The Meantime Green, a musician from Toronto, embraces the charm and simplicity of the folksy bluegrass genre in her list of upcoming songs, set to be released this month. There’s a wonderful ease and purity to her style of singer-songwriter acoustic vibes, featuring classic bluegrass string instruments like guitars and banjos and a subtle yet strong and clear voice interlaced with artistically placed harmonies.
Her music is quiet and evocative, allowing you to slip into a world far away from the stressful noise of life. Imagine a peaceful bluegrass concert in an off-road café in the rural countryside. It’s just you, a few choice friends, some satisfying food and drink, and a solo singer with her guitar on a little stage, strumming away and letting her voice flow gently over the audience. The moment is uncomplicated, untroublesome, and present. The past and future are nonexistent, and you can just…exist. That’s what her music feels like.
The Meantime Green’s music possesses many of the iconic bluegrass elements. The rhythm and timing of her songs have that distinct bluegrass rhythm, which tends to be off-beat and push slightly ahead in anticipation of the main beat, giving it that energetic feeling. Bluegrass is also known for improvisation and vocal harmonies, both of which occur in The Meantime Green’s music. The harmonies are intricately placed throughout the songs, where they only come in for a few choice notes at a time, allowing the main vocals to carry the song. Plenty of the classic folk instruments are present, and it’s clear that, more often than not, the guitar is the star. Her songs often feature guitar solos at the beginning and/or end and in between lyrics. They’re decently complex guitar frets yet are executed in such a beautifully subtle manner that it gives the illusion of a simple and free beat that is actually quite compounded. Changes in rhythm are almost unnoticeable; they slip into each other seamlessly like an intricately stitched quilt.
All of this and more is present in The Meantime Green’s single, “Pull Me Out.” It has the energized rhythm, the iconic guitar solos (especially a very satisfying one at the end), and the shining vocals highlighted with harmonies. It does feature the keyboard! That’s a slight change from The Meantime Green’s other songs. It adds a wonderful new color to the song.
The musician describes the song being about the “often invisible ways we can be controlled” and wrote it “while imagining the space that lies beyond that control.”
We did what we were told
We were so controlled
We never made a sound
Many moments in the lyrics describe something being “learned” and thus needing to be “unlearned.”
Whether we discern it
Still we’ve learned
And still we’ve soaked it in
And silently we’ve burned with it
Holding ourselves in
What is this mysterious “it” that pops up throughout the song? There is a hint that implies it could have something to do with the topic of women objectification and diminishment:
You learn to be easy on the eyes
And quiet
And they said you were pretty when you smiled
Could The Meantime Green be singing for women? Perhaps this “it” that she had to unlearn was the social construct that women should be seen and not heard and look pretty for the sake of others?
What’s fantastic about the ambiguity of the “it” is that any listener of any background can apply whatever “it” represents to them and personalize the song for themselves. A wonderfully creative and empowering feat by The Meantime Green.
