Sounds of Melancholic Wonder: The Lemon Twigs on Their Path to 'Everything Harmony'
Tuesday, 09 May 2023
Written by Simon Ramsay
Photo: Eva Chambers
Anyone who’s experienced The Lemon Twigs’ flamboyant retro-theatrical-pop stylings will already know that Brian and Michael D’Addario love to reinvent themselves on every record. But even fans who’ve become accustomed to the New York siblings’ convention-defying music might be taken aback by how sweet and vulnerable they sound on the sophisticated folk-rock of ‘Everything Harmony’.
It’s been fascinating to watch these former childhood actors develop since arriving on the scene with 2016’s ‘Do Hollywood.’ Combining baroque pop opulence with grandiose broadway numbers and so much more, the wildly imaginative twosome were clearly bursting with enough ideas to sustain an entire career as they flew through a succession of exceptionally well-executed pastiche pieces.
Such creative abandon reached even bolder heights on ‘Go to School’, an allegorical rock opera about a chimpanzee named Shane who was raised as a human boy before, in the wake of bullying and heartache, burning down his high school and fleeing back to the wild. But the duo badly needed to hone what they were doing, and allow their own identity to shine, if they wanted to fashion the kind of classic tunes that inspired their younger selves.
Cue ‘Songs for the General Public’, a rollicking and radiant affair that saw the D’Addarios’ songwriting blossom, contouring their skills into a freewheeling barrage of hook-laden pop-glam-punk bangers with class to burn. Although picking up from that release in terms of quality, ‘Everything Harmony’ couldn’t be more different.
Overflowing with spine-tingling harmonies, timeless Laurel Canyon melodies, beautifully sad storytelling and textural splendour, it’s a deeply personal work by an increasingly disciplined outfit who, without sacrificing any unique proclivities, have refined their irrepressible urges with stunning results. We caught up with Brian, the older D’Addario at 26 to Michael’s 24, to discuss every facet of their impressive progression, while also hearing about experimenting with furniture-based sounds and what we can expect from their next two albums.
‘Everything Harmony’ is a fourth record that more than makes good on your promise to approach The Lemon Twigs from a different angle on every album. But before we speak about that, how do you look back on your earlier efforts, which were bursting with ideas, but not as focussed or streamlined as the most recent two?
I see them as formative practice records. I still really like our third, the one that came out before this one, and I’d never had the sustained enjoyment of a record we made before that. It felt like the way forward, kind of living with the song for a while, even if you recorded them right after they were written, but then having them in some state of gestation for a while before deciding ‘this is what I want to put out.’ We’ve definitely found a style too. At this point I have a few different ones. A few different modes. But we’re always trying to find a new one. There’s always going to be records that are kind of in between those and are always stepping stones for another one.
Michael described ‘Songs For The General Public’ as being your interpretation of pop music, so what’s ‘Everything Harmony’ your interpretation of? What were the inspirations you took your cues from before spinning everything in your own way?
Maybe songwriting in general. It was like an exercise in picking the strongest melodies and words. But the music’s main influence, sonically, was ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, ‘Pet Sounds’ and Arthur Russell. His compilation ‘Iowa Dream’ was a huge influence. But the commonality is that each of those artists have their own melodic identity and if you strip it away from all the production elements, the songs stand on their own.
But we really got into the sonics on the record. We went to Hyde Street Studios in San Francisco and it was the first time we’d invested that much in a piece of music. Getting string players in and having them overdub themselves eight times, putting everything through these acoustic echo chambers, experimenting with different overdubs, playing the couch, mic-ing up the couch, mic-ing up the piano bench. Every experiment we did, it was all acoustic instruments and acoustic sounds. Actual sounds. We also stayed away from the synths we used on the last record and there wasn’t a whole lot of heavy delay or anything like that, which helped the record have a sonic identity to it
We were pretty influenced by Phil Spector too, particularly his late 70s recordings like ‘Death of a Ladies Man’ (Leonard Cohen) and Dion’s ‘Born To Be With You’, which is all about using whatever is available at the time, in a similar way to what he would have done in the ‘60s if he could get everybody together. We got other musicians in to play with us, which we hadn’t before, from our live band at the time. Corner of My Eye, I Don’t Belong To Me and What Happens to A Heart, we tried to play those at the same time and capture the spirit of those Spector recordings.
What Happens To A Heart is exquisitely arranged and orchestrated. How much time and effort went into crafting that song?
That one took the most time, just getting the balance right once we’d got all of those instruments on there. When we have an idea for a part and realise we need some French horn, to get the person in and have them play that, it’s like ‘oh man’ because we can be a little bit lazy when it comes to getting other people involved. You have to explain your idea and that can make us a bit anxious, socially.
We don’t want to offend anybody when they’re playing. We’re so used to working with each other, we can’t offend each other if we try. We’ve said everything already. So it took a lot of listening before realising it wasn’t done. We had to get other people in to play this and that and had to go in and play things again, and then do 30 mixes, to get it so you can hear the vocal but also the arrangement of the track. It was a very difficult album to mix.
You’ve said you wanted to create something really beautiful with this album, where the sounds are as important as the songs themselves. Which tracks best showcase that desire?
Born to Be Lonely, I’m proud of how that turned out. I Don’t Belong To Me, I’m proud of that because it’s very sparse until the end, and that was a good collaboration because Michael had that horn line and I came up with the harmonies that were underneath. I wrote it out and there’s a lot of subtle textural work that went into that arrangement. But I don’t think it overtakes the song. And that’s the hard thing. You almost have an impulse to mask the song in the middle because you get all these ideas while you’re recording it and things that became your favourite parts of the song are actually the least important. It felt like we struck a balance with that.
