Singled Out: King Park's Clouds

King Park recently released their new single "Clouds" from their forthcoming album "Everett" and to celebrate we asked Timon Moolman to tell us about the track. Here is the story:

Our second single, "Clouds," was written during a pretty painful stretch of life. A recent gut-wrenching heartbreak had left me confused and all I had were questions.

Sooner or later, everyone gets hurt worse than they even think they can be hurt and it forces a kind of change on you. You retrace your steps. You question your own judgment. How did something so good turn so bad? Everything flips upside down, and you wonder what could come next.

When I wrote "Clouds" I felt as if my own deepest values had betrayed me. Just as my relationship crumbled, so did my assumptions about love itself. That's where the opening line comes from: "she taught me love was just a fleeting act of God." I found myself angry with a God I'd been told would protect me, and us. Because of how things ended, I started thinking that maybe love was not an endless, pure, real thing. Maybe it just came and went; maybe it was just a passing moment. Maybe that's not ultimately true, but that's where the song stemmed from.

King Park's bass player, Tyler, translated the words I'd written into music. The main guitar line-the one that opens the song and reappears throughout-was written by Tyler. Early on, I shouted the lyrics over the guitar line (I yell a lot in our songs), but that didn't last. As the song came to life in the band's rehearsal space, the lyrics, instrumentation and vocals all ebbed and flowed in intensity, as different pieces came together. Songwriting can be like collage. The bridge of "Clouds" was originally a separate thing, in a different key. But something in the lyrics seemed to fit, and so we glued the two together.

"Clouds" ended up being a lament, but one marked by paradox. The song is about how more than one thing can be true at once. Clouds get in the way-they come between-you and a source of life, in this case, God. But at the same time, clouds are full of something else that sustains life, even if things feel messy in the process. Rain brings life, yes, but it also means flooded basements, muddy boots, cancelled plans, and skidding tires. And sometimes that's all we see in dark skies: the floods, the mess, the loneliness, the swerving wheels. The song asks the question, Could the things that we think obscure our reception of good things actually be the way good things come to us?

But the song does not stop there. It also asks, with a kind of choked frustration, Do we sometimes get in our own way of receiving good? The lyrics in the second verse hint at that possibility: "And when the rain falls down, we'll stay indoors. When the floodwater falls, keep off of the floors." These are some of my favourite lines. They come at a point in the song where the intensity builds in frustration and then retreats into the echo of questions. "Clouds" was a way for me to sift through my disappointment with God but also with myself. Maybe there's more to the dark than I can see, or that I let myself see. At any rate, the song tries to hope that might be true.

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen and watch for yourself below and learn more about the album here

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