Green Garden

Album: Sing To The Moon (2013)
Charted: 31
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Songfacts®:

  • Classically trained Birmingham native Laura Mvula (pronounced Mmm-vula) started writing songs on her laptop while working as a supply teacher in a secondary school. She released her debut EP She in November 2012, which garnered much praise from the critics. One reviewer, for instance, described her sound as "like hearing Nina Simone sings The Beach Boys," while another made up a new genre in honor of her soulful vocals and ornate soundscapes - gospeldelia.
  • This is the lead single from her debut album, Sing To The Moon. She described the song to Digital Spy as "still a bit of a bedroom track - one that I'd just jam to in my flat. To have it out there in the world is very weird!"
  • Mvula gave her first live TV performance on February 1, 2013 when she sung this song during BBC 1's The Graham Norton Show.
  • The song is an elegy to Mvula's old home in Kings Heath, Birmingham, where she and her family moved to from Selly Park. She explained to The Birmingham Post: "When we moved to our new house, for us kids it was a huge huge big deal to have trees in the back garden. Where we had lived in Selly Park, the back garden was more concrete than grass, so it felt like we were in a forest. Some of my happiest memories are of endless summer holidays where it seems like we spent most of the time in the garden, making up dance routines or having mammoth waterfights. The song is a celebration of that."

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