Little Green Cars gear up for festival show

Groove Tube with Jimi McDonnell – tribunegroove@live.ie

In a double bill that rivals Sinéad O’Connor and John Grant, Little Green Cars will open for St Vincent in the Big Top next Tuesday, July 14. The Dublin based quintet are currently working on the follow up to their hugely impressive 2013 debut, Absolute Zero. Adam O’Regan (guitar/vocals) is optimistic about the as-yet untitled release.

“It’s been great,” he says. “We’ve just been finishing up the album for the last while, and it’ll be next year before it’ll come out. We’re working really hard, we’re really excited about it.”

Little Green Cars have two lead singers in Faye O’Rourke and Stevie Appleby, with Donagh Seaver O’Leary on bass, and Dylan Lynch on drums. Who takes on songwriting duties in the band?

“There are two chief songwriters, Faye and Stevie,” Adam says. “And generally what happens is that they’ll go off and craft the song and then bring it to us and play it on a piano or acoustic guitar, in its barest form. Then the band will kick it around, it’ll go through a lot of shapes and sizes before the final product comes out and it sounds the way it does.”

Absolute Zero is a fine collection of songs, but Adam is also eager for the public to hear Little Green Cars’ new material.

“It’s almost three years now since the first album came out, which is insane,” he says. “We had it written a year before we recorded it, so all that music . . . it feels like we’ve moved so far from it, in a sense.”

Little Green Cars created a well-earned buzz with their first album. Is Adam at all nervous about how this one will be received?

“What is it they say? You have your whole life to write your first album, two years to write your second or whatever it is!” he says. “The first one was written over five years – we started when we were 16 or 17, and recorded it when we were 19, 20.”

The band are signed to the New York based label Glassnote records and this allowed Little Green Cars to tour the US over an intensive two-year period. What was the reception like across the pond?

“Obviously America is so huge, you’ve got to keep going and going back,” Adam says. “Nevertheless, on our first tour there we had an amazing response. Then, the second time, there were more faces in the crowd, and more the third time. You do definitely feel a fan-base building.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.