MUSIC INTERVIEW - THE GREEN CHILDREN
World-Conscious, Wide-Eyed & Perhaps A Little Enchanted 'Encounter'
In another day and age, a very unique pair wandered into the small medieval town of Woolpit, England. The little boy and girl were like nothing the villagers had ever seen before. The legend, which is based on actual accounts, tells that the two children had green skin and spoke a strange language, and to this day, their origins remain a mystery. The Green Children, an enchanting musical duo hailing from Norway and England, have appeared just as mysteriously onto the music scene. And just like the Green Children of legend, they are not quite like anything the world has ever seen.
Ashley Schaeffer: You guys are unlike any other musicians I’ve ever heard of before. You’re still pretty new to the music scene, but you’re signed with Universal Music Group, you’re working with a Grammy-winning producer, and you’re already diving headfirst into humanitarian work, which is something most musicians don’t do until way later in their careers. Ten years ago, did you expect to find yourselves where you are today?
AS: Your producer, Brian Kennedy, has worked with the likes of Rihanna and Jennifer Hudson. How would you describe your experience working with him so far?
Milla Sunde: It’s been lovely. We’ve been in the studio a couple of weeks experimenting a lot with sounds. We’re both from quite different backgrounds music-wise and it’s really cool — it’s two different worlds, musically, coming together. It’s a little bit new in the start, but I think, in the end, it’s going to be a really exciting result.
TB: I think it’s really cool ‘cause he’s bringing stuff to the table that maybe we don’t have, and he’s a really amazing piano player and arranger, and I think the results are going to be really fresh. We’re just continuing working; we’re right in the middle of it right now.
AS: How is the songwriting and creation process shared between the two of you?
MS: We mix it up, but we have our roles. Tom usually does most of the music and then he’ll make something — a melody on the piano — and then give it to me. I’ll be writing some lyrics and melodies to it, and I’ll get back to him with it. We’re both in there together, when we go into the studio with the producer.
TB: We’ve been writing together for such a long time now…
AS: How long have you guys been writing together?
TB: The last five years or something, ‘cause we met back in school and we’ve tried lots of ways of writing, so it works out…
AS: When can we expect your new album to be released?
MS: It’s going to be in the summertime. We’re aiming for the summer, so we’re working hard now to get all the songs together, and we’re really picky so we’re going through every song and making sure it’s all going to be an album full of good songs, not just a few of them. They’re all going to be great, so we’re working hard to create that.
AS: Your music is described as “cinematic fantasy pop.” Do you feel like you guys work an element of fantasy into your music and the work you do?
TB: Yeah, we definitely have in some songs. There’s a single called “Dragons” that we’re finishing off now that has metaphorical, magical lyrics, and then there’s another song called “Black Magic” that we’re working on which is gonna be a big song. It’s quite natural for both of us. We both grew up in quite small towns where a lot of fairy tales and legends and folklore exist, so we have that bred into us from a young age, and it naturally comes out in our music and the whole project, so it definitely can be seen in what we’re trying to do.
AS: Do you guys have favorite fantasy novels or movies, or do you get the majority of your fantasy influence from where you came from?
MS: For me, most of it comes from the nature and the surroundings of where I grew up. My house was between two mountain tops with snow on them and with a valley — just a really lovely situation. I would be going hiking with my family on the weekends — really ideal. I read a lot of Norwegian fairy tales when I was young, and one of my favorites was one of the older films, like The Labyrinth. I really loved The Labyrinth with David Bowie. I have that movie and I keep watching it over and over again — I love it. But of course, you know we love Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings… All the good fantasy movies, like Star Wars and all that. We love both fantasy and sci-fi movies — that’s our favorite kind of genre.
AS: You’re named The Green Children, which has a lot of history and folklore attached to it. I was just wondering if you guys have any personal theories about where The Green Children came from.
TB: It’s really funny. We chose the name and we didn’t know anything about the legend. The name spoke to us, and then started to look on the Internet to see if there are any other bands that have got this name or are there any organizations and so on, and we found this whole legend. It started to freak us out after a while because we found out it was about a boy and a girl, and we thought “that’s cool,” and then we found these other things. That they come from a land with no sun, and Milla’s allergic to the sun, and we went to the village and there were all these drawings of a boy with curly hair and a girl with blonde hair, so it was really, really strange. It was like, we are The Green Children. There was some kind of connection there with these two kids in this town, so we read everything there is about the legend. I guess we hadn’t really made up our minds on the exact origins. I think we’re waiting for that to come to us in a dream.
AS: You talked before about how you’d always had this vision of doing good in the world, and how you also wanted to do music, but was it from the very beginning of working together that you knew you wanted to focus on humanitarian work?
