Woody Thomas of The Brooklyn indie alt-folk project offers a track-by-track breakdown of the debut album—from relationship ups and downs to recording in his mom’s basement and the role SoundCloud rap played in shaping the band’s sound
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I first came upon Parks Department last year, when I was juggling my secret 9-5 as a copywriter at a tech/consulting company (soul-sucking but well-paying) while using every single second I could to pursue the music work I *actually* cared about that wasn’t really paying me *actual* money.
After all, as we all know, a difference between the labor that pays the bills and the work that fulfills. And as you get older… with more responsibilities and less time… bills growing and clocks ticking… you have to stay vigilant to ensure that the creativity isn’t crowded out; you have to fight for the artistic life.
In their art and their existence, indie alt-folk band Parks Department stands for that battle. It’s an active decision to define oneself on one’s own terms; to pursue passion in the face of pressure; to refuse to succumb to expectations or equate equate personhood with the name on a pay stub. To make the time and claim the space to follow your heart and do what you love.
So: Parks Department. If the name piqued your interest, that’s exactly where the story starts. The project is helmed by Woody Thomas, a one-time NYC Park employee, who started it back in 2020. As an essential worker, he was clocking in for 10-hour days, so when it came to building a band, he recruited the people he saw the most: his coworkers. And named the project accordingly.
In the following years, Parks Department evolved from the original rag-tag group of rangers to a crew of musicians and friends Woody met and made along the way. (They now play as an 8-piece band.) However the debut album —which dropped last week!—was informed by that initial period, when Woody was experiencing a feeling I (and probably you) can definnitely relate to: the futility and frustration of doing work that feels meaningless.
For me, that was crafting messaging to sell tech services I didn’t understand or care about. For Woody, it was being forced to show up every day just to patrol an empty park. In both cases, it’s a depressing what’s-the-point feeling and the sickening claustrophobia of clocking-in to work and missing out on life.
“I am not my job,” Woody told me (amen). “We should be fighting against this monolithic identity culture and defining ourselves by what we care about… our relationships and our interests.”
To that point, Parks Department describes themselves as pro-work but anti-job, and their album is a product of the work that really matters: a collection of songs rooted in friendship and freedom; a response to the questions and crises that accompany growing up (from work to relationships); a rally cry for art and community and a stubborn refusal to give up on the dream.
Whether it be making music, or… I don’t know… writing/yelling about it.
To accompany the album’s release, Woody provided a deep-dive into the album’s 10 songs—a breakdown featuring (along with excellent use of the word bildungsroman) insights on relationship ups and downs, recording in his mom’s basement and the role SoundCloud rap played in shaping the band’s sound.
Parks Department—TRACK BY TRACK:
1. “Switchback“
“In many ways, this record is an ode to the mid 20s through early 30s and all that comes with it: romantic relationships, friendships, job stresses, teenage dreams, all that bildungsroman stuff. ‘Switchback’ is a clearcut relationship song. When my girlfriend and I met over 6 years ago now, we agreed to date for 2 years max because she really wanted kids and I didn’t. We then broke up (just shy of 2 years) and tried to date people more aligned with our respective lifestyles. We failed to convincingly do so, missed each other, and ended up getting back together. (Talk to me IRL if you wanna talk about navigating that kid convo.)
Musically speaking, save for the piano, Dalton (the band’s drummer, multi-instrumentalist, co-producer, and mixer) and I recorded everything in my mom’s basement in CT (thanks mom). The dynamics and feel Dalton brought to this really brought the song to life .
2. “Towel “
“This one’s about feeling your artistic teenage dreams begin to buckle in the face of adulthood. It’s also a tribute to the kind of friendship that can come from making art together, regardless of any measurable success. Lyrics like ‘tell your dad back at home, the band’s doing well, some kids at the show said we should be signed‘ are big shoutouts to my good friend Adam, who does all the art for the band. Adam and I grew up together and started making little movies and songs in elementary school. We spent our 20s trying out different styles of music and art, including working on a synth-pop/trap group called Snack Shack Boyz and venturing briefly into SoundCloud rap. All of that playful experimenting is what eventually led to Parks Department, though, and this song is an ode to continuing that creative pursuit with your friends — even if your family might scratch their head at it.
