Brian and Michael D’Addario dropped their fifth album as the Lemon Twigs, A Dream Is All We Know, only last year, so it feels like a quick turnaround for the former to release his debut solo record. However, most of the songs on Brian’s album Till the Morning have been floating around for some time now, just waiting for the right home. “These were tunes that piled up over the years but when I started putting the album together, it really hung together musically and thematically. It’s country baroque,” Brian explains in a press release. And while there are slide guitar moments here and there, as well as some Carter Family inspiration, Till the Morning still fits decidedly in the Lemon Twigs’ velvety, carefully crafted ‘60s-style pop sound.
That sonic consistency is no surprise considering that Brian’s younger brother, Michael, co-produced the album and sings on five out of the 11 tracks. Even when Brian’s operating on his own, those songs still feel like B-sides from a forgotten Lemon Twigs LP (which in turn sound like something that was unearthed from the Beatles or the Beach Boys’ storage units). “Till the Morning”—a Brian-only affair, with Paul D. Millar engineering—is a warm, jaunty springtime air that channels Simon and Garfunkel and includes the standout line “If I knew where my mind went tucked beneath your thighs / I’d go there more often.” The best track on the album is “Company,” which starts with straightforward piano flourishes and Brian’s voice, until strangely orchestral electric guitar and Moog synths traipse in, buzzing furiously like a kicked hive.
The penultimate song, “Useless Tears,” is an appropriately melodramatic lament that sprang from “the paranoia that arises when you realize the social contract has been violated,” Brian explains. Arch, macabre strings strut and weep under Brian’s voice as he tells us of how “These useless tears they echo through the ears / Keep on flowing year to year like an oil well.” It’s certainly a sentiment for our times, even if the music sounds like it’s from six decades ago—and serves as a necessary reminder that class struggles have been ongoing from time immemorial.
Besides Michael, Brian found another collaborator in LA poet and Beach Boys songwriter Stephen Kalinich, who penned the lyrics for two of the tracks—the charmingly lo-fi “Song of Everyone” and the unabashedly romantic “What You Are Is Beautiful.” Kalinich’s contribution is clearly a nod to the D’Addarios’ position as sonic successors to the Wilson brothers (although we hope with happier endings), but also plays into the pastiche of it all. Working with a personal hero of yours is always an exciting prospect, but what if Brian had taken the chance to uplift a new voice, an up-and-coming poet who could lend fresh eyes? Hopefully something more exciting than this. The lyrics on “What You Are Is Beautiful” are lucid and beautiful, if a bit trite (“Through your eyes of sadness I see richness beyond measure / More than any earthly treasure”), while the vagueness of “Song of Everyone” makes it feel empty as opposed to the uplifting message it’s aiming for (and even undercuts the merits of a rhetorical “Song for Everyone” with the line “No single plan for any woman, child or man / Each must find their own way”).
Brian D’Addario’s penchant for nostalgic songwriting on Till the Morning (and on the Lemon Twigs’ previous records) had me returning to the late Mark Fisher’s seminal work Capitalist Realism, in particular these queries: “ How long can a culture persist without the new? What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises?” In the context of his book, Fisher’s questions were inspired by the 2006 film Children of Men, in which humankind literally cannot create new people—no child has been born for nearly two decades. Of course, without children, society is doomed to end. But Fisher turns this existential question into a creative one—one still with existential consequences—asking how our culture can continue without “the new.” The answer: We get albums like Brian D’Addario’s that are beautiful, lovingly made and yet, dully familiar.
Clare Martin is a cemetery enthusiast and Paste’s associate music editor.
