The Lemon Twigs Q + A
FORMAT FESTIVAL 2022 // WORDS BY LIZ WATTS // PHOTOS BY EMMA WATTS
The Lemon Twigs are the power pop, musical theater, gritty, visionaries of our dreams- and they’re siblings. We chatted with Brian and Michael D'Addario on Day 3 of FORMAT Festival about individuality, drawing inspiration from film, and their upcoming show benefitting the Wild Honey Foundation.
HPM: Coming from people who are running a business/brand as siblings, how do you keep your individuality while also collaborating?
M: We don't worry too much about that. I mean, I think it's just like when you have a band, I think you want it to be as in sync as you can. In fact, you have to try to figure out how to not seem so individual. I mean, obviously when you look similar, right, it's a good thing because it does a lot of the work for you. People kind of confuse you and everything, right? Yeah. So I feel like we have the opposite problem.
Playing on individuality, I know you both work on other musical projects. How do you kind of separate yourself from “I'm Brian from the Lemon Twigs” and you just as an artist and creator?
M: Well, I think that we're both very confident as musicians. You know, aside from the band itself, we don't really lean on the band. If we're in a situation where we're playing on somebody else's stuff, you find in that indie world like that you're not really up against a whole lot in terms of people who are dexterous. And Brian especially, it's like, you know, he'll go into a session and it's, it's like, that kind of stuff goes out the window. It's really more like, “uh, Hey, could you play this?” And it's never something that he's not capable of playing. I usually only do drums.
I know you all have a unique upbringing in music, like your exposure to Broadway when you were younger. How are those things fueling you creatively? Are there any other things like art or film that you really look towards for inspiration?
M: The film is, it's great for lyrical inspiration. Sometimes people say things in old movies or foreign films and you're able to use those and repurpose those lyrics. Typically the language is just better and especially with noir, there are great one-liners, you know, little lines and everything. There are so many puns and those make for great lyrics.
You're an embellishment of sixties and seventies fashion and style and culture! Do you have a Pinterest board for gathering visual inspiration?
B: I should have something to kind of organize it. But usually, there's just one person that I like at a time- a musician or a director or something like that.
M: I think that you know, you're better off just chewing things up and spitting them out. Putting together something like that is almost too official. It's almost too mental. It's like you just take it in and spit it out and write down whatever while you're watching.
B: I think we both like to watch TV and just write while we're watching. Or like, I'll read a book or poetry while playing guitar. And I won't like plagiarize, I'll just try to keep the processes as un-mental as possible. Just very fluid, you know.
M: If you keep it that way and everything's just a mishmash in your head, then you're able to just kind of pull things. I think when you do a Pinterest thing, that's sometimes how you wind up ripping things off. Pretty like direct
That makes so much sense! Almost like you have too much to look at, too much that can be copied exactly.
M: Yeah! You kind of just wanna have these things floating around in your head, you know what I mean?
So you say you draw inspiration for lyrics from movies. I loved one of the new songs that you played, it started with something along the lines of “people died to make room for babies to be born” and it felt like a very almost 1960’s upbeat yet kinda dark phrase you’d find in an old movie.
B: What's that song that was written as a, well it’s called “Time of Day”and it was written as a sort of a parody song because we were working on a TV show that we never got made and it was about this brother band in the seventies.
M: Yeah, Brian was writing this song and it was supposed to be sort of like a Beach Boy kind of lyric.
B: Yeah, like a Jack Riley/Carl Wilson song where it's like a flowery language. So in my mind, it was satirical. Right. But then when I listened to it after I thought like “Oh, well no, that's kind of genuine.” I'm kind of always trying to write songs where I'm taking a negative thing and twisting it around and trying to find some positivity.
M: And sometimes you do find with your songs, where you sit down and you're serious about it, they're not as direct. So when you were taking the position of somebody who's writing something that's a parody, you get something more genuine.
B: Or just a little simpler and easier to digest.
I love that perspective. How's the writing going for the next album? I was super excited to hear the new songs!
M: The next album is finished and mastered and going into production. We're just writing other stuff, doing stuff all the time. We try to go to the studio as much as we can.
That's really great. I saw that one of the upcoming gigs you're doing is a charity concert- could you tell us more about that as we wrap up?
M: Yes! That's a Big Star tribute thing. The Wild Honey Foundation thing, they do all kinds of albums, you know, they'll do like a Beach Boy album and we kind of have a few different connections in that world. One with the Wild Honey Foundation itself and then one with the Big Star, you know? So I think it's like, it's just something we were asked to do and of course, we want to do it. We love to do covers and we like to do true covers, you know?
B: And that's the whole thing with Wild Honey, they always do the arrangements really spot on so it’s kind of natural for us to do it.