“Most of Your Life is Boring”: Lime Garden is Romanticizing the Mundane

Best friends Chloe Howard and Annabel Wittle sit outside in matching black sunglasses as Howard takes drags of a cigarette, laughing and talking over each other as they finish each other’s sentences. They are the vocalist/guitarist and drummer of Lime Garden, a self-described “wonk pop” band completed by Leila Deeley on guitar and Tippi Morgan on bass. The UK group has been around for the past five years, touring and putting out singles before finally releasing their debut album One More Thing in 2024. They will play Kilby Block Party 6 this week, their first American music festival, and chatted with SLUG about motherhood, female friendship and romanticizing the mundane. 

SLUG: You started out self-releasing singles during the pandemic, before you were signed to So Young Records, but One More Thing was produced by Ali Chant, who is famous for producing Perfume Genius and PJ Harvey. Can you talk a little bit about this transition and what it was like working with him? 

Wittle: We’d never done a project that big, nor had we spent that long on it. All our singles were done in, like, one day. So we had two weeks and we went to Bristol … It felt really legit, doing this whole thing in a new city, and he’s worked with so many cool people. We were really excited to work with him. 

Howard: He’s quite playful in his approach to [producing]. He calls it the playpen, that’s what he calls the studio. But we were very nervous going into recording the album because … it’s a bit of a scary, a daunting prospect — but he just had fun with it and made it less intimidating.

SLUG: I really feel that playfulness. That’s one of my favorite things about your music. What do you feel have been the most challenging aspects of creating and releasing music, and what are the most rewarding aspects?

Howard: With releasing music, especially a full album, there is a sense of underwhelming. You spend like, five years of your life dedicating and sacrificing a lot, and then you just wake up one day and it’s done.

Wittle: Yeah, it gets quite hard … In your head, it’s this big thing. And obviously it was, initially, but you tour it and then you stop touring it, and then you’re like, “Well, that’s that, I guess.” The life cycle of an album is much shorter than it probably used to be because of streaming. 

Howard: I think the bits that are so good about it — I mean, other than getting to travel a lot, go to so many places and see how it connects with people — there’s room for us to experiment a bit. I feel like you can hear us doing that on the record. It’s nice to have the space to do more than just the poppy stuff. 

SLUG: You said in a previous interview that none of you had a lot of all female band influences growing up, so you wanted to be that influence on someone else. Do you have more all-female band influences now than you did as as kids? Or do you still feel like here’s not enough of them in the world? 

Wittle: There’s definitely not. There’s a lot more women in music, but there’s not many all-female bands, really. Like, normally, [a man] is the drummer or something..

Howard: I mean, we’ve always had bands that were huge influences to us, like HAIM. But obviously they’re one in a million. There still needs to be more.

SLUG: Do you ever get tired of being labeled or pigeonholed as an all-female band? Or do you fully embrace it? 

Wittle: Yeah, we do. It’s funny to say that — it’s like, the reverse of what we just said, but it does get tired. The most annoying thing, I think, is sometimes people will be like, “Oh my God, you sound just like this band.” And we sound nothing like that. You’ve just seen four women and gone, “I know!” It literally happens all the time.

Howard: Yeah. We’re so proud of [being an all-female band] and I couldn’t imagine it any other way, but we’re just a band who makes music. In order for there to be more female bands who are genuinely taken seriously in music, it’s about beating the stigma of being a gimmick.

SLUG: You satirize the the music industry a lot on songs like “Nepotism (baby)” and “Pop Star.” I know that at some point, you all had other jobs in addition to making music. Is that still the case? Do you still feel like you have to balance that with music?

Wittle: Yeah. The longer we’ve been doing this, the more I realize that you have to get to a pretty big point to not have another job. Everyone we know music has another job.

Howard: In an indie band, you will have another job.

Wittle: At least one other job, probably two or three to make it work. Everyone we know who does it, does it because they love it.

SLUG: That’s true, but I think that would still surprise a lot of people. Many people assume that when you get to a certain level of — I don’t know, Spotify listeners — that you’re making loads of money.

Wittle: Yeah, especially the older generation, who mainly buys records and doesn’t understand streaming … I’m constantly having to justify it to my parents and family members. They don’t understand. They’re like, “How do you not make money off of this?” and I’m like, “I don’t know either!” It’s mad, but we love it, so we’ll carry on doing it.

SLUG: Well, I’m glad to hear that. I also wanted to ask about the song “Mother” as someone who has a complicated relationship with their mom, as many people do. Can you tell me a little bit more about the lyrics, “I’d love to bring your love into the world / But it’s not up to me if they’d be wanted / If they’d be loved / If they’d be even yours.” What does that mean to you? 

