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Colleen Green is the embodiment of a certain type of millennial freshness. The indie one-woman-born Dunstable pop-punk group is rarely seen performing without their Wayfarer-style sunglasses and electric guitar poster signed “Happy Birfday Jeff”, a birthday card. replacing a party from a long time ago that her fans can only imagine it was a super cold time.
“People always say, ‘Colleen Green is so cool, she always wears sunglasses, what’s going on? “She must be so cool,” she tells me when I meet her in her apartment and home studio in Lowell to talk about her new album “Costs, Which will be released on September 10.
“It’s just a gimmick,” she says, and the title of the new album doesn’t care. “I’m cool, but I’m not like ‘cool’.”
She’s been wearing the sunglasses ever since she started performing as a solo artist. She had just been diagnosed with myasthenia gravis (MG), an autoimmune disease, after moving from her home state of Massachusetts to Oakland, California. Unable to work and pay rent, she decided to move in with her brother to LA. She didn’t have a job or the energy to go out and meet people, but she had a drum machine that she bought from a friend when it ran out of money that she had never even touched, so she decided to read the manual and start playing.
“My first album, ‘Milo to Compton’, was just me, alone in my room for hours, just playing my drum machine and playing guitar on top of it.”
When it was time to do shows on her own she was a little embarrassed because the drugs she was taking made her face swell and she knew people would take pictures. She found the sunglasses in her brother’s kitchen and has been wearing them ever since.
Green released her first album as a cassette tape in January 2010, and in the fall she signed to Hardly Art Records, a sub-pop affiliate, whose bands she idolized as a teenager.
“Being signed to Hardly Art less than a year after releasing my first album was one of the best and most exciting things I can remember that happened to me,” said Green. “It was the catalyst for everything else that came after that. Every year since then, it gets better and better. “
“I consider myself to be an east coast person but a west coast artist.”
Colleen Green
It’s been 10 years since I grew up, released music and toured. His latest album, “Cool,” has been finished since January 2020, but COVID-19 and a copyright dispute have delayed its release.
“The last year has been a bit difficult for me as an artist. I feel like I’ve been fired from my job, ”says Green. “It was a mixture of waiting for everything to be okay to release the album or even scheduling the album to release, and waiting to see what was going to happen in the world.”
She says that between closures, wildfires and a less than ideal living situation, LA was getting bleak. She is 36 and wants to spend more time with her family, so she moved back to Massachusetts, where she intends to stay.
“I see myself as an east coast person but as a west coast artist,” says Green. “I love LA and owe this city a lot. This is where Colleen Green was born and raised. But that’s where I belong.
Its studio space, which doubles as a TV room, isn’t intimidating. Just a desk, her computer where she records demos in GarageBand, an iPad she currently uses as a drum machine, her guitars and a bass. It does everything itself and has always kept its configuration simple and compact. When she first started touring, she took public transportation to go to shows or be driven by friends. Needing to carry all of her gear on her back, she doesn’t even use an amp, instead traveling with a SansAmp.
This DIY minimalism does not detract from its sound. It is singularly a complete group and its own choristers, harmonizing and recalling lines to itself. He never fails. The hook and the complexity of her sound evoke a woman who might be weary of the world and even of her own behavior, but who in the end really loves herself.
“To me the word ‘cool’ describes people and things that are just comfortable being who they are. That’s where I am now and that’s why I think this title is so suitable for recording, ”said Green. “It’s really exciting to see how people respond to me as a woman and as a solo artist, doing it all on my own. I got to where I am just by doing my thing.
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