features
Anthony Green: Beautiful Things Are Coming
Anthony Green has yet to notice the cigarette resting between the fingers of his right hand extinguished itself seven minutes ago. The Circa Survive frontman, perched casually on the concrete stoop outside of Coffee & Cream in his hometown of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, is far too immersed in people-watching to notice. It's the first Friday of the month, and in the quaint northern suburb of Philadelphia, that translates to a town-wide festival. Green is merely another pleasant denizen among herds of young parents and temporarily unsupervised teenagers, almost all of whom clutch melting confections while migrating toward a kindly, middle-aged fellow performing unobtrusive Pink Floyd covers in the churchyard.
Suddenly, Green stiffens. A blond-haired girl holding a dripping ice cream cone is surprisingly bold, plopping herself down on the same step only a few inches away. She relentlessly stares Green down for minutes until he awkwardly breaks the silence. "So, uh, what kind of ice cream is that?" She stares but doesn't answer. Maybe it's because she's starstruck. Or, maybe (and possibly more likely) it's because she's 2 years old-maybe 2-and-a-half. Her mother smiles and politely informs him that the ice cream is strawberry. "I knew it," says Green with a delicate laugh. As the toddler is led away, stumbling over cracks in the sidewalk, she never once removes her eyes from Green. "I don't know what it is, man," he says, waving. "Little kids are fuckin' fascinated by me. I mean, like, every kid, everywhere I go." Is Green paranoid? You'd think so, but then an entire kindergarten class strolls by, each pint-sized student silently sizing him up. "See? It kind of freaks me out."
During the two hours he spends in the middle of this bustling Norman Rockwell painting come to life, not one person over the age of 4 acknowledges Green-not even those sporting Killswitch Engage and New Found Glory shirts (both of whom played last summer's Warped Tour alongside Circa Survive). "It's rare that I get recognized around here," he says, finally dropping his half-burned cigarette. "Maybe if I go to the record store or something, one of the kids who work at the coffee shop will see me and say hi. But it's not like anyone's searching me out, and, honestly, I don't mind it not happening. I wouldn't wanna be like Gerard Way and not able to walk into a mall. Of course, that guy's a real rock star. Have you seen his fuckin' shoes?"
There are, however, many people who would disagree with Green's modest self-assessment. Cute Is What We Aim For frontman Shaant Hacikyan witnessed Green's effect on audiences last year from his vantage point alongside Circa Survive on both the AP Tour and Warped Tour. "He has not only the front row, but the back row of kids running on top of every single kid just to get close enough to touch Anthony Green," says Hacikyan. "He's the most compelling live singer I've ever seen. I mean, he's Anthony fucking Green."
But Green hasn't always been comfortable being Anthony fucking Green. In fact, even as he's about to release his first solo album, Avalon, he considered going by another moniker-either his MySpace alias Moshtradamus or High And Driving, the name of his electronica-tinged outfit which yielded a 2003 EP featuring several early incarnations of songs appearing on Avalon. "For a long time, I wasn't sure who I was," he says, meandering beneath Main Street's Victorian lampposts. "Growing up, I always struggled to be what I thought people wanted me to be. I didn't even like hearing my own name. I really worked through that with the last Circa record. I guess that's sort of why I decided to just use my name with this project and these songs. It's the right time to say, 'This is me. I am who I want to be.'" To everyone who enters the large, aluminum-sided house he shares with members of Circa Survive and to all of his friends and family who live in neighboring towns, there's no profanity in his name. He's just Anthony, a former chubby kid who grew up in a strict Roman Catholic household with three older brothers and an innate ability to stand up in front of any crowd without fear. As Green leads the way into the house, past a framed Radiohead OK Computer poster in the living room and into his basement bedroom, he apologizes for the "mess," which can only mean Circa Survive bassist Nick Beard, who's firmly planted on the couch, since there's barely much else in the area. In Green's room, the loose strands of white Christmas lights and the doorway to the adjacent laundry room seemingly indicate that a third-semester Art History major-not a beloved frontman-calls it home. He turns on his modest flat-screen TV with little interest in what's on, lights a stick of incense and grabs a nearby acoustic Fender cutaway before sitting cross-legged on his bed. Green is instantly at ease, like a kid hanging out in his room.
