The Lemon Twigs’ Go to School Is Musical Theater for Your Ears

Writing a concept album is among the foremost creative challenges for a songwriter. Each song’s narrative has to be woven into a larger narrative arc, and the music itself also has to be crafted to play a compelling role in telling the greater story. On their second LP Go to School, ’60s- and ’70s-rock-indebted brothers The Lemon Twigs tell the story of a chimp named Shane who’s been raised by human parents and struggles with his identity as he faces the trials and tribulations of attending school with human children. Despite the immense talent and precocious experience of 21-year-old Brian and 19-year-old Michael D’Addario — they’re the sons of musicians Ronnie D’Addario and Susan Hall, and they’ve both performed on Broadway — Go to School’s development was a bit of an accident. 

“When we were writing the initial songs, it seemed like they were linked in some way,” Brian D’Addario tells the Scene, calling from the van the day after playing two consecutive nights at the Hollywood Bowl with Arctic Monkeys. “It felt like we had to figure out what it was that united them. Certain aspects of the story would kind of appear through different songs as we wrote them. It was piece by piece. There were very few decisions that were made in advance of writing the songs, in terms of the story. It was usually the song that informed what the story was.”

Shane’s story stands on its own, but also lends itself to larger statements about love, alienation and finding one’s place in an increasingly chaotic world. The themes have a recognizable teenage slant that older listeners can still easily identify with. In “Rock Dreams,” Shane’s adoptive parents (sung with pitch-perfect dramatic flair by Hall and Todd Rundgren) pepper their duet with lines that take you right back to childhood: “School is in an hour,” and, “You’re going to like your new school,” they sing, before the song launches into an anthemic swell of distorted guitars. The D’Addario brothers, not far removed from their high school years themselves, tried to stay true to their own voices, writing nearly finished songs alone before sharing their ideas with each other.

“We tend to think that, especially with lyrics, it’s a lot easier to get the original intention of the song down when it’s just one voice,” Brian D’Addario says. “We try to flesh it out as much as we can on our own beforehand, but there are cases where someone is just playing a song they’ve mostly written and the other person changes the whole foundation of the tune.”

With some technical assistance from their father, the brothers recorded all 16 of Go to School’s tracks live to tape in their parents’ basement in Long Island, N.Y. The resulting sound gives you a sense of watching a musical with your eyes closed. 

“Our favorite records were recorded the way we decided to record this one — in rock, and in all genres,” Brian says. “So it just made it so that it could have every advantage to be on the same level as things we like, as opposed to some replication of it, or some copy of it. We wanted to do whatever we could to elevate the work.”

That included calling on Rundgren and Big Star’s Jody Stephens (who lends his agile drumming to “The Student Becomes the Teacher”) to help them further articulate the LP’s sound and story.

“[Todd] came over to our house when he had a show locally,” Brian says. “Jody we had met when we did a tour of Ardent Studios in Memphis about two years ago. … We had him fly out and stay at our house, and he was super, super sweet and really did the song well. It was just great because we knew exactly what we wanted to do, and they ended up being perfect.”

Go to School is a bombastic, colorful affair, with songs like “The Bully” and “Lonely” boasting larger-than-life arrangements that incorporate strings and horns in addition to guitar, keys, bass, drums and vocals. To replicate that sound onstage, which they’ll do when they play The Basement East with Jungle Green and Ornament on Tuesday, the brothers have expanded their touring band to a five-piece, adding multi-instrumentalist Tommaso Taddonio.

“It’s been a lot easier with another melodic instrument,” says Brian. “You’d be surprised how much more ground you can cover and how much more of the arrangements you can represent with an extra person. It’s been really nice to feel like we’ve filled out the sound and represented the record.”