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.”
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!”
Josephine is a singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, music teacher, & shapeshifting yenta from New York. Her favorite songwriters are Carole King and Lou Reed. She is the writer & persona behind the “Music Is Easy” LP (Dig! Records, 2020), and co-creator of the “Stocky Tunes” collab LP with Hershguy (Dig!, 2021). Her subsequent singles “I Feel Like Rain” (Paris Tapes, 2021) and “Marionette” showcase an expanding range of styles. Her band, the Josephine Network, features Toni Lynn (Apache), Saara Untracht-Oakner (SUO), Nat Brower (Brower), Keith Cayea (Brooklyn Bluebirds), Dorian Deangelo (Darien Rectangle), Hershguy (Dirty Fences), and Jay Pluck (EKP). The Josephine Network are making a name for themselves in the rock ‘n’ roll world, playing shows with Sheer Mag, Pinc Louds, Brontez Purnell, Seth Bogart and more. In 2021, “Music is Easy” was featured on NPR’s This American Life. In Spring 2022, the Josephine Network were direct support for Shannon & The Clams’ US tour. After a successful US run, the band embarked on a European tour in the Fall of ‘22, playing Funtastic Dracula Festival in Spain, as well as shows in France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands.
