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| In their natural state.... |
“Brian: Creatively, it's been pretty healthy since we've started enjoying each other's music --
Michael: We just get out of each other's faces.
Brian: But there's like a looming question of the fact that we split the duties and we fill up an album with half my songs and half of Michael's songs, basically.
Michael: What's the looming question? I'm still waiting on the looming question. Nothing's looming.
Brian: It's looming so much that I'll never get to it.”
That exchange is about four years old, but it sums up the functioning relationship between brothers behind The Lemon Twigs, Michael and Brian D’Addario. People with patience for sibling squabbling can enjoy through an extended version of it in a two-part interview with an outlet called Face Culture from a year earlier (pt. 1 and pt. 2). They’re both very young in that one - Brian around 18, and Michael just 16 - and it takes a little while to warm up…but once it does, holy shit, is it entertaining (it’s comedy gold for me). They did interviews separately after that, at least for a while. As Michael explained in a 2018 interview with The Independent, “Better to contradict than to be cut off.”
Spotify hepped me to The Lemon Twigs about [two and a half years] go with “Tailor Made,” which dropped me in the early-middle portion of their output. Without knowing anything about them, I thought they’d read my likes and fed me either an old 70s song, or some throwback act pushing their mid-20s or so. Turns out the actual story is much odder.
The D’Addarios grew up in a musical family from Hicksville, Long Island - one wired enough into that world where they could ask Todd Rundgren to sing a part on their second album. Both brothers have been performing since childhood, doing everything from Youtube videos to multiple shows on Broadway - e.g., from 2018 article in an outlet called Another Man Mag (this is Michael), “Assassins, The King and I, South Pacific and Oklahoma as childhood favourites, in addition to early roles in Oliver and “fucking Les Mis and stuff like that” - to movies involving Ethan Hawke and Michelle Pfeiffer. They started writing their own material by age 7 (per Brian, “basically a Monkees song” called “Girl”). They put out Do Hollywood in 2016, an either conscious or unconscious homage to The Beatles or The Beach Boys, or even Procol Harum (that Face Culture interview is messy), but a mid-60s Beatles influence comes through very cleanly on a track like “Those Days Is Comin’ Soon” (or “Haroomata”), among others. Their debut EP, Brothers of Destruction, makes a case for my, frankly, shaky understanding of The Beach Boys - e.g., “Why Didn’t You Say That?”
Michael: We just get out of each other's faces.
Brian: But there's like a looming question of the fact that we split the duties and we fill up an album with half my songs and half of Michael's songs, basically.
Michael: What's the looming question? I'm still waiting on the looming question. Nothing's looming.
Brian: It's looming so much that I'll never get to it.”
That exchange is about four years old, but it sums up the functioning relationship between brothers behind The Lemon Twigs, Michael and Brian D’Addario. People with patience for sibling squabbling can enjoy through an extended version of it in a two-part interview with an outlet called Face Culture from a year earlier (pt. 1 and pt. 2). They’re both very young in that one - Brian around 18, and Michael just 16 - and it takes a little while to warm up…but once it does, holy shit, is it entertaining (it’s comedy gold for me). They did interviews separately after that, at least for a while. As Michael explained in a 2018 interview with The Independent, “Better to contradict than to be cut off.”
Spotify hepped me to The Lemon Twigs about [two and a half years] go with “Tailor Made,” which dropped me in the early-middle portion of their output. Without knowing anything about them, I thought they’d read my likes and fed me either an old 70s song, or some throwback act pushing their mid-20s or so. Turns out the actual story is much odder.
