The Lemon Twigs: "I'm not interested in making music for musicians" | Dork
The Lemon Twigs: "I'm not interested in making music for musicians"
Their second album told an oddball tale of a chimpanzee raised as a human boy, but with their new 'un, The Lemon Twigs are looking closer to home.
There's no one quite like The Lemon Twigs. Still an embellishment of sixties and seventies baroque fashion and sound, modernity rarely touches the devilishly creative brothers, Michael and Brian D'Addario.
Having to push the release of their third album back - not an unusual story at this point - with that came some new paths; they got to touch it up a bit, released a live album, and even began the next chapter all before 'Songs For The General Public' is, well, in the hands of the general public.
Exactly the way they want it is how The Lemon Twigs do things; they're the sort of band who live by their own rules.
Chatting to the band (separately, they prefer it this way apparently) the two cogs make themselves known while working harmoniously in tandem. The growth the two brothers have gone through since boarding the hype train back in 2016 for their debut 'Do Hollywood', is from two plucky and determined creative minds into outliers of a pop scene that doesn't quite know where it belongs.
For their third outing, they've delved into exploring and examining society, namely just telling stories, that could either be "from a personal point" or just "channelling what is natural," Michael ponders.
Brian nods to a similar idea: "It's a lot about people's internal and interpersonal struggles. You end up hearing a lot of things that you might hear in real life, but there's a grandiosity to it, that isn't very conversational, you know?"
Given the two have been touring for a fair whack during their career, and they seem like the kind of people determined in their drive to just enjoy the ride, are these things that they've heard on that long and winding road, particularly 'Moon', which celebrates doing what you wanna do?
The brothers are unafraid of biting off more they can chew on the quest for satiating their creative drive.
Immediacy is certainly the order of the day on 'Songs...'. It's filled with some of the duos most energetic and life-affirming tracks, channelling some real seventies, rocking and rolling, the night will never end vibes. But as with all great things, "it was very disorganised in the beginning," Brian admits.
"I was working on a solo record, Michael was working on an almost-completed solo record, and we had an initial group of 10 or 12 songs that we thought the next Lemon Twigs record was going to be. But we just kept working sort of beyond that. Of those, probably three of them were ended up on the album.
It's these delicate songs that will potentially make up the next Lemon Twigs outing, but 'Songs…' is an album that relishes in the upbeat and the driven. "When I look at this one, there's only one or two that I would say fit into that category."
Truthfully, no matter what brush you want to tar the D'Addario brothers with, they don't care. They're a force to be reckoned with, who will create what they want to create, and that might be making a musical based around a chimpanzee, or it might mean exploring society on a granular, warts 'n' all level.
Taken from the September issue of Dork. The Lemon Twigs' album 'Songs For The General Public' is out now.
