The Lemon Twigs, Live at Leeds Uni Stylus

Brudenell presents...

The Lemon Twigs
plus guest support.. TBA

25.2.19 | £15.00 ADV (+stbf) | 19:00 DOORS

Tickets on general sale, Friday 7th September at 9am from Crash Records, Jumbo Records, online and at The Brudenell.

https://www.facebook.com/TheLemonTwigs
https://www.thelemontwigs.com/

–
Do Hollywood, The Lemon Twigs’ 2016 debut LP, was an invigorating,
much-needed blast of fresh air that whipped across the arid landscape of
contemporary rock. If that stunningly accomplished recording, which
flew in the face of current musical trends, wasn’t surprising enough on
the face of it, the fact that Do Hollywood was the handiwork of two
teenagers—brothers Brian and Michael D’Addario—rendered the achievement
utterly mind-boggling. Now, with the follow-up full-length, Go to School
(4AD, Aug. 24), the siblings, now 21 and 19, respectively, have set the
bar dizzyingly high even by their own lofty standards, and proceed to
soar over it into the stratosphere. Listening to this wildly ambitious
album is like entering and inhabiting a parallel universe.

Go to School’s subtitle is A Musical, and that turns out to be an accurate
description of the 15-song extravaganza, which tells the tale of the
pure-of-heart chimpanzee Shane, who’s adopted by a childless
couple—played by the brothers’ musical hero Todd Rundgren and their mom,
Susan Hall—and raised as a human boy. Michael describes Go to School as
“a fairy tale with a dark edge,” as Shane is ostracized, bullied and
rejected by the girl he falls for, erupts in an extreme act of
retribution for being robbed of his innocence. The libretto is played
out in a series of intricate, wildly eclectic musical settings ranging
from spot-on throwback rockers to traditional Broadway-style production
numbers.

“We had enough songs to work on a straight-pop,
more obviously autobiographical album—which didn’t feel like much of a
risk—or this one,” Brian says of the decision-making that set them off
in this envelope-ripping direction. “These [Go to School] songs come
from the same place our autobiographical songs come from, so we decided
to trust our instincts and to really commit to making it a musical.”

Michael
continues the thought. “We weren’t gonna do it half-assed—we were gonna
do it full-on and not shy away from the concept,” he says. “For me, it
felt completely like the obvious thing to do, which sounds ridiculous,
but everything about it is more advanced to me, and further along. What I
think would be really disappointing for our most dedicated fans is if
we just did a straight-pop album next.”

For Brian and Michael,
working in the musical-theater mode wasn’t that big a stretch, because
both had been child actors. Along with the brothers’ roles in TV series,
Brian had appeared in a Broadway production of The Little Mermaid,
while Michael performed in Coast of Utopia and All My Sons. “We were
literally raised on Broadway,” is how Michael puts it.

When
the brothers are working on a project, they typically immerse themselves
in a handful of albums as a trigger for inspiration. In this instance,
they were listening to Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma and The King
and I, as well as Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music and
Assassins.

“Our mom introduced us to Assassins when we were
kids,” Brian recalls, “and me and Michael would do all the different
parts with the different characters in the car. We didn’t understand
certain parts of the plot, but we knew all the words. I hadn’t heard it
for years, but when we were doing this project, I rediscovered it. At
that point I’d gotten kind of numb to a lot of rock music, and I was
ripe for emotionally connecting to musicals. So I felt like that was
where I was meant to be.”

“With any musical, you’ve gotta first
believe that people breaking into song every five minutes is
normal—there are no rules,” Michael says of the cosmology of musical
theater. “There’s no reason why nobody realizes that Shane is not a
human. They just know he’s a little bit different. You don’t ask, ‘Well,
does he not have a mirror?’ That doesn’t matter. You’ve gotta believe
it in order to enjoy the music and absorb the weight of the lyrics. The
‘why’ is just because it gets you to the next part. It’s supposed to
make you feel something.”

They recorded Go to School at the
dedicated analog studio they’d installed in the Long Island home they
shared with their parents. They used a chunk of the advance to upgrade
their gear, picking up a vintage 24-track console and two-inch tape
machine, and another chunk for orchestral sessions encompassing strings,
horns and woodwinds. Brian composed the arrangements and conducted the
musicians, while Michael manned the console.

“‘Born Wrong/Heart
Song’ is where we went full musical,” says Brian. “We decided that we
weren’t going to put any drums or guitars on it and just have it all be
orchestral instruments. I’ve always been a firm believer that production
is everything, and arrangement is everything, and the song is variable
depending on how you arrange it.”

