Biography

A stark contrast of raw, radically truth-telling lyrics and dreamy electronic instrumentations, Important Trash’s self-titled debut album is a collection of songs that is altogether new, entirely female-driven, and years in the making. 

Important Trash’s Mary Parker was born and raised in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley. She began studying classical piano at the age of eight, and her passion for the instrument never waned—even after her mother forced her to stop taking lessons. Though Parker experimented with songwriting as a young adult, anxiety and pressure from family pushed her in other, safer directions. But the music floating around in her head never quite disappeared. 

Well into a decades-long, successful career in music editing for film and television (which she juggled with raising a daughter on her own), Parker picked up where she left off. She sat at the piano, just like she had as a little girl, and wrote. Her plan was to release a songwriter demo with her daughter on vocals. But as the scope of her vision grew, Parker knew her demo would be more than that. Despite her assertion that she “wasn’t a singer,” Parker took over the project and started taking voice lessons. In doing so, she realized that she was the only one who could perform these deeply personal songs. She had been writing them for herself all along. 

Parker knew she wanted her songs to feature a jarring but cohesive mix of acoustic and non-acoustic elements. She imagined frenetic, high-pitched synths on top of rich, bass guitars. She wanted a sonic landscape she hadn’t heard before. But she couldn’t describe it—she had to create it herself. Out of necessity and an unrelenting, crystal-clear vision of what she wanted to achieve, Parker self-produced her album. 

Parker’s project took on a new weight one night in 2016, when she was watching the Billboard Music Awards. The Go-Go’s were about to perform, and the host introduced them as the only all-female band who wrote their own songs and played their own instruments to ever top the Billboard charts. Something clicked for Parker, and she made a promise to herself that her project would be completely female driven. She started the hunt for a woman to mix and master her songs. She hit countless walls and was told again and again that “there just aren’t any women doing what you’re looking for.” But she kept searching, and eventually, she found her collaborator in Lindsay Marcus. Marcus, who connected with Parker’s vision from the start, helped fine-tune Parker’s sound until it was exactly how she’d been imagining it. 

The result is Important Trash, a years-long labor of love written, recorded, produced, mixed, and mastered by women. These songs are the diary pages of someone caught at the intersection of self-expression and self-destruction. Someone who’s not afraid to expose the truth—even when it’s dangerous. Someone who asks us, “What happens when a woman finally demands a life of her own?”