The Lemon Twigs - In Conversation
Introduction & interview by Beau Croxton
The Lemon Twigs by Eva Chambers
For our 12th installment of In Conversation and new digital cover story, we are thrilled to have an interview with The Lemon Twigs.
Brothers Brian and Michael D’addario– aka The Lemon Twigs– are quickly approaching the ten year anniversary of their debut record. The group has been widely celebrated over the past decade for their sharp songwriting and extensive harmonic depth. They have expertly crafted their own signature retro power-pop sound that rides the line between such greats as The Beatles, The Byrds and The Beach Boys, while channeling a plethora of other Rundgren-esque vintage rock and pop sounds. Their records are irresistibly catchy, consistent and full of vintage tones. Most notably, the brothers construct creative and vast vocal harmony arrangements.
During the pandemic in 2020, the Long Island-born group found themselves with time to reset, rebuild and ponder how they could level up their albums. Whatever happened there is history, because the band then started a tremendously potent run of albums with their new label, Captured Tracks.
Their last two records, Everything Harmony (2023) and A Dream is All We Know (2024) are both brilliant efforts— and their upcoming 2026 album Look For Your Mind! couldn't be a better way to celebrate the decade since their debut record, as it cements another consecutive classic into their outstanding run.
Their sixth LP (out this Friday May 8th) definitely lives up to its namesake thematically, as many of its songs search for sanity and clarity in many different areas of life. But the record also serves as a bit of a “Sign of the Times” record for the D’Addario brothers.
The Sgt. Pepper-esque “Gather Round” shines a light on just how beautiful a shared beam of hope can be in a world gone mad. “Bring You Down” is a peppy rock n’ roller that serves as a rally cry against “the man”– and it manages to infuse an incredibly fun “Surfin U.S.A.”-type whimsy. It’s a necessary and important song to hear at this moment in time, and it doesn't hurt that it's an absolute bop. It also sounds very alive, energetic and direct– this record digs deeper into the live sound that the band has found on the road with their new bandmates. Look For Your Mind! marks the studio debut of live Twigs Reza Matin (drums) and Danny Ayala (bass), who play on a handful of tracks.
The laser-focused approach is immediately apparent in the opening track “Look For Your Mind”, which is a Michael D’addario-led highlight that properly ignites the flame for the record. Between shouted lead vocals, sparkling vocal harmonies and a twangy, Yardbirds-esque guitar solo that soars above a bed of growling, gnarly, baritone fuzz-guitar– there’s a whole lot to be enamored with right away.
As always, their songwriting is razor-sharp. Brian’s “Fire and Gold” has a lithe strut that sounds like The Who on a sunny day, and “My Heart Is In Your Hands Tonight” is an instant Lemon Twigs-classic with killer falsetto that could have easily been a lead single. Perhaps the most serene and delightful moment is Brian’s “Joy”, which is a McCartney-esque wonder with fantastical, swooning orchestral arrangements that stun in the album's final stretch.
I caught up with Brian and Michael D’Addario on Zoom just one day before they drove to Canada for their North American tour.
We discussed Look For Your Mind!, gear, songwriting, their collaboration tracks with Thundercat and much more.
Check it out below!
(P.S.— New Yorkers…. be sure to catch the band's FREE NYC SHOW in Tompkins Square Park this sunday!)
INTERVIEW
BEAU CROXTON: Hello! Nice to meet you!
BRIAN D’ADDARIO: Nice to meet you, too! Sorry, it's been a little bit crazy today. We're just getting ready to leave tomorrow– I've been waiting for an amp to get here at the very last minute.
BEAU: No worries. So– I’ve had a few spins on your new record, Look For Your Mind!— and it's absolutely fantastic, as usual. How are you feeling about releasing the record into the world in May?
BRIAN: Thanks- I'm feeling really good about it! We just got together with Danny, who played bass on a couple of the songs (and plays bass in our live group). We were playing through some of the songs, and it's gonna be really nice to play live.
The record came out of us playing a lot of live gigs and really getting very into the standard “rock quartet" sound, and bringing that into the studio. So it's going to be really nice to be able to translate that live very easily– which is not usually the case with our records.
BEAU: So, I'd love to know where you were at artistically, when you were transitioning from A Dream is All We Know into the new era of Look For Your Mind!— how did you want to approach this set of tunes differently?
BRIAN: Well, I guess I kind of touched on it a little already– but we were just playing tons and tons of shows last year and the year before. We had just gotten this particular (live) group together in about 2023– so I guess we've been touring with this band for about three years. When translating the music that me and Michael would record to the stage, it felt like we kind of developed a live-sound that we wanted to capture on record. So that's definitely represented.
