Features Overview

ABOUT PARKER AINSWORTH

Parker Ainsworth is a songwriter, storyteller, and somatic practitioner whose music currently sits at the intersection of folk, country, and 21st-century storytelling.

Growing up in Austin, Texas, where the songwriter tradition runs deep, he later followed his heart west to Los Angeles, where a decade of touring the California coast, living on a sailboat in the marina, and exploring the world helped him to find his literary voice. During this time, he traveled across India for 7 months with only a guitar and backpack, later working on a polar expeditionary cruise ship that took him to both the Arctic and Antarctica. He covered some ground, playing on stages and intimate spaces alongside notable greats ranging from David Rawlings and Damien Rice to Jason Mraz and Willie Nelson.

Then, in 2019, he had the opportunity to pen the end song for the indie film The Peanut Butter Falcon. "Running for So Long" is what emerged. Written in an afternoon, with the film’s directors in the room, it was recorded two days later with Butch Walker, featuring harmonies by Paris Jackson and Jessie Payo. In the wake of the film’s success, opportunities came knocking, followed by what Parker now refers to as his initiation. Starting with the reality of a bad contract, a global pandemic, and the end of a seven-year relationship with his then fiancée, Parker found himself renovating a cabin with practically zero knowledge of construction, all while shedding layer after layer of identity in the vastness of the Mojave Desert. Things got darker than dark, and though the physical labor was demanding, the harder work of rebuilding himself from the ground up was a gift in the truest sense of the word, as it offered Parker a refined sense of purpose and direction through modalities ranging from psychedelic to somatic.

Now based in Joshua Tree, California, Parker has spent the last five years deepening his practice as a Somatic Experiencing practitioner, breathwork coach, men's work facilitator, and storyteller while writing the most fully realized music of his career to date. With his 2025 release, Wearing No Clothes, he chose to lay things bare in one-take recordings, no edits, and just his voice and guitar, making a celebration of mortal vulnerability in an age of artificial everything. Now with a forthcoming full-length Cactus Heart on the horizon, Parker is exploring a more produced, textured, and exploratory approach to what Country, Western, and Folk music actually mean in the 21st century.

Parker Ainsworth's music blends the tenderness of a confession with the grit of a story overheard at a roadside bus stop. His work offers listeners a roadmap back to themselves, via the winding paths that a human life contains. A lifelong student, Parker often prefers to cite those whose work he has drawn from. When asked what he hopes his music can accomplish, Parker often points to Ram Dass’s words, in the end, we are all just walking each other home.

PRESS

https://nodepression.org/running-for-so-long-house-a-home-from-the-peanut-butter-falcon-soundtrack/

https://americanahighways.org/2020/12/18/song-premiere-parker-ainsworth-only-love/

https://buzzbands.la/2020/12/23/stream-parker-ainsworth-only-love/

https://canvasrebel.com/meet-parker-ainsworth/