Merce Lemon: The Best of What’s Next
Photo by Justin Gordon
Six years ago, Will Oldham shared a story about meeting Johnny Cash for the first time, in Hollywood during JR’s recording of “I See a Darkness” for Solitary Man, in 2000—the third installment in his and Rick Rubin’s American Recordings series. “It was astonishing how he was not anywhere but present, and present with the music and present with everybody in the room,” Oldham recalled. And there JR stood, in the Akadémie Mathématique of Philosophical Sound Research room, singing “I hope that someday, buddy, we have got peace in our lives, together or apart, alone or with our wives” to the high-heavens. “Then we’ll stop our whoring and pull the smiles inside and light it up forever and never go to sleep,” he let out, before Oldham’s voice joined in with his.
They’re lyrics that sounded just as incredibly devastating passing through Oldham’s lips as Bonnie “Prince” Billy as they did crawling across the cobblestone of Cash’s shredded voice, the kind of lines that evoke the strange, pervasive antiquity of the Appalachia they were written in. And those lyrics sound permanently overwhelming when Merce Lemon sings them, which she does almost nightly now, as the 27-year-old singer-songwriter sandwiches her Colin Miller-aided cover of “I See a Darkness” in-between two new tracks, “Slipknot” and “Backyard Lover,” on her setlists. Across older songs like “Chili Packet,” “Sunflower,” and “Moon Shots,” her storytelling is unbound like Fiona Apple’s and her instrumentation ricochets off landlocked frequencies like there’s a tab that needs paid and bellies that need fed.
Merce Lemon grew up in South Oakland, a hub for cheap college housing and families dispersed around the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon’s campus refuge. Her parents owned a beautiful brick house that moonlighted as a storage container for film reels (her dad is an archivist). Their garage was a letterprint shop for most of her childhood (her mom is a letterpress printer), and she and her sister would traipse through their mother’s garden with their best friend and next-door neighbor Franny. Her home didn’t have A/C, so she spent long hours at the nearby Carnegie Library, camping out in the teen section during hot Pennsylvania summers. Merce grew up biking everywhere, because her parents were anti-driving, and she attended a Spanish language immersion preschool in Wilkinsburg for five years. When Merce was in 10th grade, her mom suggested she legally change her last name to Lemon.
She keeps an anecdote about Kimya Dawson staying at her parents’ home whenever they would come through Pittsburgh in her back pocket. When the Moldy Peaches songwriter would have a gig booked, Merce would sometimes jump onstage with them and sing a little bit. But music is in her DNA. Her parents both play, and her dad—who had his own band called the Working Poor—has been a frequent member of her band since her return to the city seven years ago. “Since I was born, my parents have taken me to shows,” she says. “Having children has never stopped them from having their life still. I would fall asleep on the back of couches at DIY venues with big headphones on my head.” The Spanish immersion preschool offered an alternative approach to traditional curriculums, namely through musicality. “Each morning started with singing in a circle,” Merce continues, “and those songs carried with me out of school, too. I would come home singing them. That was a really natural transition from being around music to also participating in it.” Before she learned how to play an instrument (she admits she couldn’t play a chord on the guitar until she was 17), Merce grounded herself in language and harmonizing.
Merce had an acapella group with her sister and Franny. She was just seven years old, but they wrote their own material and performed a cover of Delta 5’s “Mind Your Own Business” and even booked a couple of gigs doing it. “I don’t know any other songs by them, but my parents showed me that song when I was younger, and we were obsessed with it.” By the time she was 12, Merce was leading her own punk band, Two Dragons Black and Red (a name she nods to on the Moonth song “Dragon Friends”), and they played a cover of Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” but Merce’s bandmate Yoka’s mom translated it into Spanish. “The words were actually very different,” she explains. “It wasn’t a proper translation, but it was the same melody.” Merce cut her teeth on playing an always-out-of-tune miniature Les Paul—it was total disorder, the epitome of rebellion.
“I don’t think I ever played the same thing twice,” she laughs. “Even then, I was using the guitar as a filler so that I could sing these songs that I had made.” Merce lives in Yoka’s mom’s house now, and they’ve talked about having a Two Dragons Black and Red reunion and seeing “what it would look like to reinterpret those songs now that we have some semblance of how to play an instrument.” While nobody would describe Merce Lemon’s music as punk now, she does joke about returning to the genre. “I would love to,” she says. “Sometimes, when we’re in practice, we just start jamming and I start screaming into the microphone. It’s such a good release, and maybe just doing it in practice is enough. But I’ve thought about it.”
