Tayla Parx's Happiest ‘Era' Has Just Begun

Tayla Parx's Happiest ‘Era' Has Just Begun

Tayla Parx is in her era of thriving. The singer, actress, and Grammy-nominated songwriter behind massive hits by Ariana Grande, Khalid, and Panic! at the Disco is an independent artist once again. Next month, she'll release her third album Many Moons, Many Suns, a culmination of a few years' worth of life lived to its fullest.

"Each of my projects are stories of what happened since the last album," she says over Zoom from her home in Nashville. "There was a lot to catch people up on."

Parx has technically been working on the music for this album since 2020, though at the time she didn't realize she was making her follow-up to that year's Coping Mechanisms. Parx experimented with writing and dropping new music as she felt inspired, releasing the singles "Rich," "Flowers," and "For What It's Worth" back in 2022.

This past spring, a week working in Nashville that helped solidify that these songs would make up her third full-length project, and first since she parted ways with Atlantic. "I think that me and Atlantic just both understood that I'm the type of artist who needs to be able to do things Tayla-made," she says. "Even when I was partnered with Atlantic, it was still on my own imprint. But this time I was able to say, ‘There are no red lines. Let's go back to how we used to make music. Let's go back to allowing life to happen. Let's go back to writing those songs.'"

A big reason why Parx took a few years to realize she was working towards an album was because she needed to find balance. That meant experiencing more "firsts" in her daily life so that she had real inspiration to pull from for her lyrics. "I always wanted to have the freedom to create music whenever I wanted to, but I also wanted the independence to be able to do that while living my life," she says. Outside of her own music, she still acts (most recently portraying Donna Summer in the film Spinning Gold) and writes and produces songs for other artists. "As an artist and as a songwriter, sometimes we're just studio rats, and you don't realize until it's too late that you haven't been living."

Life came at Parx fast over the last four years: She got engaged, then broke it off. She fell into lust and then fell out of that quickly. She spent a lot of her time trying to figure out what she wants out of a relationship as well as what the words "freedom" and "independence" mean in both her personal and professional life. The culmination of those lessons is an album that charts the lowest and highest points she's experienced during this time.

To invite people into this new world, Parx is launching the official album announce with new single "Era." It's a raucous, catchy, empowering, high-energy track that celebrates those high points and was appropriately written towards the end of Parx making this album.

"I'm in my era of owning everything that I am. I've been learning boundaries. I've been trying to get good sleep. I've been growing food to eat," she says of the track, which features Zimbabwean-Australian rapper Tkay Maidza. "If you listen to my lyrics, I'm telling you everything that you need to know about me and what my values are as a as a human. I'm saying that when you go through those dark times, you will finally bounce back and realize that you're OK."

Parx looks to the future with pure joy. She'll be playing more live shows, across both the U.S. and Europe. She's wondering what touring will look like for her, and that's something that she's particularly excited to broach. More than anything, she's appreciative of the time she took for herself. It made her more than capable of entering this particular creative era.

"When any artist prioritizes happiness and whatever their way of being an artist is, you get the best music out of them," she says. "And I believe that this is some of the best music I've ever created."

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