On August 19, UK singer and songwriter Phoebe Green releases her long-awaited debut album Lucky Me. Headliner caught up with her to find out about her new musical direction, writing as a form of therapy and having her music grace the final series of Killing Eve…
Phoebe Green is one of those artists whose personalities radiates through everything she does. Candid lyrics laced with wit and intimacy are filtered through melodies and choruses so infectious you feel you must have heard them before. And while these pure pop songwriting sensibilities have been evident in most of her releases to date, they’ve never felt as potent as they do in her first full length debut album Lucky Me.
Out on August 19, Lucky Me draws upon the qualities that helped mark her out as one to watch amongst indie rock circles over the past three years and refines and repackages them into a far more polished, electronic, poppier proposition. Preceded by a string of standalone singles and EPs that hinted heavily at Green’s considerable skill as a compelling storyteller, it’s an album that sees the guitars and full band sound that previously shaped her music largely side-lined, instead placing her lyrical vignettes front and centre.
“I was gearing up to make this album for way longer than it took to actually make it,” Green explains over Zoom, joining us from her parents’ house by the sea. The sense of familiarity and openness that runs through her music is also present in conversation. She’s immediately engaging, funny and often laughs her way through sentences, making for a disarmingly refreshing contrast to the sometimes stilted nature of Zoom interviews. “I was planning on making an album from the moment I released my first EP (Dreaming Of) in 2019, but the songs just didn’t come. I don’t think I was experiencing anything evocative enough for me to want to write about it. Because of lockdown I wasn’t very inspired.
“Then it got to this time last year and I met up with my friend [songwriter and producer] Dave McCracken, who I wrote a lot of the album with. I told him I was stuck and didn’t know what to write about, and he said I probably had more to write about than I realised, and that I wasn’t letting myself feel anything. And that was so true. I wasn’t in a place where I could actually process anything or really delve into the way I was feeling. As soon as he said it, I realised had to look inwards, rather than looking for external inspiration. That’s when it started, and the album was written in about two months. It just came so quickly.”
Prior to starting work on Lucky Me, Green had worked almost exclusively in a solo capacity, rejecting the notion of collaboration on the grounds that it would mean she “wasn’t good enough to do it on my own”. Inevitably, when writing commenced with McCracken, sessions took a very different form to what she was used to.