The D’Addarios grew up in a musical family from Hicksville, Long Island - one wired enough into that world where they could ask Todd Rundgren to sing a part on their second album. Both brothers have been performing since childhood, doing everything from Youtube videos to multiple shows on Broadway - e.g., from 2018 article in an outlet called Another Man Mag (this is Michael), “Assassins, The King and I, South Pacific and Oklahoma as childhood favourites, in addition to early roles in Oliver and “fucking Les Mis and stuff like that” - to movies involving Ethan Hawke and Michelle Pfeiffer. They started writing their own material by age 7 (per Brian, “basically a Monkees song” called “Girl”). They put out Do Hollywood in 2016, an either conscious or unconscious homage to The Beatles or The Beach Boys, or even Procol Harum (that Face Culture interview is messy), but a mid-60s Beatles influence comes through very cleanly on a track like “Those Days Is Comin’ Soon” (or “Haroomata”), among others. Their debut EP, Brothers of Destruction, makes a case for my, frankly, shaky understanding of The Beach Boys - e.g., “Why Didn’t You Say That?”
Having come in at the middle - again, “Tailor Made,” but also “Foolin’ Around” - I came into The Lemon Twigs hearing something closer to The Rolling Stones - rawer, looser, just ballsier, guitar-driven, straight-70s rock sound. And so I proceeded from there, into this:
“But is the world ready for second album Go to School, a fantastical, Tommy-meets-Rodgers and Hammerstein opus about Shane the adopted chimpanzee who, unloved, bullied and heartbroken burns down his school, killing 100 people, before running away to the woods to live a life of reflective solitude?”
Musically, Go To School goes all over - e.g., The Stones with “Never in My Arms, Always in My Heart” (that video is fucking brilliant...) and “This Is My Tree” (especially in Michael’s vocals), to a pair of late-70s piano-centered ballads (Elton John?) in “The Lonely” and “Home of a Heart (The Woods)” to tunes that stand up that Rodgers and Hammerstein nod like “The Lesson” - but I listened to the thing five times before realizing it was, in fact, built around the tale of an adopted chimpanzee trying to find his way in the specific cruel setting of human adolescence.
Something messy and ambitious as all that can’t be for everyone, obviously - and the more I watch The Lemon Twigs, the more the whole thing presents as performance (see the light-comedy mugging in the video for “The One,” from their latest album, more later) - but one thing always stands out: the D’Addarios do what they do very well. Loud and Quiet’s review of Go to School nails it when it calls them “master magpies.” (I stumbled down a rabbit-hole of reviews, so here you go: Pitchfork (appropriately, exhaustingly jaded), Flood; but Pop Matters wins with this sentence: “The result sounds like Jellyfish, backed by the Boston Pops, performing Tommy. I told you it was preposterous.”)
Their latest album, Songs for the General Public, released (I think) in August 2020 is more - rock grounded in the 70s sound - and less - it’s not a rock opera - of the same. All the same, it marks a progression in that the Beatles/Beach Boys nods from their earliest material has essentially evaporated. The sonic palette is more consistent - very bright sounds, lotsa major chord sounds - and all hailing from early-to-mid-70s before the “radio-accessible rock” era of Boston, Journey, Foreigner, etc. If you’re fan of that era (e.g., me, hand way up and waving around), it’s like everything else in The Lemon Twigs catalog: good, fun goddamn music.
I want to close on the open question of where The Lemon Twigs go from here. They’re unquestionably fans of 70s rock, as Michael explained to Another Man Mag:
“I like old fashioned rock – those sounds are great; those voices are great. I think it’s the modern influence. A lot of influences get in there, and a lot of that shit gets lost. I don’t know what draws us to play it – it’s just what I know. It’s rock music – it’s what I know how to do. I’m not a great rapper!”
But also this (same interview):
“The Cardi shit – all that shit that’s on the radio is tight,” he adds, perhaps unexpectedly. “The new Kanye stuff sounds amazing. It’s not like I think that there’s no genius; no great modern stuff. I love a lot of stuff, it’s just rock that barely ever appeals to me.”
Related, they once called Kanye’s “Ghost Town” the greatest thing since…something by The Beatles…but then there’s that “I’m not a great rapper…”
About the Sampler
Having covered Go To School pretty well above, I just want to flag a couple songs from Do Hollywood and Songs for the General Public for people who don’t have Spotify: how about “These Words,” “As Long as We’re Together,” and “Frank” from the former, and “Hell on Wheels,” “Live in Favor of Tomorrow," and “Only a Fool” from the latter (which I included because it sounds like the damn Chimpmunks...).
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