Sleep In The Park

Album: Old Sea Brigade (2016)
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Songfacts®:

  • New York City is where extravagant wealth and crippling penury intermingle, often in Central Park. Old Sea Brigade (Ben Cramer) wrote this song when he was living in the city after moving there from Athens, Georgia. When he was a guest on the Songfacts Podcast, he explained: "The chorus came from trying to draw a comparison of being in Central Park, surrounded by all of these wealthy apartments, and then looking around and seeing a lot of homeless people and such diversity within the park itself. I was living in Brooklyn at the time, but I used to go to Central Park to hang out or go for runs, and it just seemed like this captivating place."

    "'Sleep In The Park' is about the narrative of it being such a melting pot of everyone in Central Park, and the fact that although everyone is in here, not everyone has a warm place to go when they leave the park," he continued. "It's about those black-and-white alternate lives you see all around New York City, and this idea definitely inspired this song.

    A lot of my songs are centered around heartbreak and falling in and out of love. The different phases of going through a relationship are all prevalent in a lot of my music, and that is such a big inspiration to creating art and healing while going through different phases of life. There's definitely an aspect to that in 'Sleep In The Park.'"
  • Old Sea Brigade (the name of his band in high school that he used as his solo performing moniker) wrote this song in 2010 but didn't record it until 2015, when he got together with producer Jeremy Griffith. It was released on his self-titled debut EP in 2016.

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