5 Records with The Lemon Twigs

Brian D’Addario: Discover America is a record that we love the sound of. It’s the fusion of calypso and Van Dyke Parks’ style, which I feel was informed by early American music. Not early American music like early American pop music but standards, tin pan alley, and American folk music. I also loved the way he sounded on the record Song Cycle. I think there’s some Mighty Sparrow on this, too.

I always point to the song “The Four Mills Brothers” as a real inspiration to me in terms of string arrangements. It’s so busy, but it’s vital, beautiful, and serves the song well. I also love the short tape delay on the strings.

The two Allen Toussaint songs that Parks covered for Discover America (“Occapella” and “Riverboat”) cued me into an era of his songwriting I wasn’t aware of before. And because the song “Riverboat” was [originally performed] by Lee Dorsey, I went and listened to him also.

Brian D’Addario: H’Art Songs is an album of slightly more conventional songs, but the arrangement is all done on the piano. That was what struck me about it. The first time I listened to it, there were these Baroque-styled string arrangements or what I would perceive to be string arrangements. But it’s done all on piano, played by either a couple of different pianists or the same piano, overdubbed. It’s a unique-sounding record the first time you hear it. 

The lyrics are great as well. There’s a lot of repetition in the melody, but the lyrics change the whole time. There are great concepts in the songs. In “Enough About Human Rights,” Moondog asks, “What about snail rights?” Then he goes on to list animal after animal on the same run. And the song “Do Your Thing” is a great motivational song.

Michael D’Addario: It’s kind of like Nike’s “Just do it.”

Brian D’Addario: The thing that struck me about that record was that it’s just piano and voice and some percussion. But it’s a totally different style of songwriting, and you can’t necessarily point to what his influences were on that. He’s just someone who has a completely unique melodic and harmonic voice. 

Brian D’Addario:  Mustard was a big influence on [our new] record, as well as the album Boulders because Roy Wood played absolutely every instrument on it. We had a realization that three or four cellos can serve the same effect as an orchestra. And that if we wanted arrangements on this new record, we could do the cellos ourselves. I ended up playing the cello on it. Coming off of the last record, we didn’t want to employ a quartet because It would end up being irresponsible for us to do that financially. We decided we didn’t have to sacrifice the arrangement of this record. We will do it ourselves.

Mustard is just incredible. “Any Old Time Will Do” is a great song, with great vocal layers and harmony arrangement. It has sped-up vocals that sound like a mysterious instrument.

Michael D’Addario: We love that about Roy Wood’s records and Todd Rundgren’s records and the Move record Message From The Country. It’s so cool arranging studio instruments and using compressors and experimenting in the studio.

It’s something that I hear on the Wood’s records from the ‘70s, and it’s fun to think of them doing it in the later era of the Move. How Brian and I do things, we’re just two guys that like how the Beatles might have done stuff when they were not all at the studio at the same time. Recording songs like The White Album, that’s kind of the mode that we operated in on this record.

Brian D’Addario: We got into The Idle Race years after we got into Electric Light Orchestra, and it was pretty insane to hear Jeff Lynne’s production and songwriting ability right out of the gate. I think there’s another producer listed on this album, but there’s so much studio trickery at this early date. 

This was when everybody was starting to get into flanging, interesting delays, and things like that. It’s cool to hear him employ all of those tricks.

Brian D’Addario: It was inspiring to us when we heard Let’s Go – Joe Meek’s Girls! because of the limitations of Joe Meek’s studio in terms of space. He had a famously small flat, which is an apartment. Let’s not split hairs, none of us are English. 

Michael D’Addario: It’s more space than we have for our studio. It’s quite a bit more space.

Brian D’Addario: It is more space than we have for our studio. Don’t remind me. 

Michael D’Addario: One of the things about the way he used compression specifically, and I guess the way that a lot of Beatles records used compression, was bouncing instruments together and putting them through compressors. In Meek’s case, everything is going to the same place and things are definitely all going through the same compressor on the first generation as opposed to bouncing stuff together. Not necessarily being able to pick out every instrument, and the drums being right up front in the mix. 

Brian D’Addario: It was uncommon for the time to intentionally over compress and distort, giving the songs this incredible punch that makes them just fly out of the speaker. But also, this just happens to be a really great collection of songs. “Dumb Head” is probably the most fun song, but “My Johnny Doesn’t Come Around” is my favorite. And “I Lost My Heart At The Fairground” is super fun.