MS: I’ll just speak for myself, and Tom can answer for him, but as a young girl, I was always very compassionate toward both humans and animals, and I had a love for nature, but it’s just naturally built into me. Growing up in Norway and also traveling quite a lot as a young girl, I saw how lucky I was with every opportunity I had in Norway. It was so beautiful and there was a lot of opportunity, a lot of wealth, so I saw that I really, really wanted to do something with my music to help other people. I think Tom totally had the same kind of vision. That’s why partially it works as a band so well, because we see the world through the same eyes and we have the same passions and desires to use our music for a bigger purpose than only to enhance our own lives.
TB: Just to add to that, I suppose the reason we got involved so quickly in all of this is we were searching for courses and we found this one that we really believed in, which is helping women develop businesses and help themselves out of poverty, and we decided, eventually, to take Bangladesh, and I think that trip really changed us forever. It’s a very poor country, Bangladesh, but at the same time, we saw so much hope in the women we met that we wanted to get involved more, so we set up a foundation and we made a song about what we’d seen and then a music video in Bangladesh. The short story is, after we’d done all this, the man we’d been working with won the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway and then we used the song and the movie we’d made to raise funds. That was the first amazing campaign we did for that foundation, so we got more involved in the foundation first, and now we’re focused back on the music side so that we can continue to help.
AS: I wanted to ask you about how you actually raised the money to open an eye hospital [the Grameen Green Children Hospital] that’s giving all these people their sight back. I was wondering how you raised the funds for the hospital — if you toured or you made a movie then…?
MS: Yeah, we made these songs and made a record — a small EP, a single with a few other songs that we produced ourselves, and in correlation to the Nobel Peace Prize — we got those CDs distributed to most of the big stores for free without having to give any money, so we got a lot of big companies on board supporting us and helping to distribute the CD, and a lot of people bought it, and the rest that was left, we gave away with a slip where they could donate money. A lot of people donated more money than they would have given for the CD, so we got a lot of donations and it was really successful. It was around Christmastime, and people were in the giving spirit, and it was very successful and people were generous.
AS: You’ve been taking a really active role in promoting something called “microfinance.” Can you explain what that is, why you chose to embrace it, specifically, and what kind of a difference you’ve seen it make?
TB: That was the first real cause that we got passionate about and why we took the first trip. What we liked about microfinance is it was a really positive story and it was something that was really working. I guess everyone sees poverty on the TV. You can get quite withdrawn when you see all the terrible images, and I know that affected me. It made me almost withdraw from the course. So microfinance is that positive thing that is working, and it’s amazing. These women who come to this learning institute with nothing had built themselves and brought themselves up with these small loans, earning houses and putting their kids through education, and they weren’t relying on continuous donations. So the power was given to them, and that really spoke to us, and the fact that it was helping women was also a big thing for us. We believe that’s the best way to help the children, because they always focus on the family. So it was really the fact that this man in Bangladesh set up a bank called banking for the poor, it’s called Grameen Bank. He now has seven million women who are lending money to this institution, and it’s totally changed their lives. This idea has got all around the world, about 100 million people now taking these loans. It’s just really practical, it works, and we thought we should try to give it a bit of a bigger voice.
MS: When we went there and we saw the next generation of the kids who were so fluent in English and studying to be doctors and teachers and all that, and coming from mothers and families that can’t even write their name, it dawned on us how to help the children — you help the mothers. It focuses on the mothers, because the mothers are the ones that are going to make sure that their kids get education. It was an eye-opener for us, to go through the mothers to help the children.
AS: You guys have already traveled all over the world at this point. Any favorite locations?
TB: I don’t know. Everywhere is so different. We’ve been really lucky to travel a lot of places, and every place has a special thing that I love about it, but from the point of view of the things that we’d seen, everywhere we traveled we’d gone to see microfinance working, with these amazing women who are incredibly prideful that they’ve managed to help themselves. So I can’t really answer that. Maybe Milla has a favorite place, I’m not sure.
MS: I don’t know. It’s all really interesting, but I must say that the one thing that was maybe the most exciting was Bangladesh because it was so different and it was so populated. People are very different, and when you go out in the villages the kids, and nobody there has TV or anything, so they have such an innocent attitude to life and to people, I thought that was very beautiful to see.
AS: Do you have a tour in the works to promote your new album?
TB: Yeah, that’s the plan. Right now, we’re 100% focused on the music so that we can help more people in the future. Our passion in life is music and creating the songs to have them help other people, and to inspire people is just an extra bonus for us. I think there are so many great causes that need more attention, so hopefully we can shine a bit of light on one that we believe in.
The Green Children's new album 'Encounter' is due to be released later this year on Spin Side Records.
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