“I’m very self-sufficient, I’m really independent, and I don’t like having to rely on other people for everything,” Green said. Green wanted to be a rock star since she was 6 years old, but said that up until she was in Los Angeles she hadn’t realized creating music alone was an option - she had always thought she needed a band. “Milo Goes to Compton” was Green’s first album as a solo artist - no band - and her lack of either a job or money led her to paying “two punk friends” $100 to make 75 cassette tapes and sleeves for her. “I just started making drum beats with it and I made like 10 different beats and wrote songs over those beats and that’s what ‘Milo Goes to Compton’ was.” “I had that drum machine and I had never had the wherewithal to play with it, but when I was there, alone, had no friends and nothing to do with my time, I figured it was a good time to play it,” Green said. Second was $35 worth of friendship that had somehow survived purges of Green’s property when she moved to Oakland and then LA - a drum machine she had bought from a friend in Boston in an effort to help him scrape together some cash years earlier. I just remember being really, really happy once I was in LA despite everything that had happened leading up to that.” “Maybe it was because I was alone for the first time just completely experiencing life totally on my own. I went outside and I just … the sun was shining and it was so beautiful, and I was like ‘I belong here,’ ” she said. Green had lived in Dunstable, Lowell, Boston and Oakland already, but said she never felt the way she did when she arrived in LA. Now 36, making music for a branch of a record label she idolized when she was younger, and having the first single off her latest album recommended by the New York Times for the nation’s summer playlists, Green is back from a decade in LA and told her story over tequila at the Worthen House Cafe in Lowell, where she used to play shows upstairs with her college bands.įour other friends, including those who started The Have Mercys with Green in Boston, had also moved with her to Oakland in 2009, but Green had to leave the boyfriend and bandmates behind just months later as her disease - myasthenia gravis - initially left her with no real options other than moving in with her brother in Los Angeles, a city where she knew no one else.įirst was an immediately intense reaction to Los Angeles, where her brother lived in a neighborhood near Santa Monica, and where Green would remain for the next decade even though she arrived under stress. It ended up being the best thing that ever happened to her. LOWELL - Less than a year after Colleen Green sold almost all of her possessions to fund a move across the country in a Dodge Shadow with her boyfriend to Oakland, Calif., the 24-year-old Dunstable native and UMass Lowell graduate was diagnosed with an incurable auto-immune disease that she hadn’t even heard of before, and which left her unable to work or pay rent.
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