Playground by Alison Sudol

Album: Still Come The Night (2022)

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Songfacts®:

Although many of the songs on Still Come The Night explore the grief she endured after a miscarriage, Alison Sudol didn't want to make a depressing album "that would pull you into a murky space." To contrast the heartache songs like the title track, she also wrote tunes like the joyful "Playground," which was inspired by her own love story.

"'Playground' reminded me of falling in love with my partner and wanting to move my body and celebrate that and not forget that, even though we'd gone through something so painful together," she explained in a 2022 Songfacts interview. "It's a really light song."
Sudol also told Songfacts that she initially struggled with the vocals and an experiment in the studio led to surprising results. "The vocals are really ropey," she said. "I wrote the song pretty much as we were coming up with the whole thing. The lyrics came as well. I listened to the music as we were getting ready to leave the studio, and the vocals sounded so annoying. I thought I was going to hate the song listening back. So just to temporarily do it, I said, 'I'm going to sing down two things right on top of each other and I'm gonna sing them like s--t, but playfully.' And instead of trying to sing it, it sounded like it needed to be talked. And we kept them. And it's amazing what you can cover up when you put new vocals on top of each other, because they are ropey."
Sudol, who wrote this with the London-based producer Chris Hyson, explained how the song came together with her backing band (Welsh brothers Alex and Lloyd Haines on guitar and drums, with Alex Killpatrick as sound engineer) in the studio: "We wanted to make something that we could dance to so we were trying out grooves and testing them out to see what would make us move. We added the guitar counter melodies through a Leslie Cab at Livingstone Studios in London a few months later which brought another layer of color and texture that the song was calling for. In that same session we added percussion which we all played in the room together, some of us stopping and starting at different times in the song, following the arrangement."
This is the first album Sudol released under her own name. She previously released music under the stage name A Fine Frenzy, including the popular track "Almost Lover."
This was the album's third single, following "Peaches" and "Meteor Shower."

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