The Lemon Twigs Are Making Some Big Changes For Album #2

Last year, word began to filter through online about two teenage brothers starting to turn heads in New York with their eclectic fashion sense and equally dizzying, pop culture grab-bag of musical styles. With a thrift store punk aesthetic, an all-in, kaleidoscopic approach to songwriting and enthusiastic live shows, Brian and Michael D'Addario were touted as the next big thing, a claim given greater kudos with the release of their debut album Do Hollywood last October.

Brian D'Addario is hanging out in California for the week, sandwiched between the two weekends of the Coachella Festival where the band are making their first festival appearances. Festivals have a way of bringing out special performances, with bands going that extra mile to win over new fans. The Lemon Twigs ace card was bringing out one of their musical heroes, Todd Rundgren, to guest on their version of his song Couldn't I Just Tell You which D'Addario enthusiastically says was "a dream come true!"

"The show itself went well too. It was really our first festival and as we're going to be doing a bunch of them it was nice knowing it's not going to be a drastic change for us. I was expecting it to be like a major adjustment which it wasn't. It felt different enough that it'll be nice to do a bunch of festivals compared with the same thing we've been doing for the past couple of months."

One of the things that immediately hits you when listening to Do Hollywood is the way the duo pull from all corners of rock and pop music with a carnivalesque glee and playfulness. The Beach Boys, The Monkees, Queen, The Who, glam rock, power pop and psychedelia all combine in a wonderful collision of sound that D'Addario describes as "very stream of consciousness". Though that worked for them on their debut, he sees it as an area they'll be working to refine for their next record.

"We didn't really do much editing with the first record. That's going to be the big difference between album one and two. The songs are going to be more structured and we're going to try to make them just as interesting but with more thought in their structure. Before, we would just let the ideas come. Now we do that to a point and then stop and if we write anything extra it will probably become its own song. It's just going to be more focused going forward I think."

The good news is they have the songs already written for their next album, installing a 24-track desk in their parents' Long Island basement ahead of a whole month of recording in May before they head to Australia and then hit the northern hemisphere festival circuit.

Songwriting was generally a separate and individual process for the brothers but that too has been evolving to the point where greater collaboration between the pair has been happening. "There's a certain type of song now that we can write together, which wasn't the case before," D'Addario explains. "Now we can complete a song together and even though the next album won't be a complete collection of songs like that, we're going to bring each other into the process much quicker. There will be a lot less detail behind who does what on the next record. A lot of the songs were written right after Do Hollywood and though they weren't all collaborations they feel more like collaborations because when we record we're not going to say, 'This is my song, I have to sing lead and play all the instruments on it.' It was a little immature that we did that in the past," he says, with the benefit of hindsight.

It is also easy to forget that the pair are only just exiting their teens and still developing their musical personalities and growing as players, something D'Addario points to as another agent of change in their music. "After recording the first album we were happy with each other's songs enough to trust each other more. Also, Michael's voice has got a lot stronger and my drumming has got stronger, whereas we were like 'this is what you're good at so you're gonna do this...' and I think since then we've both improved in different ways and we can have a little more fun with it."

Both brothers spent time in front of the camera as child actors, which has prepared them somewhat for the peripherals around releasing music - videos, promotion, interviews, waiting around - but they've also had the added bonus of having two school friends also playing in The Lemon Twigs. Keyboardist Danny Ayala and bassist Megan Zeankowski give the group a full band dimension and add a sense of camaraderie to the unit.

"Yeah, they're very important," enthuses D'Addario. "They're very talented in their own right. It's important that we have the people playing the parts who wrote them as opposed to people who are obviously hired hands. It's cool because they have their own personalities on stage so it isn't just people looking at Michael and I all the time," he laughs.

The brothers have began touring the USA with their exuberant high-kicking, guitar shredding and Keith Moon-styled drumming live show as well as making a foray into the European market, with surprising (to them) success. "European shows keep getting bigger. They have taken to the album more so than in the States. Even though we're playing bigger places in the cities like LA and NY, there's still a lot of touring we have to do in the US and it really feels like we're at that first record place. In Europe it feels like a bigger thing. The shows getting bigger in that way is kind of an overwhelming thing but I feel like we are playing well and people we talk to after shows are really nice so it's not like people are getting too fanatical about it. I'm happy about that, it's not getting too crazy," says D'Addario cautiously.

Fashion has always gone hand in hand with music, whether as an extension of a person's creative personality or as an attention grabber. In the case of The Lemon Twigs it's a bit of both, with D'Addario explaining that much of the impetus for their style comes from Michael. "We really know what we don't like with clothes and videos. With the clothes, Michael usually picks out a lot of the stuff and then I wear what he throws away. Now I shop a bit for my own self. It was really important to him in the beginning for us to dress up a bit."

As the Los Angeles nightlife beckons, we touch on one more obvious topic. The sibling relationship and how it has shown to be both a blessing and a curse in other famous musical partnerships such as those of the Everly, Davies, Gallagher and The Jesus & Mary Chain's Reid brothers. "It's a bit of both but I'm really happy to work with my brother. I can't think of another musician that I respect more than him. I think he has an incredible amount of potential and if we continue to work together constructively we can do good stuff. I just hope that it stays that way."