The Meantime Green proves that good things come in four with her new songs Pull Me Out, After the Storm, That’s Too Sad For Me and Thin Skin — premiering exclusively on Tinnitist.
Toeing the line between indie-folk and roots-pop, this refreshing quartet of elegantly homespun, emotionally intimate and sweetly sincere ballads were written and recorded by the publicity-shy singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist in the solitude of her Toronto home. Created during bits of free time found in The Meantime Green’s otherwise-practical life, this is music made like painting: solitary, with vocals and instruments added in layers like colour on canvas.
Here’s what The Meantime Green says about the songs. Click on the photos or the titles hear the tracks:
“Pull Me Out is a song about the often invisible ways we can be controlled, and how might unwittingly participate in our own diminishment. This song makes me happy, because I wrote it while imagining the vast space that lies beyond that control, and the kind of deep connection that might happen there.
“I started writing After the Storm a few months after having a baby. It started out as a song about the stillness that finally comes after a big event, but somehow turned into a song about old traumas: the gravitational pull of them, and how we silently orbit them while pretending otherwise.”
“I wrote That’s Too Sad For Me when my four year old went through a short period of being obsessed with death. It happened near the start of the Covid pandemic when we were quite isolated together. I found it difficult to endure the endless death talk, which would shift suddenly from sweet, sad questions to violent declarations. After one particularly hard afternoon I collected the lyrics into this song.
“Thin Skin is about getting older together, and about the whittling down of our defenses. On another level, I was thinking about learning to live without god, and without the myths that have long given people a sense of meaning and transcendence. I was inspired by Karen Armstrong, who wrote in A Short History of Myth about how there is a moving and even heroic asceticism about the current rejection of myth. Something about this struck me, how exposed we are without a god layer in between us and the universe. This is a song about being exposed.”
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Normally, this is where I’d tell you to visit The Meantime Green’s website or follow her social media accounts, but she doesn’t have any of those things — or at least none she’s interested in sharing them. That’s right; she’s an artist who’s more concerned with making music than getting likes and retweets. And it doesn’t stop there: The Meantime Green doesn’t even want me to tell you her real name or include any pictures of her. So you’ll just have to make do with her songs. And really, they’ll tell you everything you need to know about this unique, entrancing and private artist.
