The Lemon Twigs

A melodic and imaginative romp
The D’Addario brothers have always worn their inspirations proudly on their vintage-inspired sleeves. Now, they’re making a sound of their own

Oh, to spend a week in The Lemon Twigs’ world. A world where streaming is just something your nose does when you have the flu and your in-car-entertainment is an eight track cartridge player and an AM radio. You can still smoke in bars, but nobody does. Well, for most of us, that’s just some retro version of the metaverse, but thankfully The Lemon Twigs have gone and recorded the soundtrack for it anyway.

Everything Harmony is not a radical departure from their delightfully rear facing sound. The spirit of ’74 still looms large here, but for the album opener “When Winter Comes Around,” they look slightly further back to the folkier parts of the late ’60s. It’s pleasant enough, but outstays its welcome somewhat while the fast forward button beckons. Fortunately track two is a bit of a gem. “In My Head” is a lovely, low-key pop-rock confection packed with ringing guitar lines and sweet, simple harmonies. The song uncoils beautifully and the “la la la” coda is a delight. From here on in, the hits just keep on coming.

“Corner of My Eye” and “Any Time of Day” are both gorgeous pop songs that manage to stay just the right side of saccharine—a precarious balancing act which brothers Brian and Michael D’Addario seem to have perfected. “Ghost Run Free” and “What You Were Doing” are unapologetic power-pop classics, dripping in melody with just enough grit. The Twigs choose their reference points with care, and Wilson, Chilton, and Rundgren are cited often and with great gusto and reverence. If you’re looking for any influences from anytime later than 1975, I’m afraid Everything Harmony is not for you. But this is never pastiche. This is just music that harks back 25 years before the writers were born.

In 2023, nothing is clear cut. In music, genres intertwine until the component parts can barely be recognized. The Lemon Twigs have a simpler approach and the music they like is reflected in the songs they write, it just happens to be from an era which the cool kids haven’t found yet. This is a good time to be a part of The Lemon Twigs’ world, but I get the feeling that it might start to get pretty crowded.

The D’addario duo continue to dazzle on their long awaited new record ‘Everything Harmony’.

Endlessly talented brothers Brian and Michael D’addario continue to show their ever evolving music with perhaps their most ambitious and personal record yet. 

Rarely has stark despair sounded so lovely
With their classic late-60s songwriting and beautiful harmonies, the New York duo have never mined the past more effectively than on this fourth album

The Lemon Twigs could have cemented themselves as hyper-pop for classic rock stans.

Everything Harmony is a very clever title. This is, indeed, The Lemon Twigs’ most one-track record to date, using a single acoustic echo chamber throughout and keeping the music light and lilting. However, in typical fashion, a slyness creeps into the songwriting and – like David Lynch’s opening shots of a peaceful murderous suburbia – not everything in this leafy album is as harmonious as it might seem at first. We’re dealing with harmony in the equilibria sense rather than pure saccharine sunshine and sweet rainbows.

The D’Addario brothers are, after all, unreliable narrators, casually glossing over sinister undertones with smiles, pairing serene pillow-propped melodies with the comic disgruntlement of ‘Every Day Is The Worst Day of My Life’ – a track that they tell me is inspired by Jonah Hill’s therapist’s concept of constant work – all making for a unique world of beauty and dark comedy masquerading as a single force of upbeat folky gems. 

It’s this quirky style of songwriting that truly soars on the album. Throughout, The Lemon Twigs project sorrow through comedy with such a light touch that it’s like stepping on a loose paving slab on a rainy day and having pocket change and confetti slosh up onto your sock. This adds idiosyncratic depth to the album while the luscious melodies ensure that Everything Harmony will be a timeless fixture of your next 1000 summers.

This sanguine aura starts with the tranquil plucked tones of ‘When Winter Comes Around’ and sustains throughout. Musically, they are more than competent enough to ensure that the melodies never become samey while sustaining the same day-off-in-midweek atmosphere that makes it feel like a uniform piece. Along that journey they stop off at obvious hits like ‘Corner Of My Eye’ – one of the year’s best singles – and slightly rockier departures with The Replacements-like lament ‘What You Were Doing’, creating an array of textures in the rolling bliss.

By their own admission, the album is a spring-like tale of rejuvenation matched with the counterpoint of self-aware struggles and strife. So, you might have blissful moments of melody akin to birdsong and sweet themes of nature run throughout, but they are often pitted by patches of urban woe and the dreaded ways of modern life. These are allowed to exist on the same page without ever approaching anything jarring thanks to the baroque capabilities of the brothers. 

Like Brian Wilson at his best, on secretly strange songs like ‘Born To Be Lonely’ and the title track, they often serve up pop that seems so seamless on the surface that it hides the almost-inscrutable musical complexity beneath it all. This presents something that you’ve never heard before in the most natural-feeling fashion that never challenges and always welcomes. 

The result is a simple joy born from a duplicitous proposition. It is as light and easy as music gets, but it is also intricate and full of dark depth all whisked to a shimmering height by stunning performances that build to a beautiful zenith when the brothers harmonise themselves—it’s been said once before, and I’ll say it again, there is something simply scientifically stunning about siblings harmonising. In the end, Everything Harmony is an album that does supremely what indie was invented to do: highlight the good times with poppy sunshine and blow away problems on a cool breeze.

