“Oh, I’m strolling through the streets of Glendale, California, on my way to Target for Java juice. You wanna make a smoothie and get the right stuff in you and it’s the only place that does the right kind and I need it,” D’Addario’s lilting tone dances down the line. Energy is certainly what the vocalist needs right now, considering The Lemon Twigs have been hard at work getting their sound ripe for the season.
The Lemon Twigs are a young band, already with two releases under their belts. The first, What We Know in 2015, brought with it a buzz in the music scene impossible to ignore. Though it was their sophomore album, Do Hollywood in 2016 that solidified their reputation as a force of nature – an inimitable, multi-talented duo in the saturated pop-rock scene. Their music is capable of delighting and entrancing all at once, with a colourful brand of psychedelic, multi-instrument manipulation across varying platforms of electronica.
Truth be told, The Lemon Twigs have often been described as flamboyant in their sound. While D’Addario’s persona couldn’t convince of anything otherwise, there’s a perfectly valid reason the group are set on the outlandish path they are. “There were multiple avenues that seemed like the torch of making progress, making music,” he says. “Fortunately those failed because if they hadn’t we probably would have been a teen sensation or something equally horrible – we wanna make records we like.
“We’re more focused than flamboyant, we don’t shy away from doing things that are fun or funny. We don’t have to be melancholy all the time because that shit is boring all the time, but we’ve got that space to move into along the line. That’ll explode later on in our career, but right now it’s fun for us to make music and we’re not gonna pretend it isn’t.”
Fun is the operative word for D’Addario, the unwavering purpose at present for The Lemon Twigs and what they’re trying to achieve musically. “I mean everything is relative, you know, and I don’t expect any of it to last,” D’Addario says frankly. “I’ll just be happy if we can make a living and keep getting better in our own time.
“I mean, we started a long time ago – we were really, really young when we started trying to pursue music – because our mother is a singer and our father is a musician, it was easy for us to follow up – it’s not so easy for some people, we were lucky for the avenue. But I don’t know,” D’Addario draws out the words playfully, “If we get over it we know when to say enough. That’s not yet though, not yet,” he adds hurriedly.
Until they reach those zests of change, The Lemon Twigs are certainly in love with their chosen path and that direction winds around to Australia very soon, albeit with a somewhat nonsensical anticipation. “Touring is definitely a chore but there has to be some sort of trade off in one’s job – it’s the best case scenario,” D’Addario says.
“If they [fans] like our band they’ll hear a song they know, but they’ll hear songs on future release and they’ll be all like, ‘this is not where I wanna be right now’, so we have to enjoy how people feel about us while it feels good, and if they stop feeling good about us, well, I guess we’ll probably keep feeling good about ourselves.”
