “I was singing a lot of falsetto then. In the rock band, I can’t really sing in those registers because it’s hard to get it over the bass and the drums that are onstage, and I can’t really hear myself when I’m doing it. My voice has been in the shape that I’ve been able to sing like that for a good while, going back all the way to high school, but I didn’t really have a forum for it. So it wasn’t so much of a stretch. It was honestly a little more comfortable not having to compete with other things, just being able to really use my voice on its own.”

Gispert also found creative liberation in his surroundings. To write Sunlight Tonight, he decamped to a friend’s farm outside Nashville in late 2016, living in a home with no internet, central air conditioning or television. He spent much of his free time wandering the surrounding property, often writing verses and melodies as he went. It was a move he could easily make, because as he explains it, the band found itself at a natural break after releasing its Live in Little Five album in 2016, at which point drummer Julian Dorio and bassist Timothy Deaux pursued other projects.

“When we wrapped up that Whigs tour, it occurred to me that if I wanted to keep touring or make a new studio record that I was going to need to do it solo,” Gispert says. “[The farm] just took me back to a simpler headspace, and kind of put me in touch with myself on a more primitive level, I think. Without a band to collaborate with, I’d say that in a weird way, probably my main collaborator was just the piece of property I was living on.”

Sunlight Tonight has a pastoral feel, with big, sweeping arrangements anchored by Gispert’s guitar and voice and made grand by cinematic strings, brass and even harp. Opening track “Through the Canvas” slowly builds from hypnotic figures on acoustic guitar and strings in its verses to a percussive, glistening chorus. (The guitar keeps the beat — Gispert consciously left drums off all but three of the album’s tracks.) Standout “Life In the Goldilocks Zone” opens with ethereal harp before yielding to Gispert’s pristine falsetto. Gispert wrote the songs as acoustic demos, and he credits producer Emery Dobyns (whose background includes recent work with Patti Smith and Jamie Lidell, among others) with fleshing out the album’s sound.

“He really got it right from the get-go, sort of what I was thinking in my head,” Gispert says of Dobyns. “I could tell that he knew what I was after, and he really shaped the album in the studio, production-wise, and often arrangement-wise as well.”

Guests on Sunlight Tonight include Sol Seppy, a musician many know from her collaborations with Sparklehorse, and The Black Keys’ Patrick Carney, both of whom Gispert says he’s admired for much of his career. Working with them, as Gispert explains it, thrilled the “music and record nerd” in him — not unlike the experience of finally exploring his early musical yearnings after years of working with a band where they didn’t necessarily fit. 

Reflecting on making the album, Gispert seems content to have completed such a project at this point in his life, and he’s pleased with how Sunlight Tonight fits into his broader oeuvre. 

“I wanted it to hit people’s ears differently right out of the gate,” he says. “It happened at the right time.”