On Everything Harmony, the fourth full-length studio release from New York’s The Lemon Twigs, the prodigiously talented brothers Brian and Michael D’Addario offer 13 original servings of beauty that showcase an emotional depth and musical sophistication far beyond their years as a band, let alone as young men. While they eagerly devour musical influences from everything and everywhere, they have somehow arrived at a cohesive and dynamic sound that speaks to our troubled times.

Having bounded onto the music scene with their precocious 2016 debut Do Hollywood, they threw caution to the wind two years later on their followup Go to School. By the time of their third album, Songs for the General Public (2020) The Lemon Twigs had begun to pull from a wide range of multigenerational inspirations, expertly darting from twee chamber pop balladry to full on glam punk, mixing plaintive singer-songwriter confessionals with an almost Syd Barrett sense of outré pop. In an interview from the time, they expressed an interest in creating “something really beautiful sounding” based on vocal harmonies and developing their combined melodic sensibilities into a setting where “the sounds were as important as the songs” themselves.

On Everything Harmony, the brothers have fully realized that vision, with a unified “Lemon Twigs sound” that successfully blends their distinct personalities while giving voice to their diverse and eclectic influences. Opening the album with the unassuming acoustic folk of plaintive “When Winter Comes Around,” which echoes the sophisticated grandeur of classic Simon & Garfunkel recordings, they immediately switch things up to the sunny classic pop motif of “In My Head.” From that point on Everything Harmony makes it clear that the Lemon Twigs can’t be pinned down.

Having recently worked with friends like Natalie Mering, with whom they appeared on the latest Weyes Blood album, they also collaborated with classic rock hero Todd Rundgren on his most recent album, Space Force. Rundgren, himself no stranger to eclecticism, says he can relate to their time-tripping approach to contemporary pop.

“They started when they were five and six years old, doing TV and Broadway and things like that,” says Rundgren. “So, they have built-in appreciation for music that is of a couple of generations before theirs. I think they were bored by the music of their own generation, and since you can’t fast forward to the music of the future, you just start going backwards to music that was made before you were born. I can empathize with that impulse, because I did that too, back in the seventies.”

Released as the album teaser track, “Corner of My Eye” channels an Art Garfunkel-like vocal melody over a moody, vibraphone-tinged backing track suggesting the chamber pop of Brian Wilson.

Everything Harmony was mostly written and recorded between 2020 and 2021, when tracking for the album began at a “very chaotic” rehearsal studio in Manhattan.

“It was one of the noisiest places I’ve ever been,” says Brian. “We did takes of acoustic guitar in between metal bands rehearsing next door and fire engines roaring down 8th Avenue. After months of sessions there, where we recorded the basic tracks to ‘Corner Of My Eye’, ‘In My Head,’ ‘I Don’t Belong To Me,’ ‘What Happens To A Heart,’ ‘Ghost Run Free,’ and ‘New To Me,’ we decided enough was enough and we looked into studios that had acoustic echo chambers after hearing East West’s chambers during the recording of Weyes Blood’s latest record.”

They finally got out of town, but instead of ‘doing Hollywood’ again, they took the tapes to San Francisco’s Hyde Street Studios where they added the album’s omnipresent vibraphone textures, harpsichord, French horn, strings, and many layers of vocal harmonies. To finish up, they flew home to their brand new studio in Brooklyn to finish mixing and mastering with the help of Paul Millar of Bug Sound.

Brian D’Addario notes the influence of two late lamented artists in particular this time; Moondog, and Arthur Russell whose album Iowa Dream encouraged them to lean into their own melodic tendencies and keep the arrangements delicate.

“Their arrangements entered my head when we were arranging the strings on the album,” says Brian, “and we worked for a long time on our vocal blend. On previous records, whoever wrote the song might do most, if not all, of the harmonies on their track but not so much on this one. Our blend is a strength that we tried to exploit as much as possible.”

While they had no grand concept for Everything Harmony, both the D’Addarios felt a “palpable mood of defeat” prevailed while writing and recording it. “New To Me” was inspired by their shared experience with loved ones suffering from Alzheimer’s, “What You Were Doing” is dressed in the tortured jangle of vintage Big Star, while “Born To Be Lonely,” written after watching John Cassavetes’ Opening Night, deals with what Brian calls “the fragility that often comes with age.”


“The album cycles through moments of depression and isolation on songs like ‘What Happens To A Heart,’ or ‘Born To Be Lonely’ to episodes of dizzying euphoria in ‘Ghost Run Free’ or the title track. There’s very little middle ground. On ‘What Happens to A Heart’ we were going for a 70’s Spector vibe, along the lines of Leonard Cohen’s Death Of A Ladies Man. We tracked it with me on piano, Daryl Johns on electric bass and Michael and Andres Valbuena both playing drums. I overdubbed a fretless bass. Two pianos, two organs, harpsichord, and celeste. The basic track was done in New York, and strings and French horn recorded in San Francisco. We got the Friction Quartet to overdub themselves about 8 times to get a more symphonic sound. We also recorded about 8 acoustics and bounced them down to two tracks; we did the same with the electric guitars.”

Everything Harmony is a unified song cycle born of shared blood and common purpose. With two musical heads being better than one, there’s no shortage of ideas to draw on. Their only impediments are time and the challenge of keeping up with their own prolific musical inspiration.

“We share an intuition and tend to be influenced by one another,” says Brian, “so the lyrical ideas on this record tend to complement each other. Writing has never been the issue for us. It’s completing, editing and compiling that takes the time. We’re trapped in a web of songs!”