is the first line of Park National’s debut album The Big Glad, and the first question songwriter-instrumentalist Liam Fagan asked himself during the conception of his earliest written works.

Why bare your vulnerable soul in a song when you can tread lightheartedly, translating those feelings into face-melting bursts of sparkly indie rock riffage? It’s a line that Fagan continues to straddle, balancing cryptic bits of emotional and lyrical catharsis with sticky melodic hooks and colorful guitar lines that speak for themselves. The 8-song collection of bedroom-produced emo-pop vignettes presents the purest, childlike essence of Park National: a young creator ambitiously navigating the struggles of adolescence and artistry, earnestly gracing each self-performed, hand-woven element of the work with raw personality and vision.

As the album garnered signficant online traction and over 2.5 million Spotify streams in the quarantined years following its release, Fagan continued writing music under the Park National name and began touring the East Coast and Midwest as a dynamic four-piece rock outfit playing small basement venues as well as sharing the stage with esteemed touring acts such as Oso Oso and Crime In Stereo. In late 2022, the album was followed up with a 6-song EP I’m Here And This Is Real that expanded upon the project’s vision– enlisting longtime friend Truman Sinclair of Frat Mouse as primary producer, engineer and mixer. The small collection of songs, which were brought over the finish line with additional production and engineering from producer and live band member Charlie Burket, is a deeper glimpse into Fagan’s emotional and sonic musings– drawing inspiration from fuzzy punk rock, indie folk, and everything in between.

2023 brought another national tour and a brand new single “mirror”, which was produced, mixed and mastered by Charlie Burket. The song continues down the experimental path previously explored by the EP, reframing Fagan’s knack for pop songwriting through warm acoustic guitar layers and a reflective, subdued lyrical delivery. It serves as a stark stylistic contrast to the instrumentally heavy, guitar-oriented style that characterized his debut album.

In 2024, Fagan plans to make a return to his primarily self-produced style that gave The Big Glad its signature charm, culminating everything he’s learned over his formative years as a songwriter, instrumentalist, and producer into a full-length body of work that showcases the very best of what he has to offer.