Penny Park is the girl that every prepubescent tweeny bopper and every defiant teenage guy can’t push out of his forming brain.
Peony Park is a deceased amusement park, a hangout spot on Cass Street in Omaha for teenagers of the ‘80s.
The girl and the amusement park represent one similar motif for Matt Whipkey, Penny's creator: They remind him of summer. The season of romance, baseball and cicadas sparked his conceptualization for album, Penny Park.
photo by Justin Limoges
“The songs are written about (Penny’s) summer admirers over the course of a summer,” Matt Whipkey says of his new album centered on the history of the park and the make-believe existence of the girl.
“She’s one of those people that every guy is crazy about. She’s very elusive and out of reach to the gentlemen that are singing the songs. It’s a story of summer from beginning to end and all of the stories take place in the amusement park, Peony Park.”
Whipkey says the album is relatable because he thinks everyone has a “Penny” and, for him, his Penny is an accumulation of a lot of different people.
“Men that are young and in high school pine over somebody pretty much all of the time,” Whipkey says. “Some of us never grow out of it.”
But the album is more than a collection of crushes. Whipkey has conducted research on the amusement park. Being a child in the roaring days of the park, the majority of his personal memories are from the perspective of a 8-year-old NASCAR racer sporting a red, numbered vehicle with bumpers surrounding the circumference. But the park was more than a bumper car haven for the teenagers experiencing the park before its destruction in 1994.
“As a young kid, I enjoyed the rides, but through my research, for the kids that were older, if you were a teenager in the '80s, it was the place to go,” Whipkey says. “Bands like The Beastie Boys, Metallica and The Replacements played there. It was this big outdoor space that probably held about 1,000 people.”
After hearing testimonies from people who saw such bands at Peony Park, Whipkey became intrigued.
“I was just a little kid on the bumper cars. I would have no clue that Metallica was playing the next night,” he says.
The album Penny Park is a double vinyl concept piece, an ambitious project for an artist whose last record, Two Truths, came out less than a year ago in May 2012.
“It’s the most work I’ve ever put into something,” Whipkey says. “And I’ve had a lot of albums out over the years. … Within a full year, we will have released one full-length album and one double album."
Some of the songs on Penny Park are resurrected songs Whipkey wrote years ago and has found a place in the pop-rock style in the current project.
“We just reworked some of the lyrics and made them fit the scene,” he says.
The scene that Whipkey mentions is a scene of summer, concerts and rides. The album is upbeat, bright, has lots of melodies, keyboard hooks and, at times, is laid-back and spacey. These techniques make the double album sound like summer, Whipkey says.
“This record’s kind of a combination of a lot of stuff,” he says. “Some of it is stuff I did on my own, some if it is stuff I did with the whole band. It’s a wide variety of sounds, from electronic to some acoustic to jazzy things.”
One song, “La Fiesta Italiana,” is a song about hitting on main character, Penny.
“It’s to remember some of those formative years,” Whipkey says. “When people get to be in their 30s, it’s easy to stray from some of those feelings and emotions you had when you’re 17 years old. I hope the album takes people back to some of those thoughts. Music has the ability to do that for people.”
Join Whipkey and Co. on June 22nd at the Waiting Room for the release show of Penny Park.
Ingrid Holmquist is a Hear Nebraska intern. She’s afraid of roller coasters, but is a big bumper car fan. Reach Ingrid at ingridh@hearnebraska.org.