“My Job is to Live My Art”: She Returns from War is Here for The Long Haul
Photo by: Mike Vanata | Western AF
Written by: Meredith Lawrence
To return is to come back to, to realign what came before with what comes next. For country musician Hunter Park, to return is also to become her best self, in spite of it all. On stage, Park goes by “She Returns From War,” a moniker that keeps the act of healing and becoming close to her heart, and conveys both her own struggles and triumphs over them.
“She Returns From War, it's just about a woman who has returned from ... the struggle. The struggle is real. There's a Native translation in most every language I've discovered,” Park says. “She understands herself more from those pains and those losses, she didn't let those things take away from her, which I think is just such a beautiful concept.”
Park plays a sometimes pop-tinged, sometimes folk-influenced country music, writing movingly about heartache, love, spite, and the growing pains inherent to figuring yourself out. For more than a decade Park’s been deliberately, patiently building her music career, first with visits to Nashville, and now as a full-time music city resident.
Park grew up in Charleston, North Carolina, where her grandmother, whom she lovingly calls mom, adopted her at just a few weeks old, an upbringing which rooted country music in her soul, she says. Around the house, her mother played Jimmy Buffett and The Judds, but one of Park’s most formative music experiences came from listening to, and watching, early Taylor Swift. Looking for confidence after coming out trans in high school, Park was empowered by Swift’s ownership of her story and career path.
“I was like, ‘this is performing, but on your own terms,’” Park says. “I was trying to find a confidence that I knew I was capable of, but I just didn't know how. And when I saw her writing her own songs and performing them like it was her fucking God given right, I was like, ‘I want to go to Nashville.’”
That first trip to Nashville blew Park’s dreams wide open. She stayed in a Holiday Inn with her mom, soaking in all of Nashville’s kitsch along with its deep music history, and taking vocal lessons. When they visited the Grand Ole Opry for the first time, on stage, country star Crystal Gayle (Loretta Lynn’s younger sister, known for her pop-country hits like “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” and floor-length hair) performed.
Photo by: Mike Vanata | Western AF
“I looked at my mom directly in the eye, and I was like, ‘Mom, this is what I want to do with my life,’” Park says.
Playing country music as a woman, let alone a trans woman, requires navigating an often sexist and slow to change industry. But Park’s mom consented to send her to Nashville during the summers. Sneaking into venues with a fake ID, 18-year old Park played writers rounds, and learned some hard lessons about the music industry. In the years since, she’s released her debut EP, 2014’s She Returns From War, and three full-length albums, including, 2023’s Rutheless, grinding through years touring from Charleston (and opened for acts including Band of Horses and S.G. Goodman), before finally moving to Nashville full time.
Photo by: Mike Vanata | Western AF
“Takes me a long time to do things / takes me a long time to get it right,” Park sings on “Wear in Ruff,” the second track off her upcoming album Dinner Music, to be released next spring. It’s as steadfast as it is poignant a supplication on the grit of going the distance: “Time can feel like a reaper / but we will not let him win / I don’t wanna wear out / I just wanna wear in.”
To wear in before wearing out in a music industry that often takes more than it gives is no small task. Clear eyed and self-assured, Dinner Music connects to a sense of self Park’s slowly built through her albums. 2018’s Mirrored Moon Dance Hall listens like a set of questions along the way to figuring out: “Please get me an explanation / or escape to follow breaking the bind in my reality / I’m fucked up by totality” she begs in the melancholy “Thieves,” before coming to terms with raw uncertainty later, on the album’s title track. By the end of 2023’s Ruthless, Park clears away wanting and longing with empowerment, intoning:
I wanna be ruthless
I wanna be the very last thing they see
Not something as useless as the man that you say that you wanted to be
Now the whole thing’s on fire
And the phantoms are filling up the floor
And I feel so inspired
To be the one thing that you can’t ignore
I wanna be cunning, I wanna be woman, I wanna to be ruthless
“You finally come to the conclusion that if no one is coming for you, and no one is coming to save you, what are the things that really actually matter in life? And it's love, learning compassion, learning empathy, understanding why education is important, drinking enough fucking water,” she says. “Those are the things that make people actually ruthless.”
“I don’t want to be misunderstood for other people’s comfort,” she says. “Don’t compartmentalize me in ways that you think make you feel safer. That is not my job. My job is to live my art.”
“I watched the world turn over me / for a good long time it felt a lot like sinking on an arm too tired of aiming / all these arrows I could blame them when I point them in my eye,” she sings on the new album’s final track, “Machine Like Me.” Returning is ongoing; the world can still take from Park, but she’s learned the embrace the ache, and create, anyway.
“I don't want to be misunderstood for other people's comfort,” she says. “Don't compartmentalize me in ways that you think make you feel safer. That is not my job. My job is to live my art.”
Western AF is not currently accepting feature pitches for Western Dispatch. If you simply can’t help yourself you can send it to westernafsubmissions@gmail.com but, really, we aren’t accepting pitches.