Merce’s nomadic musical backstory makes sense in the context of her short discography, too. Her first two albums, Ideal for a Light Flow with Your Body and Moonth, were reverential entries into a twee-devoted canon, a mode of performance that, in the company of her new LP Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild (out September 27th via Darling Recordings), sounds like a portrait of her own yesteryear. If you’ve been clued in to Merce’s latest string of singles (“I See a Darkness,” “Will You Do Me a Kindness” and “Backyard Lover”), then you’re probably already well-aware of her recent, alt-country-leaning metamorphosis. Her 2024 output has drawn comparisons to Crazy Horse and Big Thief, two apt references that only scratch the surface of the Merce Lemon Band’s sound. But don’t let the excellent use of pedal steel (performed by Wednesday’s Xandy Chelmis) fool you; her style of Americana rollicks in a container of arrangements colored by emotions more so than genre. Merce exists in an ecosystem with bands like eyewash, the Sewerheads and Gaadge, though she sounds like none of them.
And that’s how she prefers to work. “Some of my favorite artists, their soul is in all of their music and it’s undeniably them, even if it sounds totally different,” Merce says. “Their voice is what’s carrying and holding their years of work together.” She prefers to stay restless in her writing, and there’s never any temptation to find a proper “sound” or capitalize on a particular niche that may suit her better than others. Despite the cosmetic differences between Ideal for a Light Flow with Your Body and Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild, the thread that binds the two projects glows because of one relentless force: Merce’s songwriting.
After putting out Moonth in 2020, Merce tried slowing down—accumulating songs at her own pace rather than anyone else’s. In that stretch of time, she began crafting stories more slowly and more intentionally. “When I started putting songs together when I was 17, I feel like I would just barf something out and call it a song,” she says. “With [Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild], a lot of the songs started as five different songs and lines began from little voice memos.” The nine songs she’s getting ready to put out were written without any plan to have them become an album. Merce wanted to give the songs “the space they needed.” “There was no self-imposed pressure for them to be anything,” she furthers. “And then, all of a sudden, I just had enough and they somehow all fit together—even though it was four years from the earliest one (‘Crow’) and the newest one (the title track).”
Merce has been candid about her de-prioritization of music during lockdown and how it took her a long time to get that spark back once the dust settled. She’s content with her music career now, unafraid of what fate awaits her now that she’s acknowledged that it’s not her primary identity. Reaching that headspace freed her, and taking that time off allowed her to fall in love with being intentional. “I don’t know when the next break like that will be,” she admits. “I am kind of worried about carving out space to write songs again without this pressure that is also imposed by the industry. I feel very lucky that I had that space. Now, I’m like, ‘How do I bring that energy into this more chaotic world and still prioritize it and have fun with it?’”
That fun cuts through the chaos on “Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild,” which is Merce’s retelling of a family friend’s encounter with folk troubadour Michael Hurley, when he howled in his living room and awoke a pack of dogs in the midde of the night. The phrase felt evocative enough to her to name the entire record after it, and she believes it’s a title that can take on multiple meanings. “I have a few interpretations of it,” she admits, “but I don’t want to tell anyone what a song means. When my friend told me this story, that image was so seared into my brain. It was like I was watching it on a film when he was telling it to me. I got obsessed with this idea of this old man screaming down a hill at dogs and them howling back at him.”
Merce writes like an archivist, though she does it subconsciously. The songs she grew up with, the phrasings of love and horror told through the songs of Drag City artists like Oldham and Joanna Newsom, transport her to a place and call to mind vivid memories that she, in turn, aims to capture in her own work. In Merce’s older songs, an important place in her life was the kitchen in her parents’ house. During “Disco Ball,” she paints a familiar image when she sings about “observing the laughter into the masses,” and I am transported into the recounting of a family fable, in which an aunt talks about a post-War life unlit but adorned with joy and food smells that pool on the nearby window sill. “That room was where so many important and beautiful things happened, because we didn’t have a proper dining room,” Merce says. “I love how you’ll be at a friend’s house and they’ll have a huge house and everyone will just be smashed into the kitchen together. It’s this room that brings people together, and I was trying to preserve that.”
On Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild, Merce preserves the folk-heavy text of Moonth by plugging it into rousing, soft-loud soundscapes that are sonorously crushing and full of cherry-painted, tender reckonings. The origins of this influx of punchy, mountainous guitars wasn’t intentional, but a product of Reid Magette joining Merce’s band. “I had this thought when I was writing them, like, ‘This needs crazy feedback guitar,’” she says. “Reid brought a lot of that with them. They’re always like, ‘I’m not a lead guitarist, I don’t even know what I’m doing.’ I think they came into these songs when they were in such a raw form that, when we started playing around, they just interpreted them so well and were ready to serve them and understand them.” In 2024, the first instance of that sonic change came during the six-minute “Will You Do Me a Kindness,” which arrived alone in March.
I recently got an email from Paste contributor Ethan Beck, and he mentioned that he was at one of Merce’s many Pittsburgh shows and thought of me when she played “Will You Do Me a Kindness.” Out of everything one person can be, I would argue that being associated with a song like that is one of the better things. “Will You Do Me a Kindness” is my song of the year, my song of the decade and, maybe, my song of the century so far. We all have songs like this, songs that exist within you as anything but. You press play and fall into it—or maybe you press play and it falls into you. “Will You Do Me a Kindness” is charming yet devastating, a paradox that tests the strength of Merce’s own musical equilibrium. The instrumental climbs like a skyscraper and then explodes into a firestorm of emotions. Merce’s language is a sensory treasure trove that’ll crack you in half and then piece you back together with the way she sings about “the way a fly comes so quick through a door that’s swung open” and chairs scattered in the yard “while the wind does its whipping.” There’s an outro guitar solo from Magette that is one with the basalt and the granite, a piercing, afflicting sequence that could buckle the ozone.
But “Will You Do Me a Kindness” is not one of the nine songs included on Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild. She wrote it after the record was completed at Alex Farrar and Adam McDaniel’s Drop of Sun studio in Asheville. “We were playing it a lot live, and I was like, ‘I just want to record this to capture the way we’re playing it right now,” Merce says. The rollout for Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild was still months away, and it had been four years since her last release of original material, so she and her label made the track a one-off single foregoing the album. The option of sitting on the recording for two or three years was never in the cards, but “Will You Do Me a Kindness” is the kind of song built for a nomadic, never-finished lifespan. “I might re-record another version and put it on the next album,” Merce continues. “I want it to have another home.”
Home is of great importance to Merce (and inherently present in the music she makes), who left Pittsburgh when was 17 and, after living in Seattle with her uncle for a few years, moved back—but she had no intention of staying. “I was gonna make a life for myself somewhere else,” she admits, “and you feel like you failed at first, when you’re young and you come home and live with your parents for six months until you find another place. I felt like I had backtracked for a second. But I don’t feel that way anymore.” Of course, that always-lingering pull of the place she sprang from became too unavoidable. “I got swallowed back into this world,” she says. “I was trying to find my place again in a city where I had grown up. So many people here have known me since I was a little kid, and I was like, ‘How do I reinvent myself as an adult in this world and find my own pocket here?’ I wanted to see if I could feel challenged here, or if I was just too comfortable.” There’s security for her in Pittsburgh, in the Regent Square neighborhood of the East End where she and her cat Moldy live, and she’s keen on keeping it, especially given the insecurities of a lifestyle dependent on touring.
On “Backyard Lover,” the lines “Now I am falling to a dark place, where just remembering her death’s about all I can take” idle after every listen. When Merce was 15 years old, her best friend passed away, and she’s admittedly written songs that are fundamentally and bluntly about that loss, though they never surfaced anywhere beyond her notes and voice memos. But that trauma was a transformative event that recalibrated the way she now contextualizes not just her relationships, but the parts of herself she vulnerably lends to a song versus the parts of herself that remain for her and her alone. The nature-bound poetry of Louise Glück and Mary Oliver help Merce make better sense of those juxtaposing forces. “I basically moved to Seattle in response to my friend dying,” she says. “I was just like, ‘I can’t be in the city.’ I always was like, ‘What would my life have looked like if I hadn’t experienced this huge loss?’ More recently, in the ways I’m in relationships with people, I see how, even though it was 12 years ago, it still affects how close I hold the people I love and how scared I am of losing them—because I know how much it fucking sucks.”