My favorite lyric is ‘I spent a decade punching in, trying to forget the dream, workin’ to make ends meet, but when you sing I still feel something.’ I tried to make jobs — their draconian schedules and our adherence to them — a subtle but pervasive character throughout the record. Things obviously need to get done and people need to work, but so many jobs require workers to sacrifice their entire identity and wellbeing for inefficient scheduling and vanity metrics. A lot of this record alludes to these outdated aspects of work unnecessarily infringing on our personal and creative lives.
It’s also one of two songs on the record that was recorded while it was being written — again, in my mom’s house in CT. That’s why it has a drum machine. My friend PJ, whom I grew up playing music with, tracked some real bass over it, and Dalton then recorded live drums, bass, guitars, and his backup vocals in Brooklyn. Our buddy Cam (who has a great band Survey Monkey) recorded some backup vocals too at his apartment. Live, this song has taken on a new life of its own now that we have a full, fixed band.”
3. “Boston”
“A song about a hometown friend of mine who had moved to Boston after grad school and was going through that early-adulthood ennui. This was one of the first songs I wrote within the style that became Parks Department — kind of folky, conversational lyrics that fit my singing voice. It took a longtime for me to write songs that I could sing convincingly and this was one of the first. At early live shows I used to throw these little novelty Park Ranger badges I’d get at work to audience members who could name a town/city referenced in the song — my favorite is the Berkshires shoutout.
In the earliest years of the band, Michael (our keyboardist and OG member), Adam, and I would meet weekly at this phenomenal studio I rented through a friend in Ditmas Park. It’s where we workshopped most of the songs and tracked a lot of the demos, before getting a full band together. On an early, much faster demo, Michael recorded this great Wurlitzer part in that studio. Like a lot of the record, we tried many different versions to get to this one, and we ended up slowing it down significantly. We re-tracked everything except for the Wurlitzer, which we were able to slow down to the new tempo, resulting in this kinda cool, warbly sound. The final version was, again, recorded mostly at my mom’s house in CT on a weekend Dalt and I went up to track.
Also big shoutout to our friends Anna and Zach from Starr Anise who sing harmonies throughout this.
I should also mention that when the band started, it was composed of nearly all co-workers of mine from NYC Parks — hence our band name — but by the time we started recording the album, only one Parks member was left: my good friend Constantine, who plays trumpet on this track.”
4. “Money tree“
“Some people (including members of the band) thought this was a breakup song. It’s actually one of the only classic ‘love’ songs on the record, which I guess says something about my writing?
It was written about a year into dating my girlfriend, after I started semi-living at her apartment. She went to visit her brother in LA for a week, and I couldn’t go because I couldn’t get the time off from work. I remember calling out sick one day that week and nothing happened, no one even noticed. I was so pissed, like, ‘why the hell couldn’t I have just taken these days off? I don’t really matter.’ So, that’s the story behind the lyric, ‘find a good reason to call out sick again, no one notices.‘ The song’s primarily about being upended in a partner’s absence after starting to build a life together and realizing just how much your lives have started to intertwine. Sadly, the lyric ‘I boil tea because I couldn’t sleep then slipped and cracked the mug to pieces in the sink,‘ is true. I cracked my girlfriend’s childhood mug into pieces when she was gone, and had to makeshift Kintsugi it back.
Out of all the songs on the album, this one probably took the most versions to get right. It was really tricky finding the right drumbeat and arrangement for my vocals to cut through properly. Eventually — once again — Dalton figured the drums out in my mom’s basement. Huge credit goes to Ryan Kershaw (who saw potential in the earliest rag-tag iterations of the band and came on as a producer) for writing and playing the lead riff, without which the song wouldn’t be what it is.”
5. “Ma Chérie”
“’Every night I’m in your bed, but am I in your dreams?‘ — this lyric pretty much sums up the song. A fairly sexy song about the inevitable decline of sexiness in longterm relationships.