Howard: Yeah, that was me relating it back to having children of my own. I was thinking about the partner I was with at the time, and the classic thing of being in your 20s and a woman, just thinking, “Would I have kids? What if I didn’t even like them that much?”

SLUG: There’s also a line in there about being a mirror, looking at your mother and seeing yourself, and wondering if she sees herself in you.

Howard: When you’re a teenager, your worst fear in the world is becoming your mother. The older you get, the more you realize you are actually very similar, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

SLUG: I think motherhood and the idea of children is also more complicated when you are in the music industry and you are famous, to some extent. Is that something you think about? 

Wittle: We were talking about this recently — if you’re a woman in music, how do you have a baby? For a man, it’s fine, whereas it’s quite inspiring when you see some women doing it, like Laura Marling and Oklou, but it doesn’t happen often. 

Howard: We always have this really sick joke that if one of us got pregnant right now, we’d be so upset with them.

Wittle: We’d be like, “How dare you?”

Howard: “The band’s over!” But famously, male rock stars have got about 20,000 kids and it was never an issue.

SLUG: Since you’ve never performed in Utah before, what are you most excited about when it comes to Kilby Block Party and the string of festivals you’re playing this summer?

Wittle: I mean, the lineup is unreal. Some of our favorite bands are playing. Also, we’ve never played an American festival, so we’re quite curious to see what it’s like. People don’t camp at Kilby, do they? That’s new to us. And what’s Utah like? Is hot and dry? The Mormons as well — we have no picture of what it looks like, apart from the brief episode I watched of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. That’s all I know about Utah. 

SLUG: Outside of music, do you have any artistic inspirations from other mediums? 

Wittle: We’ve got lots of different ones, but the title of the record was inspired by this author called Raymond Carver who [wrote] really cool short stories. That was a big inspiration. His work is commenting on mundane life, in a really interesting way … [The title] is from a book of short stories called Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? “One More Thing” is the title of the last short story … It’s about an alcoholic wife and her husband, and their relationship. But the way he writes about it is really cool.

SLUG: I see a lot of universal things in your music. You’re commenting on things that most everyone experiences — like motherhood, or the anxiety of having a passion and then also having a job. I think that’s really cool that you’re are finding ways to make the mundane really interesting and unique and fun.

Howard: Thank you. It’s important to do that because most of your life is mundane. It’s boring. For most people, that’s the case. So it’s nice to romanticize it a little bit sometimes.

SLUG: Can I ask about the album cover, and what you were envisioning when creating it?

Wittle: We found an image [of] two people on a bed. It’s not our legs in the photo, but we wanted it to look like we were all on the bed together, hanging out, because that’s what that first record was about. We started off being friends, and then writing music, and now we’ve got an album. It wasn’t much deeper than that. It felt right.

SLUG: I was wondering if it was your legs.

Wittle: No, it’s two people wearing different socks to make it look like four people. 

SLUG: It seems like all four of you are really close friends, and you can just play around and be goofy with your music. There are a lot of bands where there’s a lot of turmoil between members — maybe they’re dating each other, or they have broken up — like Fleetwood Mac, famously. Sometimes people say that the best music comes from having a dramatic personal life that is intertwined with your music. But at the same time, I feel like the opposite can be true, too. Having really tight, close friendships and love between band members can make the music truly great. Do you agree with that? 

Wittle: I don’t know how people do it and don’t like each other, because you have to spend an ungodly amount of time together. 

Howard: In the ‘70s, when Fleetwood Mac was making music, they were probably earning a shit ton of money.

Wittle: Yeah, they could just book a hotel on their own, whereas now, the reality is we’re sharing a room for a weeklong time period. I don’t understand how you could not get on with your bandmates in this day and age. We spend so much time together, and the reward is not monetary. We all started off being friends.

When it comes to the collaborative element of songwriting and performing together, that foundation of friendship makes Lime Garden’s music what it is. Having just recorded their next album last week, they promise it will have a more cohesive direction and theme, and they tease the prospect of playing a few new songs during their Kilby Block Party set on Sunday, May 18. “We’re way more sure of ourselves, of what we want to do and who we are. We’re in a really good place to just fucking go for it,” Howard says.

Read more interviews with artists performing at Kilby Block Party 6:
“Love All” is the Beginning and the End: An Interview with Tennis
Bartees Strange on Horror, Alternate Worlds and George Clinton