The Lemon Twigs

All Photos By Taylor Monica

Help! I interviewed the Lemon Twigs and all I got was this shirt! It says “The greatest thing in power-pop since those plastic hamburger telephones” with a photo of Nixon and Elvis shaking hands but the D’Addario brothers’ faces are crudely airbrushed over theirs.

Wait that’s actually awesome. PRESS THAT!

Anyways, I sat down with the Lemon Twigs because the back door was unlocked and they were too nice to refuse a man with clearly nothing to lose in this godforsaken world. Here’s as far as we got before a bunch of huge guys with unbelievably tight ponytails pulled me off them:

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It seems as the world becomes a crazier place The Lemon Twigs find themselves in their most mellow form. Can you speak to this observation?

Brian: Well, we kind of had been wanting to go that way for a while, just because songs started to pile up that were ballads and really harmony driven, and they were kind of our best songs for a while, I think. But we wanted to do a more energetic record when it was time to do our third 4AD record. So some of the songs, like “Corner of My Eye” were from around that time, but just didn't fit on the last one.

Michael: Our albums are generally kind of compilatory. Probably a lot of people are that way. You know, some songs have been hanging around for a long time, and some songs are brand new. So we just kind of put the ones together that sound the same.

Obviously you’ve delved headfirst into conceptual music with 2018’s Go To School, but I don’t think that means every Twigs album is without a concept. Could you talk on the concept for Everything Harmony and what went into its reality?

Michael: Just taking the melodicism and song writing craft seriously. I don't mean taking ourselves seriously or anything like that, but just working really hard. And not just throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks, you know? We worked hard on the structure of every song. And the structure is solid.

Brian: It's kind of reflective of our overall mood at a certain time. I mean, it's definitely reflective of our mood like two years ago, when we probably wrote most of the songs. And it's just a very bored time. Also kind of more looking outside of ourselves and taking in the overall vibe of that period of time, at least on my songs.

Would you say power-pop and fashion are harmonious? How is the music you listen to and play translated through your wardrobe and vice versa?

Michael: I think the music is all like the album cover. It's all the same things, like everything has to match. We kind of go through different periods and different phases, but usually things match.

Brian: When we’re wanting to do a real rocking, heavy show, I think we probably wanna dress the part for that. This show that we're doing is such a combination of mellow and rock, and it's interesting. There's so many more harmonies than we've really ever done before, and more structured playing. It's more upbeat-more consistently upbeat than the other shows that we've done. So we're kind of into more colorful stuff right now.

Michael: Typically people can only do, like, one thing well at a time. We have four guys in the band right now who can play songs in an arranged style with a lot of harmonies. That's what we're excelling at. We had other bands where they excelled at improvisation, and we exploited that. We had bands where the main thing was spontaneity, and the way that everybody is acting and stuff. So this is what we're doing really well. The way it connects is that the style is basically dictated by whatever is around or whatever is inspiring. And anytime you try to do something else, it always comes off not inspired. It's really…

Brian: Forced.

Michael: I was gonna say inauthentic.

It’s no secret y’all were involved with the film industry and thus associated in Hollywood for some time. How are the film and music industries alike and different, and what made you trade in acting for musicianship?

Michael: Well, we were always really musicians. We just happen to act. It was like a sport or something.

Brian: With SAG you have to make a certain amount of money if you do this sort of thing. The rules are more set in stone I think within that industry. I didn't ever do much. We did this TV show that was through SAG a couple years ago, and coming out of doing a bunch of music stuff over the years, It was so organized.

Michael: I imagine the world of indie, like what we're doing, the way that we're in music is more akin to an indie film world. When we were acting, we were acting on a high level. We were acting in broadway stuff, and that’s all very official. None of the music stuff we do is that official. Everybody's just, like, calling their friends.

Brian: It's just more Lucy Goosey.

Michael: It's gotta be different for, like, Beck And people like that. People who use musicians all the time. They're on the clock and everything.

How have those skills helped you as performers on stage? Do you think there’s a certain truth in theatre that couldn’t be intimated any way else?

Brian: I think the sort of head space that I'd like to get into more is the kind of head space I was in when I was in theater. Which almost feels like autopilot, but it doesn't really feel like autopilot. It's like a very real focus. But you know what you're doing on such a level where as long as you just don't break your concentration, you're doing stuff without thinking about it. You're acting without thinking about it. And you're present always. But that was musicals. I almost felt no emotion but we would do it really well rather than doing something serious where you actually have to feel those emotions. I definitely wouldn't wanna act out my songs with the kind of music that we do. It's more like hitting every note with precision rather than trying to really sell it.