The last record was so much of just me and Michael over-dubbing and layering, including with the orchestrations, and just like… me struggling away on like the cello and the trumpet… and manipulating the tape and different speeds and stuff to hit notes that I couldn't hit– that we wanted to capture any of the orchestrations in a much more organic way.
So we did the more standard thing of getting a string quartet, and woodwind players– getting three of them all at once. So that kind of capturing more of a natural sound” extended into the more ornate tracks on the record as well.
BEAU: One consistent theme that I'm getting throughout the record is “sign of the times” type songs– The title track gave me that vibe. And speaking of sounding live, “Bring You Down” is super brilliant, and super rockin’. It's a timeless message, but it also feels very timely right now. What can you tell me about how “Bring You Down” came together?
BRIAN: Thanks! With those kinds of things, like lyrical themes– they always happen very spontaneously. I don't really feel like any songs really need to have any sort of message or anything like that. But in that case, I was really trying to write a song that was almost like a “Summertime Blues”or something. When you think about what that song's about, it's like…such a teenage theme of a guy who's got a summer job, and his boss is kind of unfair to him. But it's much more like happy go lucky, and more reflective of the times that they were living in in the late 50s and early 60s and stuff.
But it would have felt a little bit ridiculous to do a song like that now, because, you know, (economic) inequality has gotten so much worse, and work force relations or whatever is more in the favor of billionaires than it's ever been, and all of that. But yeah– it was just a way of reflecting that in a song, and trying to fool myself into really being the person in the song, I guess.
BEAU: Excellent. Another song I really loved was “Gather Round”— it was exuding a lot of hope and joy. What can you tell me about how that song came together? The instrumental is fantastic as well.
BRIAN: Thank you. I guess it was almost thinking about having a sort of uncorrupted leader. I guess it was around the last election, and I think everybody was feeling a little bit depressed about the options that we had. Obviously, we kind of went with the worst option, in my opinion. It's just kind of one of those things– It's like you really wish that there was somebody that would pop up that everybody kind of agreed on, who obviously had the interests of the people of the country in mind.
So it was almost like a fantasy kind of thing, but also recognizing that we have a collective power. Obviously, I have a tough time articulating these kinds of things, but it's easier to do in a song. It kind of comes out more in a fluid way when you're having to commit words to it and sing it, you know?
The Lemon Twigs by Eva Chambers
BEAU: “Joy” is another beautifully written song that had some very elaborate arrangements. I'd like to hear about your process writing that song, and how you decided to get the arrangements together for that.
BRIAN: Well, I had played that live a number of times, just acoustically, and it had kind of Paul Simon, baroque, sort of Bach-ish kind of feel to the guitar parts.
So I've arranged a lot of the strings for our records and horns and stuff, but I wanted to bring someone in that had a little bit more experience or something. We brought in this guy Sammy Weisberg, who's done a lot of arrangements for people around New York. We collaborated on the orchestrations on that, and he brought all these interesting, slightly jazzier, romantic-like harmonies into the string parts. When we worked together, it was kind of like he would present all of these interesting options, and I would kind of say, like, “Okay, we need to simplify that here” and “make it a little bit less harmonically rich” or whatever there. Then he brought in all these musicians that he had worked with before that were really top notch, so it was pretty cool. And then we did some layering, after adding some other effects and like moog bass on it– I like how it came together.
BEAU: Yeah, absolutely. So what was the most essential piece of gear for this record, and are there any songs or specific sonic moments that you're particularly excited to share that haven't been shared yet?
BRIAN: I'll answer the second question first, because it's fresh in my mind. There's a cool moment at the end of the record in “Your True Enemy”. This guy, Paul Miller, who has a studio next door, he masters all of our records and shoots our music videos and stuff– he's really great, and he's a great studio tech and tape machine tech. He helped us kind of create this really chaotic moment in the last minute and a half of “Your True Enemy.” That was cool– we did a lot of backwards stuff that we had never done before, a lot of flanging with tape machines, recording the two track mix onto a separate tape machine.
BEAU: On “Fire and Gold”as well— I think there's some in there too, right?
BRIAN: Exactly! Yeah, those are the kind of moments. We've even done it on previous records, but it doesn't get old for me. I just love how spontaneous that process is– it creates all these interesting sonic moments that you don't expect, even though I've, I've done that so many times. And there's some cool ring modulator on it, too.
As far as a piece of gear that was more essential– we used a lot of this Ampex 16 track. And so by lowering the track count (because we usually use a 24 track), that ended up serving kind of a big role in kind of limiting a lot of the instrumentation with some of the songs…which turned out to be good for what our initial goal was.
BEAU: Absolutely. Do you have any personal favorite songs from the record at the moment ?
BRIAN: Well, Michael's song, “Nothing But You”. I really like that song, and I think that there are a lot of great guitar moments on there, and I really, really like how he layered the guitars on that. Also “Fire and Gold”, because we just started playing it with the band, and it's really fun to play that riff.
