The Soundtrack

Amy Marquis, former associate editor for this very magazine, was working on a short film that would launch a series dubbed the National Park Experience, when she stumbled upon the work of a band called, yes, that’s right—The National Parks. She reached out to Brady Parks and his bandmates (all students at Brigham Young University in Utah), to see if they would write and produce a song to accompany “Love in the Tetons.” The result is “As We Ran,” a catchy folk-rock song that conjures visions of a road trip—the perfect accompaniment to the story of a Latina couple who fell in love with the Tetons and tied the knot there.

“As a kid, I remember going to the Grand Canyon and Rocky Mountain National Parks—growing up my family just loved camping, whether in a national park or another wilderness area,” says Parks. “So when the National Park Experience first approached us, we were thrilled with the idea of attaching our music to the national parks in some way. Our recording costs were already covered, so we decided to donate all the proceeds from the first month’s sales to NPCA.”

Audiences have responded to the film and the music. “Love in the Tetons” has played in film festivals in Yosemite National Park in California, and Telluride, Colorado; the film is also scheduled to screen at Banff’s film festival in Canada and dozens more sites in the United States as part of a traveling festival called Mountainfilm. (Find out when it hits your town at https://www.mountainfilm.org/tour/schedule/). “As We Ran” racked up more than 750 downloads in the month it was released, generating hundreds of dollars for NPCA in the process. The National Parks are now touring in Arizona, California, Idaho, and Utah, and making plans to record their second album in the fall. Learn more at thenationalparksband.com, and download the music on iTunes.