So many artificial production techniques have been employed over the last couple of decades. What’s the key to making a great sounding record like ‘Everything Harmony’?
To us, it’s pretty imperative to record in an analogue way. There’s things that were recorded very cheaply that we love the sound of. Arthur Russell’s stuff is a good example of that, or Peter Ivers, things that were recorded on a budget. They had a tape machine, mic-ed the drums closed and relied on performances to make the song good. And obviously the limited amount of tracks. Even though we used tonnes of tracks on this record, a limited amount of tracks as an arranging tool is helpful.
You want a full production within the first five instruments you lay down on a song. Everything after that should probably just be...window dressing? I don’t know what the expression is, but it should just be to reinforce what you already have on the track. To get an album that sounds like ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ is still very elusive to me. The studios at that time had a very beautiful sound, but the fact it doesn’t sound exactly that way is what’s going to make the album sound like its own unique thing.
‘Everything Harmony’ actually begins with a Bridge Over Troubled Water-styled epic in Winter Comes Around. What inspired that opener?
It’s definitely the song I like most, lyrically, because it came from a place I couldn’t identify. It was just a case of writing the first verse quickly, starting to write a second verse and realising it wasn’t coming from the same place, and then just stopping and having a lot of patience waiting for some more words to come. I was probably working on, or I let sit, for about six months before it was finished.
But I was in a head space where, I think it was post-‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’, the Bob Dylan album that came out a couple of years ago, he was writing these long epics and I got the notion I wanted to write one. I don’t know where it came from but maybe it speaks to going a bit out of our depth as a species? Everybody’s concerned about that, I think. Going past the point of where we should, as far as technological advancement. But it was a personal thing as well, like why you do things that aren’t good for you and go past the point you should.
What headspace were you in while writing this record, because it feels like such an introspective, reflective and meditative album must have been, at least partially, inspired by the events of the last few years and how they impacted you?
I mean, yeah, you couldn’t escape it. Part of it was just waking up to the fact that, I think I knew this but hadn’t really focused on it in my writing, there isn’t a happy path for everybody. Sometimes people are just at the whim of whatever environment they’re in. That was something that everybody felt and you turn it on yourself because you can’t change your environment. You felt pretty powerless in that time. I know I did. But there were also songs written before the pandemic, like Corner of My Eye, which is a soft delicate song. I knew we wanted to go down that path musically and was sort of waiting for Michael to have an impulse in that direction. Which he did and we went all the way with it.
You and Michael harmonise a lot more on this album than you have done in the past. Did you learn anything new about how you could blend your voices together that maybe you hadn’t realised before?
We learned from each other. Our voices are similar anyway, but it changes the way you sing when you sing with somebody else a lot. You meet in the middle. But the Simon & Garfunkel influence made us want to sing on the same mic. Getting obsessed watching performances of them and knowing the way they did it. We tried that on a number of songs, some we recorded separately, some on the same mic.
I can tell you who wrote what song and that will give you some idea of who is singing, but when it comes to harmonies there were a lot. Ghosts Run Free is my song but we’re both singing pretty much the whole time, because the chorus is where I’m singing but Michael sings the bridge. We did that a lot because we wanted that unified sound. We didn’t necessarily want people to think ‘Now we’ve got a Michael song, now we have a Brian song.’ We wanted it to really be a complete album.
The Lemon Twigs are embarking on a UK tour later this month. How are you integrating these intimate new songs in to your set while maintaining a good momentum and energy?
It’s been pretty easy because the group we’ve been playing with are so good. They’re bringing their own energy to it in a way that’s made the songs come together more. They have a real talent for playing this kind of music, playing our parts and keep getting better at them. So it’s a Beach Boys philosophy of getting the arrangements as perfect as the CD and then trying to get it right every night. You have to stay really focused to do that. How would I say it’s different? It’s like we’ve taken some of the songs from our last record and maybe given them a feel of the more energetic songs on this record like In My Head and Ghosts Run Free. Translating them to 12 string, incorporating more harmonies, and it’s been really fun so far.
Finally, I imagine you’ve already got plenty of ideas where to go from here, and already have more albums ready to roll, so what twists and turns might be coming next?
There’s a record we recorded the bulk of before this called ‘Brian’s In Love,’ which is from a Brian Wilson interview where he said that’s what he was gonna call the next Beach Boys album. I thought it was a much better title than what they went with, which was ‘Beach Boys Love You.’ But that’s exactly where I was at at the time. It’s songs I wrote when I fell in love, so they have this euphoric feel to them. I wrote them very quickly and Michael has a few tunes on it as well. It leans more into a Jon Brion, Van Dyke Parks-esque, Randy Newman-esque thing that’s sort of on this record too. There was a Curtis Mayfield influence coming through as well. Two or three songs are more soulful but the majority of them are standard me with modern instrumentation. More like Punch Drunk Love.
So that’s one I’m really excited about and we’ve sort of waited on it because we wanted a real orchestra, but will probably end up doing it in a similar way to this record, getting a string quartet to overdub themselves. A lot. And then there’s a record that’s closer to being done that leans into more of a country thing. It has a lot of 12 string, maybe more Byrds-y than country, but both those things intertwine. Some more Dylan influence in there too. That will probably come out next. It’s like we’ve got too many songs to finish, but we’re trying to get more help. We’re trying to use people for mixing and to help us turn things around quicker so we can catch up with ourselves.
The Lemon Twigs Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Sat May 27 2023 - BRIGHTON Chalk
Sun May 28 2023 - BRISTOL SWX
Mon May 29 2023 - GLASGOW SWG3 TV Studio
Wed May 31 2023 - MANCHESTER New Century
Thu June 01 2023 - LONDON Electric Ballroom
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