At last, at last!

Every Road I Travel by Parks & Recreation

On behalf of George Recordings and everyone here at Reclinerland HQ, we want to announce that the third Parks & Recreation album, Every Road I Travel, has finally seen the light of day. As of April 1st, 2022, the album is available on all streaming platforms and digital retailers, and we couldn’t be more thrilled. The release of this album marks the end of a very long story.

In 2014 and ‘15, after many months of rehearsing a handful of new songs, Joe, Bob and I went into Sean Flora’s studio on Sauvie’s Island in Portland, OR and recorded the basic tracks for a new Parks & Recreation album. This was already about 5 years after the band had stopped touring and rehearsing together, so it was quite a reunion. We didn’t stop playing, by the way, because we were mad at each other or because we had any kind of problems—or because a sanitized “The Office” ripoff stole our band name (not bitter, just sayin’…) We recorded our second album together, and then I moved to Europe in 2009 and the boys started getting on with having children, raising families and that sort of thing. In spite of all of that, we released that second album, How To Save The World, in 2011, and we thought that was going to be our last album, until 2014, when we reunited to make Every Road I Travel.

After some lovely and super fun recording sessions, Sean Flora being a fantastic and creative engineer and a great guitar player, we vowed to finish the album by overdubbing orchestral instruments using someone’s laptop and then mixing and mastering the whole thing ourselves. But, unfortunately, string players weren’t as easy to come by as they were in the past, and frankly we couldn’t afford to hire the players we required. So time went by.

Last year, 6 years after we recorded the album, Jason Hughes gave me the idea to use other sounds besides orchestral instruments to take the place of the orchestral sounds. I explored some options, including using some harmonium plugins, but nothing stuck. I did, however, come across some cheap or free orchestral VST plugins that sounded amazing. So I learned how to make them sound passably authentic and overdubbed the orchestral parts myself. During this time, I also added improved guitar sounds, overdubbed the vocals, cleaned up the acoustic guitars, added percussion, etc., and basically finished the album. I even asked Jason Hughes to lend his guitar talents to “Juliet” and “Walk in Space,” since we’d written those two songs back in the ‘00s, when Jason was in the band. I also recruited my friend and colleague Anna Lande to sing the Holy Roller parts on “Roll On, Mighty Danube.”

Then I took the whole thing to Jarkko Heiniö, whom we had in mind to mix the album from the beginning, to do the mixing and make the orchestral sounds even better. After another year, Japi, as he’s nicknamed, finished the mixing, adding his own touches that I think make the whole thing, like free NASA sounds from the NASA online audio archives, trademark “quiet third verses” where he just dropped things out to create texture and give the songs shape.

So, for the past year, a lot of work has gone into this album. I am thrilled and excited to make it available, at last, to the public. This album is the result of a lot of time, love, and attention, and I hope it shows. We managed to squeeze in all of the recurring themes of Parks & Recreation’s oeuvre, namely, the cosmos, doomed relationships, “spirituality,” eroticism, escapism, and the dark underbelly of the suburban landscape.

All of these themes interweave into a kind of travelogue, where the efforts of some unnamed protagonist to escape his suburban roots by traveling out into the world utterly fail as things such as lost love, guilt, and box stores, continue to haunt him.

We hope you enjoy this, Parks & Recreation’s swan song, Every Road I Travel.