TRILLS' Tallulah Brown on new play SONGLINES

I have two jobs. I’m a playwright, and I'm also in a girlband called TRILLS. The two work alongside each other as an ideal dream team. I have two TV shows about the music industry currently in development with Warp and Bandit. Being freelance means I can travel with TRILLS to Margate to record with our producer, and also meant I could go to LA last year to make a music video. There are of course hideous clash moments: I was sacked over email by my first agent in the UEFA office while TRILLS were being asked to sing out the Champions League Final! That was a real classic.

When the brilliant HighTide festival approached me to write a play that featured TRILLS, my main concern was how the hell I'd be able to sit on stage while the actors performed my lines. I started writing this mad mantra all over my office "If the play's good enough, you'll be able to sit on stage." That made it sound so simple!

I knew I wanted to write a love story: a town mouse, country mouse love story. My idea was to use the simplicity of "a love song" to work with that, and work against it at various points across the play. I envisaged TRILLS' music as the play's soundtrack, I never saw the play as being a musical. Thanks to the Arts Council, I had a week working with actors during the day and TRILLS coming in every evening. The songs really varied; from lyrics that described exactly what a character felt but couldn’t say, to the more epic, seismic, grandeur stuff – like the single we've released from the play, "Green Ghost".

I went away to rewrite SONGLINES, and regularly showed TRILLS edits over the next few months. We worked on the songs and the sound, underscoring parts of the play, and finding moments where we'd bring TRILLS to the front of the narrative. TRILLS have had success with our music being used for film trailers because of our unusual use of harmony. This dissonant sound works well with the play: two teenagers fall for each other, but through a series of misunderstandings and miscommunications manage to push each other away. What sounds like a simple love song has a growing, dark, clashing dissonance: the threat, the jolt, the fear.

At times the actors speak into microphones. They’re telling their story and it almost sounds like stand up, it's very confessional, very personal. They tell the audience what they wish they'd said, what they felt at the time. We're told at the start of the play that Stevie has stopped listening to music. She has shut herself off from it. Her emotional associations with music are so massive, she hasn’t got the strength to sit through certain songs. My favourite part of the play is when she gets up to sing with us. The play is set in a gig and the whole time the audience is thinking, "how will this link? How will we get back to the gig?" Stevie socks it to the audience and it gives me tingles every night.

One reviewer has said about TRILLS in relation to the play; "They move through clashes and dissonance as they rise and fall, and that makes the ultimate resolution all the more satisfying. Such music must pass through something a little harsh before it can reach something beautiful… it's sort of like living in a song."