An Interview With Green Gardens

Green Gardens are easily among the most emotively rendering bands in Leeds – and far beyond – capturing grief, longing, and the joyous gaps between melancholy with their folk-inflected indie. As discussed below, the quintet released a double single to join the dots between their last album, ‘Thistlesifting’, and their next one. Alongside the release of ‘Greeting’ and ‘I Am Kind’, we also discussed lyrics, songwriting, and their new lineup. 

How are the singles connected to ‘Thistlesifting’? 

We wanted to bridge the gap between that record and the next one. As an experiment, we did it in two days in the studio – we almost didn’t have time to plan it, we just went in and built around the demos we’d brought. Naturally, there’s a through-line. We tend to record the songs that we write in order, so you could probably plot back how I’ve been feeling since 2019. The main thing was having something that felt separate from ‘Thistlesifting’. The new albums written. This single is thematically closer to the next record than the last; trying to find light in the darkness. 

How did the instrumentation around the ‘I Am Kind’ recording of your mum’s voice develop? 

I didn’t feel like I needed to tell everyone what she was saying. When you see speech as music, once you hear that for the first time, then it suddenly doesn’t have to be words. There’s a David Bowie quote, about not needing to listen to the words to get the feeling – the melody should be able to do it – which is a big part of that sample. With the mantra, it was simple, and it can get lost in the sea of that song. 

I was really struggling after some things that happened over the past couple of years, trying to be calm and simple and remember, as long as you’re doing your best, being kind to people; as long as trying to be kind is there, that’s what I need to push myself forward, to live. 

Was it a difficult decision to use that recording, with it being so personal? 

I'd had it in a demo for a while, so I'd gotten used to it. We were a couple of weeks out from releasing it and I hadn't actually told my mum about it, so I was worried she'd be pissed off, but she was okay – I think she was quite flattered. I'm really glad it happened, because I sometimes chuck things in with demos that are a bit ambitious but won't make it to the final track. 

Is this the first release to properly feature Megan Lama, and was there a point where you realised the effect her keys could have on your music? 

Meg’s sings on ‘Thistlesifting’, but this is the first time she’s been fully part of the band. A big part of it was how much we threw at ‘Thistlesifting’. It's hard to recreate that record in the room because there's at least 30 or 40 tracks on each song, so there's at least three or four guitar parts. A lot of the compromise we struck when we were touring that record was rearranging it for live; we didn't want just another guitarist. There's a bit more we can do with Meg’s keys and voice.

Rearranging that live was a revelation of how great she made everything sound. That's something we carried into these singles, and the next record: having someone focused on making sounds from those instruments. It's really exciting for us: we've been four for so long, these shows have been the best we've ever played and it’s a step in a really good direction. 

What phase of the band’s writing and recording did these singles take place in? 

It was after the ‘Thistlesifting’ tour, between Christmas and New Year’s. We were all so busy with work. I think we found the 29th and 30th, and we knew we had the limitations of those two days. Putting those creative boundaries in place – with the last album we had almost unlimited time, we just kept chipping away at it, which I liked – made it into a different thing, but we wanted this to be different, and that’s the process we’ll use going ahead as well. 

With the lyrics and how you describe your mum’s voice as “the sun is shining”, your frequent use of pathetic fallacy acts as a ray of hope through tragedy – are there any artists that have been influential with this style? 

The way Phil Elverum writes about nature, we all find inspiring, the way that he talked about trees and bones and mountains. It’s easy to pigeonhole yourselves as tree-huggers, but once I start writing about that, it’s hard to move off it, because it’s everything. Seamus Heaney’s work is very natural, and I’ve been reading a lot of that. 

A lot of field recording based music as well, found sound and samples, a lot of which is people getting out and finding the beauty in natural ambient spaces. I find that really inspiring, and again, that’s something we’ll carry on into the next record. 

Did this single have a similar collision of accidental joy, spontaneity, and re-learning previous ideas to ‘Thistlesifting’? 

They’re always tough to flesh out. We get demo-itis. You listen to the demo so much, you fool yourself into thinking it’s the main product, then you’re trying to bring back the original idea and recreate it into something that’s perhaps less organic. You need to recapture that organic-ness. But Joel was great at that, and he’s really keen on keeping that spark in the studio. I think we did that with this single, maintaining those ideas; things like bringing the sample into ‘I Am Kind’, that’s me holding my phone up to the mike in my room. It maintains that period of time where it’s important to conserve those sparks.

Keep an eye on Green Gardens’ socials for news of future gigs and for that greatly anticipated next album (@greengardensmusic)!

Words by James Kilkenny (@jameskilk1499).

Picture by Ellie Slorick (@eslorick).