The Lemon Twigs

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’ toepisodes 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 onpiano, 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!”