Lemon Twigs branch into sound of older generation
Of all the concept albums ever released about a chimpanzee’s adventures in high school, “Go to School” by the Lemon Twigs has to be the best. Bursting with melodic hooks and ’60s and ’70s pop references, the album carries on the noble artrock tradition of ambitious concept albums with slightly outlandish plotlines. Brothers Brian and Michael D’Addario had some vintage pop on their radar, along with a handful of Broadway musicals, when they wrote the album last year. They recorded all 16 songs at their home studio in Long Island, N.Y., bringing in pop hero Todd Rundgren to play the chimp’s dad and their own mother to be the mom. Most of “Go to School” will be played in sequence when the Lemon Twigs hit the Paradise on Monday. “We just wanted to make a fantasy,” Brian said by phone this week. “We started writing it like any other record, but the songs became connected in a way that wasn’t apparent before we wrote them. We’d also gotten into some musicals that we’d never heard before, like ‘A Little Night Music.’ You can hear that in some of the orchestrations. We always envisioned it performed by the Muppets or something like that, where it has a tone that could be serious if you forget about the character being an animal. It wasn’t meant to be tongue-incheek, so much as not being part of this reality.” Though Brian and Michael are respectively 21 and 19 years old, their musical reference points come from decades earlier. It’s not often that a young, modern band will reference Sparks, pre-disco Bee Gees or Big Star (whose drummer Jody Stephens also guests on the album). “We grew up thinking that everybody was listening to those bands,” Brian said. “It wasn’t until we got to school that we learned otherwise. Our parents are a little older. My dad was 10 when the Beatles first hit America, and he was always pretty obsessed with them. So we grew up playing my dad’s CDs constantly, and started finding our own music when we were around 12.” Sometimes their homages are subtle: Brian says their song “Never Know” nods to a 90-second Elton John instrumental, “Your Starter For,” which they always thought was too short. No surprise that the Lemon Twigs have been embraced by older, pop-obsessed listeners. “I’m grateful when people say we have an element that’s missing from a lot of other bands. You have to accept that at this point, rock ’n’ roll adheres to a set of principles and a kind of instrumentation that’s not exactly modern. I still think it’s possible to do it as well as it’s been done in the past, maybe even better.” Do the brothers ever feel frustrated that they were born too late to see the bands they love? “Not really, because we live in a time when it’s so easy to access it all on YouTube,” Brian said. “We’ve probably seen more performances than we would’ve seen if we were alive back then.”