By Jo Gale
Songs about young love. Picturesque, nature-themed metaphors. Groovy campfire sing-along guitar lines. Dreamy, angelic harmonies. Nobody does it quite like The National Parks.
The group’s debut album, Young, is certainly no exception. There’s a reason it quickly climbed the iTunes singer/songwriter charts to number 13 after its release back in 2013. If you’re a lover of nature and indie folk music, or if you’ve ever experienced love and loss, Young is for you.
The National Parks have always held a sound that just feels like Utah, and their local roots play a big part in that. At the time of Young’s release, the band consisted of Brady Parks, Sydney Macfarlane, and Paige Wagner. They had successfully completed a Kickstarter campaign to get the funding they needed to record their first album. Young was then recorded here in Provo, with June Audio’s Scott Wiley. The rest, as they say, is history.
The album doesn’t start locally, however. “Helsinki” tells of a lover moving away to Finland and the feeling of longing the person left behind has, yearning to follow her there. Orchestra style strings and percussion make the song feel larger than life and cinematic, allowing the listener to travel to Europe, too.
The record continues its theme of loss and love over the next couple of tracks. “Bird’s Eye” slows things down with a gentle piano melody, joined by strong harmonies from Parks and Macfarlane. The steady rhythm guitar perfectly complements the beautiful, melancholy metaphor of a loved one moving on and watching over you in the form of the moon. (Does that sound like a certain water tribe princess to anyone else?) “Ghosts” lightens things up a bit, finally allowing the person left behind to rest their soul and be rid of the ghosts of their past.
The rest of the album brings listeners on a scenic nature tour. Twinkly chimes and violin bring you high up in the air for a ride in “Hot Air Balloon.” “Young,” the album’s namesake, allows you to take a trip back in time to summer when you were young, carving the name of your first love next to yours on the bark of a tree and riding away on your bikes. The track’s poppy beat and dragged-out melodies make it much more danceable in comparison to the rest of the album.
The acapella intro to “The Meadow” hits you with a wall of sound, dragging you to a field of flowers in the middle of a green forest — a metaphor that continues in “A Tree in Tennessee.” The age-old question is posed: Does a falling tree still make a sound if no one is there to hear it? The National Parks really lean into their namesake and utilize every possible nature themed simile and metaphor out there, and rightfully so. It works.
My favorite track on the album without a question is the closing song, “Wind & Anchor.” Macfarlane’s gentle voice is joined by a crowd of others in the last thirty seconds of the song, and the instruments fade out to make the album feel like it’s ending not in a recording studio, but with a group of friends around the bright orange flames of a campfire. “Wind & Anchor” was actually the first song of theirs I ever heard. I stumbled upon it while living in New York City and was pretty homesick at the time, but the song’s steady piano and stomp-along-able beat brought a little bit of the mountains of Utah to me while staying on the East coast.
I think that’s really the magic of The National Parks. They sound like home. Their sound is simple, catchy, and raw. They don’t add too much instrumentation or mess with any gimmicks that could potentially hide their natural energy, allowing them to create a sound that is both unique and beautiful. Though Young has since been followed by many great The National Parks albums, it’s easy to see how the world quickly fell in love with the indie folk band right from the start over a decade ago.
Be sure to follow The National Parks on Instagram! Listen to “Wind & Anchor” below.