Along with ‘Towel,’ this is the other song that was written as it was being recorded, which, again, is why it has a drum machine — and synths, courtesy of my Roland JX-3P. Dalton then tracked live drums and bass over my demo, and our friend Nicole from OK Cuddle tracked some great spacey, almost eerie electric guitar textures. PJ tracked some upright piano at his apartment in Ridgewood, and our friend Zach played some sax on it, and our friend Fia sang backup vocals.
Also similarly to ‘Towel,’ this song has taken on a whole new life of its own live with the full band. We plan to re-record it live someday, along with ‘Towel.’ “
6. “Soot“
“This is the only breakup song on the record — written during the previously-mentioned break that my girlfriend and I had. However, most of it was recorded after we had gotten back together. To still get into an emotional place when tracking vocals, I started to view the song as being less about the loss of a partner and more about the loss of youth and the specific creative life I had imagined for myself.
This one also took a lot of experimenting to get right. Different iterations of the band tried different things, and we piecemealed a bunch of various ideas together in the end, though Michael’s piano was always the bedrock of the song. One of the most production-heavy tracks on the record, featuring singing bowls, plucked violin, organs, space echo, tons of layers of feedback guitars, handpan, many layers of drums and plenty of miscellaneous other stuff. Big appreciation to our friends Cob, Cam, Zach and Anna on the ending gang vox.”
7. “Plastic Sheets“
“A series of vignettes, largely about feeling aimless and spiritually crushed in the city. The chorus line, ‘I spent years of my life losing you,’ is about losing the inflated, idealized version of your life, not a person. This song also has a (personal, albeit somewhat cryptic) reference to the dangers of weed-induced psychosis. A very real, very scary thing! Parks Department is more of a booze band than a weed band for this reason, though we support people doing whatever their substance of choice is —as long as it’s done safely of course.
We tried drums on this song a few times but never got anything to stick, and ended up using a lot of tracks from the original demo we made back in the Ditmas Park studio. This is the other song — along with Boston— that features Michael playing that studio’s Wurlitzer. Ryan played some great electric guitar, and our buddy Dave Morgan sang backups. Dave is one of the most innately talented singers I’ve ever met and we had a very short-lived band when I first moved to the city 12 years ago that I thought for sure would ‘make it.’ I used to wakeup at 5am and commute to work at Randall’s Island for this awful, first-responder bootcamp (part of being a Park Ranger), get yelled at all day by ex-military-turned-parks-enforcement guys, and then listen to the songs that Dave and I recorded, thinking to myself, ‘I’m gonna be outta this job so fucking soon.” Cut to 8 years later, still working that job, calling Dave to sing backups on some new demo I made. That basically sums up what this song is about. Also, we’re a big anti-micro plastic band, and this song is obviously about the horrors of plastic sheets – don’t get ‘em!”
8. “Sunday“
“Before Parks Department, I was fixated on the idea of starting a band with a really good singer (see above: Dave). I had started countless bands and projects, hoping to find the ‘right’ singer and crew, but none of them ever fully panned out. This song is about the dynamic I had with another phenomenally talented singer I had met
— we hit it off, and the energy was really exciting both creatively and relationally. We met just before the pandemic, which complicated things, and we were both figuring life out. This song explores the issues that can arise when people are projecting their own respective desires onto a shared project.
Occasionally one of the demos we made comes on my iTunes and I’m like, ‘holy shit, I can’t believe how good she is.’ Just one of those rare singers whose innate timbre hits.
She moved back to LA and we never ended up finishing any of the songs sadly. That being said, the fact that you can randomly meet someone so talented who ignites something in you continues to inspire me. A core belief (addiction?) of mine is that you never know when you may meet someone who’ll lead you to making the best art of your creative life.
This song features Spencer Inch on drums — a great session player whom Ryan got to record on the record before Dalton joined the band. Also big credit to Robin Buyer for engineering and tracking bass, and Ryan for laying down a lot of beautiful guitar parts. Very much in line lyrically with the song, I also had another great singer
— Birk from Norway — sing some harmonies at one section in the end of the song.”
