The Lemon Twigs

As the Lemon Twigs, sons of power pop songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Ronnie D'Addario, Brian and Michael D'Addario channel the ’70s singer/songwriter energy of their father’s era and add a healthy love of musical theater and an over-the-top performance. The brothers began writing songs at young ages and delivered their 2016 debut album, Do Hollywood, on 4AD at the tail-end of their teenage years. Success came quickly, with critical acclaim and a string of TV appearances as well as extensive touring. They evolved from the conceptual eccentricity of their 2018 sophomore album, Go to School, to a more varied but no less bombastic set of songs on their 2020 album Songs for the General Public, to the emotionally naked sentiments of their more subtle but still wildly eclectic albums like 2023′s Everything Harmony and the following year’s A Dream Is All We Know. Long Island brothers Brian and Michael D'Addario started the Lemon Twigs while they were still in their teens, each playing multiple instruments, counting guitar, keyboards, drums, horns, and strings among their proficiencies. The boys were raised in a musical home, sons of working musician parents. Along with an interest in theater, early musical influences like Harry Nilsson, Todd Rundgren, Wings, the Zombies, and other ’60s and ’70s Baroque pop figures played heavily into the band’s sound at a formative time. In 2015, their earliest output arrived in the form of the cassette-only album What We Know. Significant buzz had formed around the group even then, and they signed to indie superpower 4AD, releasing their “These Words” b/w “As Long as We’re Together” single in 2016 and selling the 7″ mostly while on a tour supporting Carseat Headrest. Their debut album, Do Hollywood, arrived later in the year, produced by Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado. The Lemon Twigs embarked on a tour in support of the album with a live version of the band that included Danny Ayala on keyboards and Megan Zeankowski on bass. They returned in September 2017 with Brothers of Destruction, a home-recorded EP written largely during the sessions for Do Hollywood featuring a handful of live staples from their touring set. In August of the next year, sophomore album Go to School arrived, a massive production conceptualized as a musical about a chimpanzee raised by human parents. The ambitious Broadway-inspired record included guest appearances by both of the D’Addario brothers’ parents as well as power pop legends Todd Rundgren and Jody Stephens. In April 2020, the band returned with The Lemon Twigs LIVE, a fundraiser for Coalition for the Homeless culled from live-to-tape recordings from shows in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and California. It was followed in August by their third studio full-length, the Rado-co-produced Songs for the General Public. It spent a week on Billboard’s Top Current Album Sales chart (number 61). The brothers contributed to Tim Heidecker’s album Fear of Death, which saw release a month later, and over the next few years also appeared on records by Rundgren and Weyes Blood. The Twigs began work on their next album in 2020 and spent months refining their new material before resurfacing in early 2023 with the self-produced single “Corner of My Eye,” the first song shared in advance of their fourth album Everything Harmony. In addition to their long-running love of glam and theatrical power pop, the band looked to the influence of both mainstream and outsider folk artists for their new set of songs, evoking Simon & Garfunkel on some tracks and Moondog on others. Everything Harmony was released in May of 2023 and was the band’s first album with new label Captured Tracks. Almost exactly a year later, their next album A Dream Is All We Know was released. It was recorded immediately after the completion of Everything Harmony during a period of intense productivity and featured more string arrangements than other Twigs’ albums. ~ Neil Z. Yeung & Fred Thomas