HTC068 The Green Apple Sea - Dark Kid

Stefan Prange, singer and songwriter for The Green Apple Sea, talks a lot at his concerts. The story behind the song he introduces often takes longer than the song itself. Sometimes he comes back to it briefly afterwards to add a detail or two that he forgot to mention earlier. It’s a bit as if time doesn’t matter in the world of The Green Apple Sea from Nuremberg: the number of songs played at the concert, the gap between albums, the response to an urgent “business” email…

The Green Apple Sea are sometimes slow because each song has to be lived first. The experience then has to condense, become denser. But maybe that’s the wrong image. The concrete must become universal, the isolated must become common. Because that’s the only way to make life bearable.

The theme that runs through the episodes on “Dark Kid” this time is Stefan Prange’s childhood and youth, which was not always easy. The fact that his stepfather used the nickname “Satan” for his father only becomes a somewhat strange occurrence in retrospect. The fact that his stepbrothers chained him to a stair railing with a bicycle lock when no one felt like looking after him is perhaps a little cruel in retrospect. For 10-year-old Prange, this was nothing unusual. When he tells these stories and sings lines like “I wasn’t afraid to die, I was just waiting to die,” it is meant with the same pragmatic naivety with which the protagonist, “Dark Kid,” accepts his environment.

“Dark Kid” is not about making the audience feel childhood trauma or depression. It’s about turning sadness into melancholy, bitterness into a shrug, anger into an outstretched hand.

The folk songs that emerge are so rounded and smooth, so completely timeless. The only reason they are labeled “indie” is because The Green Apple Sea have always played in small clubs, stoically carrying on regardless. They were one of the first bands to play this rather American style of music here in Germany. Long before the hype and long after it too. A few beloved trademarks have emerged in the process: beautiful, often sophisticated harmony vocals, the warm, dense production of Christian “Wuschi” Ebert, who also plays keyboards in the band and is co-operator of the “Lonestar Recordings” recording studio in Nuremberg. And a universally palpable thoughtfulness that accompanies the creative process of their albums. Maybe it’s better to play that song on shuffle? Replace the piano with a Fender Rhodes again? Hide two more acoustic guitars in the production? Do something else very quietly on the 12-string…?

That’s how this album, entitled “Dark Kid,” works. It doesn’t want to impose itself, but Prange can sing the songs on it hundreds of times without getting tired of them. The stories hidden within can be told just as often. Even as a listener, you can hear the songs a hundred times, discover little loving details, and find new meaning in individual lines of the songs. (We know this because we’ve already done it.)

Die Titel auf „Dark Kid“ sind episodisch angelegt, wie die neue Staffel einer Serie. Aber wenn „Dark Kid“, eine Staffel in der Serie „The Green Apple Sea“ ist, dann ist die Serie eher eine altmodische. Eine, in der die Heldin in jeder einzelnen Folge einen Dämon zurück in die Hölle schickt. In der sie am Ende eine Hand festhält oder in einem Sonnenuntergang spaziert, oder – am allerbesten – mit ihren Freunden lacht. The Green Apple Sea brechen alle Geschichten der Platte im letzten Song auf einen Satz herunter. Es ist ein Zitat von Terence McKenna: „Oh, I know this now. It‘s all about love. Making someone else’s life a little bit better“.