A little bedroom-recorded daydream inspired by time spent in Lawrenceville’s Arsenal Park.
I lived in Polish Hill during the COVID lockdown, and would walk several times a week over to Arsenal Park to sit and read and feel a bit more like a person. Arsenal isn’t one of Pittsburgh’s larger parks, but it is one of its stranger ones; its canon, powder house, and perpetually dry fountain give its acres the feeling of being populated by the ghosts of the souls that died in the 1862 Allegheny Arsenal explosion. Upon moving to Pittsburgh in 2018, swinny. (aka Sam Winward) made a habit of hanging around Arsenal Park, and taps into its dreamy feeling with “sqrl in th park,” a song that comes swaddled in a cottony DIY cocoon as it illustrates an encounter with one of Arsenal’s furry denizens. Drums lope in oblong patterns and gentle Wurlitzer dapples the track like the afternoon sunlight that Winward moves through, observed by a squirrel “pretending to be a tree.” Winward ends with a bit of encouragement for the critter: “Don’t go away, stay/U can be whoever u want to be.”
Bored In Pittsburgh 