"I remember the first time I really held a guitar. I was 11 or 12," he says, straightening his deep blue cardigan. "My dad took me on a trip to Ireland and we stayed at this bar in this town called Ballina. There was a jazz band that played every other night and I would go back and mess around with the guitar. One day, the owner's son was like, 'Hey, you wanna hang onto this and take it to your room?' Six months later, my dad got me my first guitar for Christmas."
The bedroom door atop the stairs swings open and a diminutive woman descends, overflowing laundry basket in tow. This is Meredith-Green's longtime girlfriend and roommate who 10 days from now, will be his wife. She demurely tucks a strand of should-length blond hair behind her left ear and immediately begins folding. "Why is Pretty In Pink on?" she asks, noticing the TV. Green isn't sure what she's implying, but he isn't comfortable with it. "It was just on," he counters. "How are the kids?"
Meredith quickly realizes that a micro-cassette recorder is capturing a potential message-board bonanza and clarifies. "Not our kids. We don't have kids," she says, laughing nervously. "I'm a nanny."
Although Meredith's comments are much more calculated with a reporter present than Green's, she can't hold back from instantly describing how the pair met seven years earlier when he was in the same class of an all-boys high school with her younger brother. A week after Green's graduation, he was at a beach house on the Jersey shore with friends when Meredith forced her brother to make the return trip from the beach just to take her back to see Green, who she had hung out with only once before. "I didn't find out that she came the whole way just to see me until later," says Green. "We spent the next night together-we didn't kiss or anything. We just drove around listening to Braid and Saves The Day."
Things became complicated the following fall when Green began attending classes at a nearby community college and falling into self-destructive patterns. "I was close enough to the city that heroin and cocaine were available," he says. "You could drive to Temple [University] and get Oxycontin for $40 or a bag of heroin for $10. It was sketchy, and I wasn't afraid. I wanted to get fucked up. I wasn't happy with who I was. I had Meredith, but I was stupid about a lot of things."
The breaking point occurred when Green returned home one night, drunk and on more drugs than he can remember. "I crawled in my parents' bed with them. I had a weed pipe and empty Percoset bottles in my pocket and was out of my mind completely. The next day, my parents were like, 'No school. Nothing until you figure this out.' I said, 'Okay. I'm gonna kill myself.' We all sat in this circle just like, 'Fuck. What now?'" One of Green's older brothers-a therapist-recommended rehab, and by the winter of 2001, Anthony was a patient at a clinic down the street from his home. After a year of treatment, he was finally ready to begin again. "I haven't been perfect since rehab, I can fully admit that," he says. "But things I learned there, I still use every day of my life."
However, when Green left for California a short time later to front SoCal post-hardcore scream team Saosin, another one of his vices surfaced. "Growing up, you're trying to find your credibility in other people, and for a guy, the more girlfriends you have, the more attention you build. I used that like a drug," he says. "I didn't always realize how important this relationship [with Meredith] was to my life. But there was always something that kept me coming back. Even when it was bad, I would always think about Meredith."
For proof, one doesn't have to look further than most of the songs on Avalon, which were written at various points throughout the past decade, during which Meredith was an integral character. She's aware of all of her groom's alleged sexual conquests, but regards them as the past. "I don't really want to know," she says later. "I just don't think about it. I was always back here waiting for him, even if it seemed hopeless at the time." When asked if she thinks any of the confessional Avalon is about her, she shrugs in a sort of feigned ambivalence, but smiles coyly. "I don't think so. Anthony doesn't like to say what songs are about."
That's actually very true-Green has a policy of being vague when it comes to his lyrics. But with only a light inquisition, he breaks. "The majority of the record, I think, is about her," he says, pausing as if acknowledging this fact for the first time. "To say that outloud is weird. She's even asked me before if songs were about her, and I've said they weren't even though they were. I don't know why I did that."