Merce’s old neighborhood of South Oakland runs along the shores of the Monongahela River, a 130-miles-long body of water formed by a junction of the West Fork and Tygart Rivers. From the moment I heard Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild for the first time this summer, I’d felt cosmically imbued not by Merce herself, but by the stories she told. Her work is evocative of the water and the flora and the fauna that makes Pittsburgh’s east side such a confluence of Allegheny and Appalachian cultures. On “Crow,” she sings about the city’s crow migration; “Rain” is adapted from one of Justin Lubecki’s poems, but the “I miss you like the wind hugs wings, like the mountain’s fingertips on the tops of trees, tickling the sky’s belly like soupy clouds” conjures resplendent memories of driving along Interstate 79 and memorizing the Allegheny Mountains’ green canopy and hilly populous.
And songs like “Blueberry Heaven,” “Foolish and Fast” and “Backyard Lover” sound like heirlooms that get passed down from generation to generation until their origins are rewritten into something completely unrecognizable. They’re lived-in but aimlessly in love and critical of the spaces a body can no longer fill. “In the wanderings of my nothingness, in a wading through of uncrossed lists,” Merce sings at the conclusion of “Window,” before humming through a simmering coda of noise. During “Birdseed,” she sings about eating like a bird in hopes of one day growing wings and watching blossoms “turning to fruit and then dropping.” As moments pass, that portrait of joy grows into spite: “I’m the bird that sings so goddamn loud it wakes you up at dawn,” she sings. Flickers of body weight make “phosphorescence glow,” troubles go extinct on the horizon lines, skin burns “with our thoughts of escape,” husbands are heavy like lime zest on beds of leaves, and words written down in honesty swirl into the kind of folklore you can grow in a garden surrounded by rusted chairs.
When Merce sings about “swimming in a river, showing off the butterfly enraptured in light” and the softness of the water holding her and the anger that swells as she unravels a laundry list of disasters that could be interpreted as beautiful (“A sliding hill, a quick refrain, a frozen bird melting, an eyelash for wishing”), it sounds nothing like a compromise and everything like the dogged unpredictability of the ridges I’ve run away from and hugged all the same. Perhaps there’s a home for me and for you and for everyone in the ramshackled tributary of Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild’s sharpened elbows. So it only makes sense then that, as you follow the Monongahela into the Tygart and head all the way down to the midpoint between Ardon and Clemtown, West Virginia, you’ll find yourself standing in a crick (and good fishing hole) called Mitchell Run, which was named after my ancestors whom descended upon Randolph County in the 1800s. Dig far enough beneath her language and you might find a familiar point of entry, too.
When Merce writes about a “butterfly,” she might be writing about a butterfly stroke and nodding to her time spent competing on a swim team (“I’m always trying to show people I could do, like, three of those in a row”), but you wouldn’t be wrong for considering the word within the context of nature’s delicateness and where she—and we—fit into it. The spoon tossed into the fire eventually becomes the spoon caught in someone’s eye, someone whose golden braids “pour into drops.” In Merce’s model of living, beauty and humor entangle with violence; Heaven and its buried money are both guarded by ducks; bruises don’t stay purple forever, though you may learn a thing or two from hearing “you fucking liar” cranked to an 11, whether it’s aimed at you or not. More importantly, you’d be remiss to not let the gesture of Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild swallow you up like a room. “I want to make emotional music, but I want it to still be hopeful,” Merce says. “The way I live my life, there has to be humor in all of this darkness. They co-exist, and I think that’s important to show in song, too, that all of these feelings can live together. It’s very much how my moods are—how I feel, constantly, like a million different ways in one day—and being able to hold it all.”
That thing Will Oldham said about Johnny Cash, how astonishing it was that JR “was not anywhere but present, and present with the music and present with everybody in the room,” you could say the same about Merce Lemon. She enters each song with grace and ventures through the peeling skin, ghost towns and men laughing their teeth out, all while considering the silhouettes of everything and everyone around her. As she speaks of loved ones, she refers to them by name even if you’ve never met them. You can find an entire life waiting for you inside a record like Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild. When Merce sings “no matter what, no matter what, no matter what,” she’s giving you a taste of what it feels like to be free. She’s giving you an answer to the question of how the fruit got so damn sweet.
Watch the music video for “Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild” below
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.