9. “Ossining”
“It felt appropriate to put this song at the end of the record, as it’s another song referencing failed creative pursuits — but this time, from a fun perspective! It almost feels like a sister-song to ‘Towel.’ It’s an ode to my good friend and former bandmate Mateus, who moved up to Ossining with his now-wife after years in the city. I met Mateus through a random Craigslist jam (dating myself here) right when I moved to New York, and we became fast friends, bandmates and eventual roommates. I wouldn’t have made it through those first few years in the city without him. We spent nearly every night writing songs, going to shows, and auditioning singer after singer for our idealized band. Needless to say, that band didn’t last; we did write some fun songs and play some great shows, though.
After Mateus moved to Ossining, I’d occasionally take the Metro North up to visit and spend these nice, relaxing afternoons going on little hikes, walking around this idyllic river town. When we lived together in Brooklyn we were always like, ‘damn man, I can’t wait to get back to nature!’ And then he did! I couldn’t believe how nice it was. It was like seeing a glimpse into another life — one that I’m increasingly tempted by. As I say in the song, ‘do you think it would’ve been different if we practiced like vocalists? But waking up to the Hudson, who gives a shit?” This is the only expletive on the record — otherwise we’re a pretty family-friendly band. Our apologies.
I had a demo of this song that was originally a little sadder, with midi-synths. I wasn’t planning on putting it on the record, but then Dalton heard it and was like, ‘man we gotta do this one!’ Dalton added a lot of life to it, and we recorded it — surprise, surprise — in my mom’s basement in CT. We tracked the main guitar and drums live, no click, and were having so much fun with this kind-of silly song. I had my old recorder from elementary school in the basement and Dalton picked it up, joking around, and it was miraculously in the same key as the song. I recorded him doing these little recorder solos and he hit some magic – you can hear it come in at 2:33. One of those fun, spontaneous recording moments.
Shout out to Zach who did some great lead guitar. The gang vocals were done by Zach, Anna, and Dalton, and then Cob and Julia from Provider (another band Dalt and I play in).”
10. “Mundanity”
“This song feels like the proverbial bow at the end of the album. It’s a song about appreciating the mundanity of life. In many ways, to have mundanity is to have security, stability, a lot of things that are pretty hard to get and pretty damn nice, especially in an increasingly chaotic world. Coming right after ‘Ossining,’ it feels like, ‘ok we didn’t get the rock’n’roll dream, but we got a pretty nice life – this is good!’ I also like that ‘Ossining’ ends with ‘Now we’re working weekends, taking life one day at time’ and then ‘Mundanity’ starts with ‘walking to yours, after my shift, late to the party.’ When I first met my girlfriend, I had to work Saturdays until 8pm and I’d always miss or be late to shit. Annoying, but totally manageable and not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. It’s essentially a gratitude song to my girlfriend and the little things, as saccharine as it is to say. Also shoutout to Williamstown — the second Western Mass reference in the album.
From a production standpoint, it’s one of the few songs that came together pretty quickly. Ryan did a great job producing this track; laying down some nice electric guitars, and finding a drum part that Spencer executed perfectly, to which Robin then laid down a nice subtle bass take. I also really like these warbly electric guitar textures that Adam and I recorded at the Ditmas Park studio, using an old Silvertone guitar hot through a DI and some distortion plugins.”
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At long last, I got laid off from my day job back in the fall. Now, with a lot of help and a lot of luck, I’m working to transform the work that fulfills into the jobs that *almost* pay the bills. (Following your passion is a process, baby!)
Meanwhile, Woody has released one hell of an album that I believe in a whole lot. With themes that, clearly, I feel like most of us can really relate to.
Whatever it is you do for money, it’s a beautiful day to play some hooky—
Parks Department is out now. And it’ll serve as the perfect soundtrack.
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Follow the band at @parksdeptband, buy music on Bandcamp and add songs to your Spotify playlists!
Feature image provided by the band.