In 2252, a lone folk singer named Rags Parkland performs at the Over/Under, his friend Gill's subterranean Richmond, Virginia, club ("Apocalypse in Tennessee").

[5] The combination of science fiction and folk music, known as filk, had existed as a genre for decades although Butler noted that while he was unaware of it while writing Rags Parkland, he "never imagined that nobody had done this before".

[6] Rags Parkland was one of several off-Broadway shows produced in late 2018 to combine science fiction and folk music, others including 1969: The Second Man at New York Theatre Workshop and The Outer Space at Joe's Pub.

When Butler began writing songs for the character Beaux Weathers and the band The Future, his musical influences expanded to include the more complex arrangements of Alabama Shakes, Jason Isbell, and Fleetwood Mac.

[3] The first iteration of Rags Parkland was a solo performance written by and starring Butler, staged in 2010 as part of the annual ANT Fest program at the off-Broadway theater Ars Nova in Hell's Kitchen, New York.

[11][12][13] A remount of the show at the Irondale Center in Brooklyn, New York, with all members of the original off-Broadway cast except Tjong confirmed to reprise their roles was announced in December 2021.

[14] Performances were scheduled to run from March 22 through April 7, 2022, but the remount was postponed in January of that year until later in the 2022–23 theater season before being cancelled altogether when its funders exited the project.

[12] Zachary Stewart of TheaterMania said of the cast that the "six immensely talented musicians come together to form a really spectacular band, performing Butler's catchy original songs with love and a sense of ownership"[9] and Raven Snook in Time Out New York praised Stacey Sargeant in particular as "the show's heart and soul".

[19] The album's liner notes, by Philip Romano, were written in an in-universe style from the year 2299 with a fictional introduction presenting the tracks as recovered memory data.

[2][20] Reviewing for BroadwayWorld, David Clarke wrote favorably of Butler's and Sargeant's vocal performances and found the album's themes timely in the context of the ongoing physical distancing resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.