At the other extreme,
Rundgren appears on “Rock Dreams” and takes the lead on the swelling
ballad “Never Know,” which puts the legend in his early-’70s sweet spot.
“It helped that ‘Never Know’ was something that was natural for Todd to
sing, although I didn’t write it with the intention of him singing it,”
Brian points out. “We’d just performed with Todd at Coachella [in
2017], which we figured would probably be the one thing that we ever did
with him. And then we were like, ‘It’d be great to get him on the
record somehow.’ And it ended up working out in this fortuitous way,
where it was really easy to fit the pieces together.”

Big
Star’s Jody Stephens, another musical hero, drums on “Student Becomes
the Teacher,” while Michael—who’d been obsessively dissecting the iconic
Big Star albums—channels Alex Chilton on “Queen of My School,” an
uncannily detailed homage to the great Memphis band circa Radio City.
But the song is more than a musical homage, as Michael explains. “In
‘Queen of My School,’ I like the idea of the nerd and the most popular
girl getting together. I wasn’t a nerd, I guess, but I don’t think
anybody wanted to date us. Because we were into music and not sports, it
was kinda like nobody looked at us as cool.”

In fleshing out the
characters, the brothers decided none of them should be completely good
or evil. Says Brian, “In ‘The Bully,’ you get the bully’s perspective:
The father has a PhD and his son is slow, so he resents his son. And his
wife died in childbirth, so he blames his son for her death. Then you
even understand the bully’s father, because he had to deal with this
horrific thing. And Shane’s parents sort of blame the kid for their lost
dreams, and you see why that’s sad. The whole time we were growing up,
my mom always said, ‘I feel like you could really love everybody if you
knew enough about them and understood where they were coming from.’

Brian
got through middle school and high school in what he describes as “a
comfortable sort of isolation,” adding, “I knew it was probably better
to separate myself then become corrupted in some way. And that’s a big
part of what the record’s about.”

“When I was going to school,”
Michael remembers, “there was so much negativity and so many ignorant
people that I’m kind of surprised that I was able to keep it away from
me to the extent that I did. So, in that sense, I felt like Shane, and I
think we got that angle from our own experiences.”

Michael
wrote the climactic song “The Fire” early in the process, and that gave
the brothers a clearer sense of the narrative trajectory as well as its
relevance. “It was an important subject that hasn’t been touched on,”
Michael explains. “And it’s so prevalent in the modern world that it
needs to have a presence in art.”

When asked if the brothers had
topicality in mind when they were concocting the narrative, Brian offers
an unsettling response. “We had an uncomfortable realization after we’d
finished the record that [school violence] has always been a reality
for us,” he says. “I mean, Columbine happened in 1999, the year Michael
was born. It’s so commonplace that we wouldn’t even question the idea of
Shane burning the school down and a hundred people dying. So it didn’t
even feel topical to us, because it’s something we’ve always known.”

It’s
hardly unusual for artists to gain greater perspective about their work
after they’ve completed it, and that was true for the authors of Go to
School. “Initially, we thought it would be more dramatic if Shane really
intended to hurt people,” Brian explains. “But now, the way I think of
it is that he obviously intends to set fire to the school, but it gets
out of hand really quickly, and he doesn’t necessarily realize that it’s
going to do what it does. So it’s definitely supposed to be
destructive, but his intention is open to interpretation.”

“Everything
that the story’s about would seem frivolous and pointless if there’s no
message,” Michael asserts. “Shane is put in a situation where
everything around him is negative, and there are so many evil forces
that he has to keep it out of his mind and see if he can stay
spiritually sound, and eventually he breaks. If you’re growing up in a
house or working in a place where people around you are depressed and
negative and cynical, is there any way to shield yourself from that and
keep your soul intact without just running away?”

Brian has his
own feeling about the nature of the message. “People are so reactionary
these days,” he reflects, “and it’s really easy for people to look at
something that someone did and go, ‘They’re a terrible person’; there’s
some sort of sick joy in that. And that’s another big part of this
record—that to really feel love and empathy, you have to have an
understanding of what people go through. And I think it makes the most
sense to get the message across in a metaphorical way—because if you
talk about it in the wrong way, then you’re going down a one-way street
to the wrong side of history.”

In creating Go to School, The
Lemon Twigs have taken on an immense, multileveled challenge and pulled
it off with a degree of insightfulness and sophistication far beyond
their years. The challenge now falls on listeners to willingly suspend
their disbelief and join Brian and Michael D’Addario on this
unprecedented musical fantasia, which takes us to the heart and soul of
present-day reality.