Green bring a little touch of 90s New York to Glasgow’s CCA
ADAM Green is a man who does a bit of everything.
A songwriter, filmmaker, visual artist, and poet, Adam made up one half of The Mouldy Peaches, who shot to fame after the 2007 Grammy-winning Juno soundtrack. As a solo artist, Green has recorded 10 albums, many of which have become cult hits.
As a man who does a bit of everything, he tells the Evening Times he is attracted to places that are similar in style – such as the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum.
“I love Glasgow. I go there every time I have an album. I go to museums and things. The Kelvingrove one is absolutely crazy, it’s really funny - such a mix of art and museum bits that I didn’t anticipate” Adam laughs. “There’s a Van Gogh painting next to a Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton. It’s like the museum of free association.”
“I love the bars too, like Nice N Sleazy’s. It’s a cool vibe.”
Green’s 10th solo album, Engine of Paradise, is a musical exploration about the clash of humans with machines, the meeting of spirituality with singularity, and the bidirectional relationship between life and the afterlife.
Recorded in Brooklyn by Loren Humphrey, the forthcoming album features performances by James Richardson from MGMT and Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine. He is coming to Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts tomorrow evening.
“It’s weird because this album feels like a nice round number. It’s the first album I’ve actually told people that it’s the 10th one - it’s like birthdays. At some point you
just celebrate the big ones, and that’s what we’re doing with this album.
Engine of Paradise is pushing the boundaries of his music, away from the sparseness of production in previous albums by including an orchestral string arrangement.
“With this one we’ve looked back a little bit and are trying to include sections that we haven’t included in previous albums, like strings.”
“I had a moment with myself and I decided that I like how it sounds when I use orchestras, and that’s what’s important. It’s pretty. I want to work with things that I understand, for my audience to understand.”
The music that Adam will play tomorrow evening in the CCA gives his audience an insight into some of the most intimate elements of his life. “I’ve really tried to build a bridge with this album between what my audience hears and what I want to project through the music.
“It’s like building a bridge into a different place, or picking up and working in little scraps of my life into an album”. So it’s a bit of everything, then? “Pretty much”.