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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?”