Maybe Green feels like it's not worth hiding anymore. After all, it was Meredith who urged him to record Avalon; Meredith who suggested he enlist his friends in Good Old War to be his backing band; and Meredith who recommended recording this past winter at her grandmother's beach house in Avalon, New Jersey, hence the album's title. Circa guitarist Colin Frangicetto says in many ways, Green was the last person in the band to realize he should spend time between Circa albums concentrating on his own material. "He just had so many great songs building up for such a long time that all of us were like, 'Dude, when are you gonna record those songs?" says Frangicetto in a separate interview. "Then one day, he was like, 'Yeah, so I'm gonna go to this house on the shore and record those, some stuff.' I speak fluent 'Anthony-Green,' so I knew what that meant. I was like, 'Awesome. He's finally gonna do his record.' Anthony will be doing his own thing long after Circa, and this is just his first entry into that world. In my opinion, he's one of the best songwriters of our generation, and these songs reveal an important side to him that people need to see."
The next day, Green, Meredith and the members of Good Old War hit the road toward the campus of Northeastern University in Boston for a free, one-off show. The four musicians spend the five-hour trip from Philadelphia rehearsing, putting on an impromptu concert that swerved by unaware commuters at 72 mph on I-95 North. With Meredith behind the wheel entering the city, the pair are very much a couple, bickering constantly as Good Old War play the role of the nervous kids behaving in the back seat. There's much debate over whether they should follow the Mapquest directions or the GPS on Green's Blackberry, and Meredith's lead foot is a recurring point of contention. "Everything's fine," she says, just moments from smashing the passenger-side mirror against the side of a Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority bus.
"Fuck, babe!," Green screams, looking over his shoulder as the bus driver lays on his horn. Meredith continues down the road amid palpable tension, but after a block of getaway driving, Green cracks a smile. "Goddamnit, babe." (Anytime a bus pulls up alongside the van during the remainder of the trip, everyone in the van makes sure not to look over.) Long-distance relationships and alleged infidelity are something else altogether, but any couple who can withstand rush hour traffic in Boston are bound for success.
Although the crowd inside the student union building where the show will take place is sparse and littered with students burying their heads in laptops and final reports, it isn't of much concern to Green. He's grateful that there'll be an audience: This show-and the tour to follow-are more about self-indulgence.
Now in the green room (which doubles as Northeastern University Meeting Room 336) minutes before the show, the quartet of musicians continue laying down effortless four-part harmonies of everything from Harry Nilsson covers to Good Old War originals, to which Green knows every word. The makeshift backstage buffet of vegetables and red pepper hummus that would typically be ravaged by most bands remains largely untouched as everyone chooses instead to bang on a guitar or pound rhythmically on the nearest solid object. "This is what I love," says Green, after most of Good Old War head downstairs to prepare for their opening set. "I just love playing music. I've never for a second seen anything about playing music as a job. I love playing alone; I love playing for Meredith; I'd play on the street."
Green grabs a bottle of water and takes the elevator down to the cafeteria and into the room where Good Old War have taken the stage before a little more than 100 relatively stoic students. Still, the small crowd stirs when Green slides into the venue through a darkened entrance next to the stage. Everyone in the room is well over 4 years old, and all eyes are instantly on the singer. A young, male student in a Circa Survive T-shirt sneaks a photo with his camera phone, but Green's eyes are fixed on his bandmates. "This was such a good idea," says Green. "This tour is going to be amazing."
He isn't worried that his band has only rehearsed with him a couple of times. He isn't worried about spending August and September crammed into a van. He isn't even worried that it'll be the first time that he tours as a husband, with his wife along for the ride. At this moment, as he's about to take the stage as Anthony Green-just Anthony Green-he isn't worried at all.
"Maybe I don't know what I'm doing and maybe I'm not cool in the eyes of everyone," he says. "But this is exactly where I want to be."
TO SEE MORE, CHECK OUT ISSUE 242.
Post a Comment
its so beautiful to have him in this world.. haha dont what it means but seriously
he shoudl so write an aoutobiography. it is needed in this world that he write an autobiography. it would sell as second best next to the bible in all time sales. im so serious anthony green is my freakin hero.