The Lemon Twigs Interview
Brothers Brian and Michael D’Addario craft their most nuanced album yet, blending nostalgic warmth with evolving songwriting instincts in Everything Harmony.
The Lemon Twigs are back with their fourth studio album, Everything Harmony, which will be released on May 5th on Captured Tracks. The album is a remarkable culmination of brothers Brian and Michael D’Addario’s unique blend of retro pop vocals, intricate acoustic folk melodies, and rich textures, influenced by iconic musicians such as Simon & Garfunkel, Arthur Russell, Moondog, The Beatles and The Beach Boys.
Speaking to the brothers over Zoom perched in their living room in New York, I’m immediately put at ease with their easy charm and friendliness, no egos here. After some perfunctory questions, we got talking about their process and their experience of making their latest record. “It was fun,” Michael tells me, “We produced the last one too. But this was very much just us and an engineer friend of ours, Reese. We went to San Francisco. We did some initial recordings in Midtown at our old recording space rehearsal with some of our friends from the live band that plays with us. Then we went over to San Francisco and did some mixing and recorded some new tracks. It was just us and Reese, which was awesome because it was the three of us with the run of a real studio, which we’d never had. We’ve never really been in a real studio other than to record other people’s stuff, and that was a minimal experience, really.”
I’m curious how they find using their home set-up versus these big studios. “I like both,” Michael says, “what’s nice about those places is that you can have an opportunity to use the highest quality equipment and figure out what is actually helping or not. There’s a lot of unnecessary stuff in the studios, a lot of bells and whistles that don’t matter. And then there’s a lot of things that you go, wow, if I had this, you know. And that helps because you can then say these are the essentials for my studio, right? So, I like the home recording, but going to all these different studios is great. You can find out what you like and everything.”
“We only use vintage and analogue equipment,” they explain. Brian adds that because they only had a string quartet, they decided to mix digitally because they knew they would be overdubbing the quartet eight or so times to get the lush orchestral sound they were after, though they make sure to point out that the vocals are recorded on tape.
As he brought up their vocals, I ask what the impetus was for making a more melodic record than maybe their last few albums.
“The last record before and the one before this one were very varied. There was a lot of rock stuff. There was a lot of uptempo kind of hyper material,”
Brian tells me. “That was good for playing live…I don’t know, there was no live stuff happening at the time, and we had a certain number of songs like ‘Corner of My Eye’ and a couple more acoustic tracks already written. And I think Michael and I both just got into a more delicate songwriting style”.
“I think it’s partly because of the things that we were listening to at the time,” Michael adds, “the likes of Simon and Garfunkel and Arthur Russell — stuff with delicate sounds and texture — a lot of pretty stuff. You can do whatever when…” his voice trailing off before Brian jumps in laughing, “when you have a certain amount of natural talent.”
Michael protests, clearly not what he was intending to say as Brian carries on the riff by quoting his namesake Brian Wilson, “God blessed me with some talent,” gently ribbing his little brother, “That’s from a Brian Wilson interview,” he adds so that I don’t think he means it about them. “No, I don’t know,” Michael says, lost in his thought, “you can do a number of different things. It’s just one of the avenues we decided to go down.”
Getting into the nitty gritty of their songwriting process I ask them how they divide the duties and who does what. Michael says it’s mostly separate, but then they’ll come together and hash it out together. “Little things like, should I use this chord or this chord?” Brian adds: “Very direct collaboration.” I’m curious about their approach to bridges in their songs, as their bridges are very good and not always the easiest thing to write, I say. “I’ll write the bridge after the initial impulse of the song,” Brian says matter-of-factly. Michael jumps in— “a lot of time when you write the first bit of the song, and then you think, Oh, this will be the next bit, but then it’s not quite catchy enough or something — It’s more of a tangent, and then you stick that in after the bridge. Then the thing with that is that they definitely fit because they were really right after the initial thought, you know what I mean?” He says this as though he has divulged a masonic secret, and maybe he has. Songwriting is a mercurial and intangible business, the good songs living in the esoteric realm, and you need magic to get there sometimes.
I push them for specifics on how they approached writing for their new album. “You know, we get excited about things,” Michael says.
“I suddenly started to like things that I had an aversion to before, you know? So, started to write a lot of songs that were coming from a place that I had never written from. I was trying hard to write melodies that would hold up to Brian’s melodies.”
Brian continues, “Yeah, it’s typically when I’m playing the guitar and am noodling around. I think I wrote the best songs on this album when I was playing and practising classical pieces on a nylon string guitar.”
“I did the opposite. I wrote a lot of my songs on the piano.” Michael adds, pausing before adding pensively, “There’s definitely a genetic component because our dad’s a songwriter”.
“He has similar tendencies as a melodist,” Brain concludes. As they brought up their family, I ask them what’s their earliest musical memory, “there’s a lot of them on video, so it’s hard to know what’s a memory and what’s just something we’ve seen,” Michael says. “But there’s a great video of Brian trying to play Strawberry Fields on the keyboard — he must have been like four years old or five years old. And he’s like trying to do it, but he can’t do it, and he starts sobbing, he goes, I can’t do it. But it was cool because he so badly wanted to be able to play it and couldn’t.” There you go, the Lemon Twigs’ origin story straight from the horse’s mouth.
As we’re on the subject of The Beatles, I ask if this album was a Beatles solo record which would it be? This starts a brisk debate between the brothers, and they settle on All Things Must Pass, mainly due to the amount of reverb they use on the album. “It’s not very zany, you know, like Ram or something,” Brian says before adding, “I’ll have to give that a lot of thought.” Michael lets out of howl of laughter as his brother says this. Maybe he’s laughing at the audacity of the challenge but I get the impression that Brian will think about it, not because of any illusions that they are The Beatles but because he loves their music and the nuances of what it takes to make a great record.
Favourite Beatle? “My favourite Beatle is John Lennon. My favourite Beatle is definitively John Lennon.” Michael says, “My favourite Beatles album is probably Rubber Soul or the White Album,” he says after a long pause. Solo John? “I guess it’s got to be Plastic Ono Band, but definitely would, you know, Walls and Bridges and Mind Games are up there.” Michael continues to list most of John’s albums and even throws in his demos, saying he probably listens to those more, but Plastic Ono Band wins the best solo Beatle record. Period. Brian agrees, “I would say Plastic Ono for solo and Revolver for Beatle album.”
“But what Beatle?” Michael insists. The brothers go back and forth for a bit, Brain saying he doesn’t want to say, Paul or John. Michael reminds Brian that his favourite song is ‘For No One.’ Brian concludes, “Paul was the master of being in The Beatles.” I feel that this is a debate that has been going on for a long time, and I can’t disagree with Brian’s conclusion; Paul certainly was the master of being in The Beatles. Throughout my conversation with them, I’m constantly struck by how dear they hold the music of the 60s and 70s, whether that be the awe they felt seeing Leonard Cohen perform or discussing their love of The Beach Boys (their favourite band) to the merits of each Beatle, they really take the job of making music seriously, and luckily for the brothers D’Addario, God has blessed them with some talent.
Photography By: Eva Chambers
Interview Taken from Still Listening Magazine Issue Five: 21/04/2023