‘My Golden Years’: How The Lemon Twigs made the perfect millennial Beatles song
No generation is safe from a little bit of nostalgia. Even if someone only looks to the future to see where music is going, there are always going to be those records that they keep close to their chest because they capture the spirit of what it meant to be young and have no cares in the world. While The Lemon Twigs make some brilliant music that calls back to the classic days of rock and roll, ‘My Golden Years’ is the kind of melancholic beauty that The Beatles wished they could have made.
That said, no part of The Lemon Twigs’ sound would have been complete without the Fab Four coming first. Regardless of their fixation with everyone from The Monkees to even traces of The Zombies in their delivery, some of their best moments come from repackaging those old sounds that The Beatles made so popular and making them somehow feel new again.
Although Everything Harmony felt like the moment where every part of their sound was crystallised, ‘My Golden Years’ is the kind of single that packages every hook on top of each other to kick off A Dream Is All We Know. But even on the standards we measure them with as a nostalgic-sounding band, ‘My Golden Years’ feels like the millennial answer to what The Beatles were talking about.
Because when you look at The Beatles’ discography, over 85% of it seems to be centred around love and peace. Sure, there are still breakup songs and tunes that ruminate on the sour side of life, but the lion’s share of their tunes feature the guy getting the girl at the end of the day or spreading love to make the world a better place.
In terms of lyrical analysis, this is less ‘All You Need is Love’ and more ‘Hey Ya’ by Outkast. Throughout the tune, Michael D’Addario is talking about whether or not he has the time to even appreciate his golden years to a melody that practically sounds like it has sunshine shooting out of its ass.
Although Andre 3000 took the same approach by taking a sad song and making it better by adding a lot of groove to it, this is closer to what The Beatles had been going for in the 1960s in one song. Despite people claiming that ‘We Can Work It Out’ is the archetype for what a Beatles song should sound like, The Lemon Twigs take it to another level by having a McCartney-style melody with Lennon’s insecurities.
Looking at where Lennon was at the start of his solo career, he was more unsure of himself than ever before, and while Plastic Ono Band helped him expel his demons, he had a long way to go before falling back to Earth. On the other hand, you had McCartney still making the whimsical songs that he was used to and managed to get a lot more experimental on tracks like RAM.
So, listening to ‘My Golden Years’, what you hear is the kind of sonic sheen that came from an album like RAM through the filter of Lennon’s proto-millennial struggles of getting through the day. ‘It’s So Hard’ had set the stage for the former Beatle’s woes with the world, but the D’Addarios aren’t singing from a place of pain. It’s a place of fear that comes with not knowing where they will be heading in a year’s time, let alone what they should be doing during their golden years.
Groups like ELO have been known to wear their Beatles influences on their sleeve, but in a song like this, The Lemon Twigs aren’t looking to simply copy what Lennon and McCartney and add their own touch to it. They are using the same tools in the toolbox, but what they sculpted takes The Beatles’ positive approach to rock and roll and spins it into the kind of tune that takes all of their heroes’ strengths and puts them under one roof.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Beatles Newsletter
All the latest stories about The Beatles from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.