Nostalgia is a disservice: In conversation with music’s beautiful anomalies, The Lemon Twigs
Here’s the scene. It’s mid-2024, and brothers Michael and Brian D’Addario, otherwise known as The Lemon Twigs, both casual and intense, sit opposite me in a turquoise office in Shoreditch, surrounded by various vinyl records, four glasses of water, and my phone recording in the centre of the room. A sunny city sits outside. Light creeps through the curtains as the duo’s luscious locks get lost in London hue. It’s probably not the same climate they’re used to back home in New York, and it’s lightyears away from the California dazzle laced within their music, but all in all, it’s a good day in the south.
Here’s the deal: when you interview enough artists, patterns begin to emerge. This is the case in how questions are answered, the enthusiasm with which new and old artists address you, and the general atmosphere surrounding having to do an interview, regardless of how necessary or mundane it might be. However, none of those patterns were present in the room that day. Only oddities abounded.
The Lemon Twigs, still in the desired side of their 20s, have had a glimpse of the commercial highs (see Do Hollywood), the charting lows (see Go To School and Songs for the General Public), and success again (see Everything, Harmony and A Dream Is All We Know), to the extent that when talking about festival season before the interview officially began, Michael made a joke saying they didn’t do any a few years ago because they were “unhireable”. The two evidently adore music but are aware of its pitfalls, and the subsequent vibe they give off is one almost alien in the modern music press. Egos are left at the door, a conversation flows, and it is clear that they are an utterly agenda-less outfit, much like me, they’re simply happy to call whatever it is they’re doing, work.
Here’s the beginning. The two were raised on the same music that their parents were. Placing themselves on the outskirts of the scene from the word go, their music intake consisted of old vinyl and concert footage from decades past. “I like Dave Clark Five. I loved the way Mike Smith used to scream. I thought that was the coolest thing when I was a kid,” says Michael, reflecting on those early days of music consumption, an act which prompts a verbal barrage of songs, bands and albums that the brothers bounce off one another.
“I loved ‘Red Rubber Ball’ by The Cyrkle,” says Brian. “Yeah, a big two-part harmony song,” replies Michael. “’Dead End Street’ by The Kinks,” says Brian, “I remember hearing that, and that was maybe one of the first minor chord songs that I’d heard.” “
Evil sound,” agrees Michael.
Of course, while this love for 1960s and ‘70s music was developing, the scene in New York was a million miles away from that. This meant that they weren’t often going to gigs, and their love for the live sound only began to develop when they started making music and performing themselves, delivering a ‘60s rock-inspired sound in bars that were otherwise occupied by shoegaze.
“A lot of the bands seemed to be very chill, kind of Mac DeMarco-influenced groups because there was a lot of that going on. That and shoegaze-y psych-rock stuff,” recalls Brian, “We would play our early shows and saw a lot of that.”
Despite the scene they were playing in being in complete contention with the music they made, they persisted. “I think we just like the energetic thing, but it’s still so pleasing,” says Michael, trying to put his finger on what about that era jumps out for them. “It’s not so aggressive and distorted that it’s displeasing, I guess. I just like the way that everybody sings. I don’t know, I really don’t know, I just like the sounds of the records.”
Brian continues: “There’s an excitement about the way a lot of that stuff was recorded too because there’s all this distortion happening, by accident sometimes and then on purpose other times. The instruments and the amplification were so new it was like people didn’t have it dialled in to such a degree where everything was recorded completely clean. There’s a vitality about it. With a lot of newer guitar music, it feels a bit smoothed over.”
And while The Lemon Twigs music invokes feelings that remind listeners of what The Beach Boys and The Beatles were doing in the ‘60s, suggesting that they are a band who lean on nostalgia would be doing them a disservice. Nostalgia implies that they copy the sound that inspired them, but they don’t. They wear their influences on their sleeve and develop something uniquely modern. In the same way that Bob Dylan dedicated the songs he wrote early in his career to Woody Guthrie, The Lemon Twigs discography goes out to The Beach Boys and The Beatles while remaining their own.
“The closest thing would be The Beach Boys because I think on every Beach Boys record, there is a level of production value that carries through. Even to 1980, where every recording has at least the value of the fact that they put a lot of work and time into it,” said Michael, “And you could say the same thing about The Beatles, but The Beatles were such a finite thing. I wouldn’t wanna model my career after them because it’s such a moment in time and combustible.”
“[The Beach Boys] also taught us so much about chords and basslines,” adds Brian, “And the way you can create something that anybody can appreciate with elements that are on the more sophisticated side of pop music, for lack of a better term.”
Another reason why the term nostalgia is doing the band a disservice is because nostalgia implies escapism. You imagine that they are burying their heads in the sands of time, reflecting on a decade they weren’t alive for in the hope of getting away from their current lives, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Behind the glistening production and dreamlike instrumentation that makes up The Lemon Twigs’ most recent two albums, Everything, Harmony and A Dream Is All We Know, are some of the most open and vulnerable lyrics out there. As our conversation continues, the true secret to the band’s success and their honest words shine through.
Our conversation isn’t as simple as a straightforward Q&A session; it follows the strange patterns of one of Michael’s answers trailing off and Brian picking it up (and vice versa). It’s an enthused ramble of cut-off thoughts, the same phrases said simultaneously, and the occasional laugh at an in-joke. At some point, it becomes clear that what the musical world is privy to when they listen to The Lemon Twigs isn’t just a band. It’s the inner workings of a relationship between two brothers who have a shared passion.
When you and your sibling wrote a play to perform in front of your parents, you don’t expect it to win an Olivier, and when you both wrote a song together, you didn’t expect to be playing sold-out headline tours off the back of it, but that’s what’s happening to these two. They’ve made a career out of a matured version of childhood wonderment, and we, as listeners, get to experience something truly special as a result.
They sit outside the realm of others making music because very few are making music like them, both in terms of sound and where the inspiration for it comes from. It seems that’s both an advantage and a disadvantage when writing, as that sibling-like need to constantly poke fun at each other persists. “I think it makes it harder; it’s awkward,” said Michael.
“I don’t know if it’s awkward,” said Brian, “We only ever work with pretty close friends on our recordings, so it never really feels too touchy to work with somebody else, even if a song has an emotional aspect to it.”
Michael continues, “We can’t really write lyrics together at all because it feels embarrassing. I would probably have shit on half of his songs if I’d heard them when they were being written.”
Brian laughs, “Totally vapid. Meaningless.”