‘Lonely’: How The Lemon Twigs channelled teenage isolation
We all feel lonely sometimes. Humans are a social species, after all, and we’re all searching for connection, comfort and reassurance—feats that can only be reached by the facility of others. The teen years, full of doubt, development and discourse, can prove particularly adverse as we try to navigate our way to adulthood. It’s a sentiment that Michael D’Addario of The Lemon Twigs knows only too well.
Michael and co-vocalist and brother Brian make music that could belong in the 1960s if it wasn’t so encapsulating of the modern zeitgeist. Inspired heavily by The Beatles and The Beach Boys, the Long Island sibling duo have offered an evolving and endearing strain of jangle pop since their breakthrough 2016 debut album Do Hollywood. When they returned with their sophomore album, Go to School, two years later in 2018, it was with a broader concept, a longer track list, and a simian protagonist.
It takes a band of idiosyncratic essence to construct a whole album based around a teen chimpanzee undertaking a sprawling journey from outcast amid humanity to freedom in nature. But The Lemon Twigs fit the bill. And so with their second album, the D’Addario’s showed intent to document a rags-to-riches tale, told as a musical, about Shane, the chimp in question who is raised as a boy and goes to school.
”We were thinking about this totally innocent, very pure character who came from a different place to all the other characters in the story, who came from a more cynical place,” Brian explained to Q Magazine when they questioned the album’s methodology. “We thought, ‘Oh, maybe this could explain why he’s unlike the rest of them, why he’s more in tune with his soul, because he hasn’t been corrupted.’”
There’s one song on the album in particular, nestled unassumingly but fittingly in the middle of the album’s track list—a low point within the album’s story for its primate champion—that provokes the angsty memory of feeling secluded as an adolescent, and signifies loneliness in its complexity and irrationality. It’s called—you guessed it—’Lonely’, and you don’t have to read between the lines too much to know what it’s about.
It’s a beautifully arranged song, the wistful, cinematic backdrop inverting a sense of longing from the incepting key-shifting wandering piano. The crooning, reaching vocal performance, gentle rhythmic grooves and splashes of orchestral top lines sketch melancholy on an empty palette. The laconic, child-like lyricism adds emphasis to the sorrowful simplicity of the song’s topic, its broad brushstrokes dictating the tone and flow of the piece. Such intention is clear from the opening lyrics as much as any, as the song’s singer swoons: “When I feel like going out at night / I expect friends to know but they don’t / So I’m alone / Well I’d like it if someone cared”.
Michael wrote ‘Lonely’ when he was 15 about feeling isolated at school, and the decision to include it on The Lemon Twigs second album years later—shaped from the new perspective of a chimpanzee at that—is telling. He told Billboard in an interview about the album: “When we were recording it this year, I decided, ‘Let’s just do it exactly the way I wrote it then.’ It was really genuine and it’s rare for things to be produced on this scale, but have a lyric that came from a real 15-year-old heart.”
He added: “It’s even more interesting than just being a guy who writes musicals and putting yourself in the 15-year-old’s shoes. Things like that happened, a lot of natural things like that. It was a natural process.”
Raw, characterful and undeniably relatable, this hidden gem at the nucleus of an underappreciated album guides you to reflection and stays true to the strife of its teenage writer. It might also make you feel glad at getting old. Who’d want to be a teenager again, ay?
