Little Green Cars keep motor running
The Yeats-referencing Little Green Cars are ready to take on the world — and themselves — again ahead of their third album, and their Vicar Street show, writes Barry Egan
I‘At aged 16 you are swimming in a hormone pool’
N March, 2013, Little Green Cars performed their surreally perfect single Harper Lee on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon . A huge prime-time American television audience listened as the Dublin band sang thus: ‘Like a dog I wait for my owner/ And Harper Lee, I’ll kill me a bird And I sit back and I just watch it happen/
And just like you, I won’t say a word...’
In the same month of that year, The Guardian described Little Green Cars’ debut album Absolute Zero as “a study in sincerity — dealing almost exclusively with young love and its discontents”. The band’s guitarist and vocalist, Adam O’Regan, wasn’t so convinced. “Our first album was recorded when we were 19 or 20 years of age. Trying to present an identity at that age is difficult. But after its release, and the tours that followed, we know ourselves. We now know what we’re trying to say,” he told Hot Press in March, 2016 as they released their second, and hugely acclaimed, album, Ephemera.
The title of the album was not lightly taken from WB Yeats’s 1884 poem of that name, especially with Yeats writing lines like ‘Ah, do not mourn,’ he said, ‘That we are tired, for other loves await us’/Hate on and love through unrepining hours/ Before us lies eternity; our souls/ Are love, and a continual farewell.’
Little Green Cars’ singer Stevie Appleby said: “This might be a cliched remark to make, but things just come and go these days; fads that people don’t even notice. What we were hoping to make was something that would be important to someone during a particular time in life — one that, again, will pass — but the emotional connection to that time will still linger. It would be nice to make something important enough for people to remember nostalgically.”
Little Green Cars’ Adam O’Regan had his own reasons to interpret Yeats’s words. Sadly his father, the great Irish businessman and innovator, Hugh, passed away from a heart attack in his car in November, 2012, at just 49 years of age.
“He was such an advocate of creativity,” Adam told me in 2016. He went on to say how his beloved dad provided him with “the spark” that “ignited” his passion for music and creativity when he was in his early teens.
“It was my dad’s idea that I start taking up the electric guitar. I was 13. And I remember, also, there was a few failed attempts to start playing music when I was younger.”
“My mum,” Adam continued referring to his mother, Adrienne, “would send me to piano lessons or classical guitar lessons, or whatever, but there was something about when I was 13 and they bought me an electric guitar. There was a cool factor to it. I remember I could not wait until I got back from school.”
Little Green Cars — who play Dublin’s Vicar Street on December 6 and have a long-awaited third album apparently ready to go — are ready to take on the world again. They were formed in Dublin 10 years ago: featuring the aforementioned Stevie Appleby on guitar and vocals, Adam O’Regan on guitar and vocals; Faye O’Rourke on vocals, Donagh Seaver O’Leary on bass and Dylan Lynch on drums.
In that same interview for the Sunday Independent in 2016, I asked Stevie what made them want to form Little Green Cars? “I guess at a certain age,” he replied, “you know when you look at yourself in the world and what you are going to be when you grow up and being almost disturbed to the core by it. You know, looking around, thinking, ‘Where am I going to fit into the world when I am older?’”
Stevie had an existential crisis at 16?
“Yeah!” he laughed. “At 16 years old, you are swimming in the hormone pool without any armbands. I just couldn’t see myself doing anything and what was happening through that was music just being made — just trying to express yourself and be understood. And through being understood, you would get an understanding of yourself as well. So music was just something that was happening constantly throughout me trying to decide what I was going to do.”
Little Green Cars play Dublin’s Vicar Street on December 6