Merce Lemon’s new album, Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild, is teeming with naturalistic imagery: birdseed and blossoms, backyards and butterflies, crashing waves and muddy puddles, enough crows to “make a city of this ghost town.” The music sounds like fresh air is flowing between her guitar strings. During the quiet parts, you almost expect to hear a squirrel chittering in the background. The song tempos are unhurried like the freedom of hiking without cell service, and the hint of guitar twang suggests that, despite Lemon’s urban roots, she spends enough time outdoors to earn herself a proper farmer’s tan.
If you tried to envision the home where this earthy lyricist and cozy singer resided, it would look exactly like the one Pittsburgh City Paper visits in Pittsburgh. Her front porch is overflowing with greenery, and around back is a nicely preened garden, leafy and lush. When I enter Lemon’s kitchen, she’s standing calmly at the counter spreading avocado on warm toast. At this point, the 27-year-old already had a full day’s work at her landscaping job and then came home to spend another couple hours in the garden. “It’s kind of contagious,” she says with a giggle.
Lemon wasn’t always this connected with nature. Her first two albums, 2017’s Ideal for a Light Flow With Your Body and 2020’s Moonth, evoked the cramped comforts of a dusty attic. Her introverted twee-pop songs, alternately silly and sad, were a Pittsburgher’s response to the bedroom-pop renaissance that artists like Frankie Cosmos and Florist were leading in New York City.
But since those bodies of work, Lemon’s life has changed dramatically. Between working with soil for three years and spending one COVID-era summer sleeping outside almost every night, her love of nature has deepened. Meanwhile, her artistic confidence has strengthened; her voice is more powerful, her lyrics more vivid. Her band, comprising entirely new members since Moonth, have ignited her songs with a mesmerizing chemistry.
Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild, due out Sept. 27 via Darling Recordings, inhabits the nexus between the spellbinding folk-rock of Big Thief and the rip-roaring country-rock of Crazy Horse. It’s a full-bodied triumph that positions Lemon, long one of the city’s burgeoning indie-rock talents, for a legitimate breakthrough beyond the 412. It’s such a resounding statement of purpose that it’s shocking to think that, just a few years back, Lemon was questioning her own identity as a songwriter.
“The thing about music is like, OK, if this doesn't work out, who am I?”
At the very least, she’ll always be Merce Lemon. In 10th grade, her mom encouraged her to legally change her last name to Lemon, just because Merce liked the ring of it. Her early childhood was similarly unusual. Growing up in South Oakland, the singer-songwriter was part of an “open and artistic” community of family friends who spent almost all of their time together.
From ages two to seven, Lemon attended a Spanish language immersion preschool in a backyard in Wilkinsburg. Her mother is a professional letterpress printer, and her grandmother was a visual artist, while her dad, who fans might recognize from his years-long stint in Lemon’s live band, is a film archivist whose collection once filled every crevice in their home.
“Crafting was perpetual,” Lemon says of her free-thinking upbringing. “We were rarely clothed — but it wasn’t a cult.”
Music was everywhere. Her parents, both musicians themselves, also hosted touring artists at their home. One frequent guest was Kimya Dawson of 2000s twee icons The Moldy Peaches, who Lemon would sing with onstage whenever she came through town. A precocious songwriter, Lemon had already cycled through an a cappella band and a punk group by age 12 but then contracted debilitating stage fright that kept her offstage until she was 19.
“That kind of opened a million doors for me,” Lemon says of her first show as an adult. “That rush of performing for people was reintroduced.”
By that point, Lemon was living with her uncle in Seattle, where she finished up high-school taking courses at a community college. Lemon’s best friend died when she was 15, making her already unpleasant schooling experience that much more dreadful. Rather than drop out, her mom suggested she move across the country for a reset.
It was at that first show in Seattle where Lemon met Dylan Hanwright of indie-rock favorites Great Grandpa, who offered to record her debut album in his basement studio. Making Ideal… was a great experience for Lemon, but she struggles to revisit those songs today because of how “scared” she sounds on the recordings. It’s certainly a far cry from the confidence she displays in 2024, standing tall and firm behind the mic at shows and projecting her voice into long-tailed croons on Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild.
“Somebody came up to me after a show in Seattle,” Lemon recalls, “and was like, ‘I love the shakiness in your voice.” They figured her nervous quivering was an artistic affect. “I was like, ‘I’m literally shaking.’”
When Lemon returned to Pittsburgh around 2017, she didn’t have friends in the scene, so she asked her dad and another middle-aged family friend, Jim Lingo, to be her bandmates. Lemon says being in a band with her father was a great experience that brought them closer together; he never tried to steer control away from his daughter and always respected her creative vision. After three years of building regional momentum through steady gigging, the so-called “dad band” era of Merce Lemon entered a proper studio to record Moonth.
Unfortunately, the record’s planned release arrived in Aug. 2020 at the height of the George Floyd protests and COVID lockdown. Lemon chose not to promote the album at that time, and with live shows taken away from her and her band virtually dissolved, she put effort into other hobbies. She even considered de-prioritizing music altogether and only treating it as a casual pursuit.
“I had lost my joy playing music at that time,” Lemon says. “I just didn’t feel very inspired.”
Getting that spark back wasn’t a surefire thing. Slowly, she began writing songs again, documenting her life bit by bit. She put out a call for new bandmates on Instagram and gradually assembled her now-powerhouse lineup: guitarist Reid Magette, bassist Ben Brody, and drummer Pat Coyle. Lemon’s personal life was also undergoing a restructuring. When asked if Watch Me Drive… is a breakup album, she chuckles, as if I noticed something she thought she was being subtle about. She only thinks one track, the wispy ballad “Window,” directly references her former relationship with a farmer that encompassed much of the writing process.
“It’s like a breakup song [written] when I was still in a relationship,” she says, smiling meekly. “One of those.”
Other lyrics that might scan as interpersonal conflicts are actually internal conversations. When Lemon intones “you fucking liar” during the eruptive climax of “Backyard Lover” — the loudest, angriest passage in her whole catalog — the coarse accusation is actually aimed inward at her own self-critical judgments. In the album’s hauntingly gorgeous, piano-speckled title-track, Lemon’s refrain about the thoughts of a husband “weighing down” on her mind have nothing to do with her own marital doubts.
The song is Lemon’s creative interpretation of a surreal encounter her family friend had with ’60s folk hero Michael Hurley. The titular dogs being driven wild are the hounds Hurley awoke when he supposedly howled out of his living room window into the dark night. Moreover, the “murderous flock” in “Crow” is about the Pittsburgh crow migration Lemon used to marvel at from her roof in Bloomfield.
“These crows know something that we don’t,” she remembers thinking. “I wish I could follow them.”
Lemon still isn’t sure where her own migration pattern is taking her. Though she’s now dating someone long-distance, she still views Pittsburgh as an ideal “home base.” She’s more proud of her music than ever, and the intentional effort she’s putting into her band dynamic — to “cultivate fun” and treat everyone respectfully — is paying dividends. They're having a blast. She and her label have big aspirations for Watch Me Drive…, and with recent coverage by tastemakers like Pitchfork and glowing endorsements from buzzy national bands like Squirrel Flower and Babehoven, it seems like Lemon’s profile is blooming.
So what’s missing?
“I’m just excited to put this thing out so that maybe it will open up some metaphorical space in my head so I can start writing again,” she says. “That always happens. I’m like, I can't start this other thing until I let go of this project.”