Michael: All of our stuff that we use is from-for me at least-just when we were playing constantly. When we were kids we did like a million shows just as our band, just as a little kids show.

I think often the morbidity in the subject matter of your songs is overlooked. What purpose does tragedy serve for your creative output?

Michael: For me competitiveness and anxiety and depression are probably my main-specifically anxiety really, not depression so much. But anxiety is typically what spurs my creativity. Like that I haven't written enough songs or something. I have a lot of songs, but we can't put them out or whatever because they're not finished. Or the label won't let us put out as much as we want to put out, or they won't do it fast enough. So I'm the I'm always like, ‘Ah! I gotta finish something!’

Brian: And then maybe lyrics that come out of that emotion tend to be a little bit more crazy. It’s usually you’re trying to work your way through to get to a singular idea. Lyrically you have some little idea, part of an idea that comes through in the improvised lyrics that come with the melody and then through the verses. I think you're kind of trying to work it out.

Michael: It's so much harder to think of an interesting idea that is not already taken that’s a super positive spin on anything. My dad said, ‘You should make it “Everyday is the First Day of my Life”'. And it could have been that, but it wasn’t. And that’s already taken not as a song, but it’s a slogan. So this was kind of a spin on that. It's not really meant to be taken so heavy.

Going back to the point where you were talking about how your lyric formations stem from a certain anxiety: Do you think that anxiety at its core is maybe a fear of being forgotten generations from now and not making enough of impact on society?

Michael: No, I think it's like a youth thing. I think I haven't done enough. I'd like to be able to have done a lot of material so that then if I'm like 60 or something I can just play, pick from these things. And anybody who likes it would know those things, because they don't seem to care after a certain point.

What did y’all think of the last Bob Dylan album Rough and Rowdy Ways?

Brian: That was really inspiring

For Everything Harmony?

Brian: Oh sure. It's totally all natural sounds, as all of his albums are. It was recorded immaculately with no real studio wizardry. I would say probably the arrangements on it, Sinatra albums probably had more of a subconscious impact. Just because hearing those kind of chords, it's really inspiring. And songs from the twenties and thirties.

How do you keep your personalities separate when creating music? Is it an active process?

Brian: I feel like we try to make them more unified.

Michael: We struggled with how to not make them so separate.

Specifically on this new album?

Michael: On the last record [Songs for the General Public]. My songs are a lot different from Brian's on that. Now we’re like, ‘Oh, let's do the same textures on both of these so that they have the same effects so we can trick people into thinking this is the same album.’ But the cover does a lot of work, stuff like that. People then associate the album cover with the songs and the color of the album cover.

Brian: But we sang together on the same mic for a lot of the songs. Like we tried to make it almost like you couldn't tell whose song was whose. I put the same amount of care intothe arrangements for both people's songs.

And what do you hope for the future of Lemon Twigs albums?

Brian: That they come at a rapid pace. That's really the idea. But we can't lose the quality of the recordings, you know. And that's the tricky thing.

Michael: That's the tricky thing about doing all this, this touring that's coming up-which we wanted to do-and wanting to play a lot more. And it's really fun, but it's just more time away.

Brian: If we can get someone else involved with that recording aspect-

Michael: Particularly with the mixing aspect, which we think we might have a guy now who we love. It's our friend Paul Slug Bug, who opened for us a few times. He's just a great mixing engineer.

Brian: -and someone we've been collaborating with on all sorts of stuff, like he co-directed our video for "In My Head". He’s like a jack of all trades. He knows how to do everything.

Michael: He could really, probably help us a lot. And our new band member Reza is really good. And Danny is good. We're just kind of getting a little bit more open to having help. Because it was always like, ‘Oh, I love that guy, but I don't really want him to do anything. I don’t really trust him.’

Brian: Also, it's like we can be so mean to each other in an effort to get to what's right. Or very direct.

Michael: We're not very good at that with other people.

Brian: We get a little cagey, and don't say what we really feel until after.

Michael: Sometimes we perceive things to be worse than they are just because they're coming from the other one. And then we realize after: ‘Oh, you were right about that.’

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Speaking of cages: it turns out there’s a little holding cell at Terminal West in Atlanta where the boys played. The sound was muffled from the cell but it still sounded like a real kick of a show. Good on you boys! I used my one call to the editor of RPM so we could get this hot piece on the shelves posthaste! Thanks Bruce (obviously one of the ponytailed henchmen of Terminal West) for making nice and letting me use your phone. We’re all just doing our job.

To Be Published In Print By Record Plug Magazine