BEAU: Yeah— “Fire and Gold” was definitely a big fave of mine. The guitar tones on the record are excellent. What were you working with there?
BRIAN: Well– quite a few different guitars, mainly this late 70s black Fender strat. We had this Gibson ES-335 12 string that I use a lot live. We would use that as well as this Rick 12-string for various tones. We used a lot of this 1178 compressor for a lot of the guitars, especially the 12 string sounds— like really overly compressing it.
The Lemon Twigs by Eva Chambers
BEAU: These Thundercat collaboration tracks that just came out are really excellent. “What Is Left To Say” and “Pozole”— what can you tell me about collabing with him and writing those songs?
BRIAN: It was really cool– I'm happy with what we ended up with. It was definitely kind of intimidating at first, because he has such a capacity to write great chord progressions. At first, we were really letting him lead the process early on. The thing that I always remember is like he would play these really cool chords, and I'd be looking at his hands, and because he's playing the six string bass, I was completely like, unfamiliar with any of the shapes and stuff (laughs) so it was a little bit hard to keep up at first. Then we got into a real groove where we moved a lot of the songs to piano, and he was super open to ideas that we had that we kind of brought in. He was really collaborative with the lyrics and stuff. It was like one of the easier collaborations we've really done once we got on over that initial period.
(Michael D’addario enters the chat)
BEAU: What's up Michael? How's it going?
MICHAEL D’ADDARIO: Hey bro!
BEAU: I was just asking about the Thundercat collaboration, If you had anything to add.
MICHAEL: Just that I'm happy with how it came out. You don't really know when you hand somebody off something to mix, or whatever, how it's going to come out. And sounded pretty much like how we were tracking with Kenneth.
BEAU: Yeah, sounds great! Well, you are rolling into your 10 year anniversary of Do Hollywood this year– How does it feel looking back on your past 10 years from where you're at right now and where you were then?
BRIAN: It's just good that we're still able to play shows. I mean, I don't think that we had any expectations. We just didn't know how it was going to go when we started. It's cool– I mean, I guess it feels about like 10 years—-it feels like we've been doing it for a while. But, I mean, we don't really look back that much…Kind of embarrassing, you know. (laughs)
MICHAEL: I think we didn't even really know that this kind of like position existed where you could be doing music, touring, and just constantly doing stuff like that, and not be like…a huge star. So it's cool, like, we just discovered that you can keep making music. And even if we couldn't do this, we could be like musicians or something for somebody…
BRIAN: The amps just got here!
(At this point, Brian leaves to secure the amp delivery)
MICHAEL: Sorry, we keep getting booked doing all these interviews while there's like 20 other things going on. He's just opening the doors for them.
(Brian returns)
BRIAN: Ok, All Good! Sorry about that. (shows amps)
MICHAEL: Whoa. Holy shit, those are huge.
BRIAN: They're huge, but not that heavy.
BEAU: What kind of amps?
MICHAEL: We got these VOX amps for free. Not to brag, but we've never really gotten amps for free…
BEAU: Amazing. So with your songs, there's a lot of major heavy lifting with your vocals. When singing all this stuff live and recreating it – I imagine you really need to keep yourself on point. Do you have any special vocal warm ups, remedies or rituals that you do for your vocals when you're on tour and in the studio ?
BRIAN: I think just a lot of tea. We don't really do vocal warm ups at this point. I kind of made the keys a little bit easier for myself. Naturally when I'm writing now, I like to put a little bit more thought into that, which I think actually helps me a lot. But, yeah, I don't know– there's not much in the way of preparation.
BEAU: Well tour is right around the corner. Amps secured, How excited are we for the tour?
BRIAN: Yeah, we're really excited. We've done so many shows with the Josephine Network, and they're all so cool and fun to hang with…Every show that I've seen of them has been amazing. So I think it's going to be a really good match! And yeah, I'm just excited about playing some of the new material live.
BEAU: Excellent. Yeah, Josephine Network is fantastic! Every member of that band also has a great band too.
BRIAN: I know! ( laughs)
MICHAEL: We Love Josephine!
BEAU: Well, thank you both so much for the chat. The record is fantastic and I hope you all have such a good time on tour.
BRIAN: No problem. Thanks so much!
BEAU: Absolutely, congrats, y'all, thanks again.
MICHAEL: Thanks! Bye
Look For Your Mind! by The Lemon Twigs is out everywhere this Friday, May 8th via Captured Tracks.
The Lemon Twigs are playing a FREE SHOW in NYC this Sunday, May 10th— free tickets here!
You can find Look For Your Mind! on vinyl, tour dates and much more on The Lemon Twigs website HERE.
And you can listen directly below!
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