With "Playground" I always worried a bit about someone hearing it and leveling charges of kiddie porn at me, what with the parallel I draw between the way grownups have sex with each other and the way kids play at the playground. Luckily no one has ever has leveled that charge. Or possibly ever even listened. This wasn't a popular song at all. Not a top 50 in the downloads, ever. Helvetica really liked it, though, so I thought it might have been a winner. There goes her "golden ear," letting me down again, eh?

This was one of the first videos we did for the show, in the one of the first three episodes, I think. Joint Co-Producers of the tv show Ann Hammer and Clark Kent had a small beef over the editing on this one. At that time, early on, they took turns editing the videos, but Mr. Kent—control freak that he was—had his own ideas and would get miffed if her vision didn't match his exactly. Her first cut didn't have enough clips of kids playing, so he either had her re-cut it, or he went back and punched it up. Too much of that sort of thing had Ann hammer bowing out of editing and production very soon, until the show was pretty much all his. By about the fifth episode, she'd figured this tv production stuff was for the birds, I'd say. Still, she was always a sport about it, always going out of her way to help get everything else done, and ever ready with her big giant laugh, that made everything worthwhile. Just everything.

My only other association with this song was that it was difficult to play: a ton of barred chords (and on my high-action bass! Arrrgh!) in tricky patterns, plus tons of tricky words, PLUS a key change at the end. All that and not even top 50? Daft punters, as Pete Townshend would say!