Del Water Gap and Arlo Parks Search for Balance on New Single ‘Quilt of Steam’

It can take months to recover from burnout, but Del Water Gap attempts to find healing and balance in just three-and-a-half minutes on his latest single “Quilt of Steam.” The record, which will appear on his forthcoming album I Miss You Already + I Haven’t Left Yet, out September 29, features Arlo Parks, who also served as a co-writer and understands the familiar feeling of internal and external exhaustion all too well.

“To me, this song is about coming off tour and feeling scrambled as hell and trying to find some balance and stillness in the midst of all that,” Del Water Gap shared in a statement. Last year, he served as support on Park’s headlining tour in support of her debut album, Collapsed in Sunbeams. During that time, they “became friends and discovered this mutual love for poetry and instrumental music…We had both been quite burned out when we first met, and when we finally caught some time off and the color started returning to our faces we spent two days with Ethan Gruska. ‘Quilt of Steam’ is what stuck.”

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Over airy production, the pair settles into the present moment. “It’s about waking up in your own bed for the first time in months and noticing the little details you hadn’t had the capacity to let in while everything was moving around you,” Del Water Gap adds. “Lying in bed for a while and watching the steam rise off the radiator. Feeling the poetry come back to your mind. It’s about finding beauty in the mundane but it’s also about the treason of not acknowledging conflict, and trying to keep stoic even when you have no idea where you’re going.”

During the same tour they completed together, Parks canceled a few North American dates because of this exact disconnect. After playing 125 shows over a year, the singer returned to London to bring herself back from what she called “a very dark place, exhausted and dangerously low,” citing mental health concerns,

“I think there was a point where I felt that I had given so much to the work that there wasn’t that much left over for me as a person,” Parks told Rolling Stone earlier this year. “Your body and your heart tells you that there’s a need for balance, and that you’ve been kind of going too far in one direction. I felt that super profoundly. And everyone in my team and around me was just super accommodating to me to take that space and just, like, go into hibernation mode and spend time with loved ones.”

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