Twangy indie rock is in full swing this year. Waxahatchee returned with her new album Tigers Blood in March; next month sees the release of Allegra Krieger’s Art Of The Unseen Infinity Machine and MJ Lenderman’s Manning Fireworks. Enter Merce Lemon, a Pittsburgh native whose third LP Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild also arrives in September. The sweeping second single “Backyard Lover” is a grief-stricken yet sunlit sprawl bursting with charged guitars and melancholy pedal steel, and lucky for us, the rest of the record is just as compelling.

“Foolish And Fast” is a road trip through the mountains, revelatory and tinged with sorrow; “Crow” is a ballad for the birds, wishing to be a part of their flock. Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild is timeless in its yearning for nature as Lemon admires blueberries, swims in rivers, and expresses human love in environmental terms: “I miss you like the wind hugs wings/ Like the mountain’s fingertips/ On the tops of trees/ Tickling the sky’s belly,” Lemon lulls on “Rain,” a song that began as a friend’s poem.

Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild was recorded with Asheville’s Alex Farrar, whose impressive repertoire notably includes Wednesday’s Rat Saw God, our pick for the Best Album Of 2023. The collaborators on Lemon’s LP are aplenty: Reid Magette on guitar and vocals; Ben Brody on bass, harmonica, and vocals; Pat Coyle on drums, percussion, and harmonies; Spencer Smith on piano and synth; Colin Miller on bojo; Xandy Chelmis on pedal steel; Landon George on fiddle and bowed cymbal; and Farrar on rhythm guitar. Greg Freeman, who unveiled his astounding debut I Looked Out in 2022 to many Songs: Ohia comparisons, did Lemon’s album cover.

Before my chat with Lemon, I familiarize myself with Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild on walks near the water, where I tread the single white line on the side of the road like it’s a tightrope as cars speed by trying their best not to hit me. Despite the potential danger, I’m completely captivated and almost protected by Lemon’s songs, especially as I look out at the harbor, where swans sleep as they drift on calm waves. I inform Lemon as we talk on Zoom that it’s a perfect walking album, and she tells me about her musical background, her songwriting process, and her special relationship with her cat. The LP’s title track, which is also the finale, is out today; hear it below, and read our conversation until the very end for her birdseed cookie recipe.

What’s your earliest musical memory?

MERCE LEMON: I feel like sometimes my memories are confused with photos I’ve seen because my childhood was highly documented, but I would say my earliest memory is falling asleep on the couch at a DIY show that my parents brought me to with huge, noise-canceling headphones on my head.

Like how old?

LEMON: Probably three years old. Three or four.

What do your parents do that they were bringing you to DIY shows?

LEMON: My dad was in a band my whole life — or at least my whole childhood growing up — called the Working Poor. That was in Pittsburgh, and then he also was a film curator. So he would do a lot of film screenings, and oftentimes there would be live music accompanying them. My mom also played in some bands, but they were just huge music lovers. When I was younger, we hosted a lot of bands. My parents lived in a nice house that they got really cheap in Pittsburgh in the ’90s, and we often had bands sleeping at our house. I don’t really remember when that stopped being as much of a thing, but for the first half of my life there was always people around, bands coming through and sleeping on our floors.

What music did they play?

LEMON: The band my dad was in was — I always have a hard time with genre, but kind of freak country stuff. My mom was in a band called Bad Daughters for a second. It was awesome. The bands coming through, it was such an eclectic mix, but Kimya Dawson was one of them that would stay at our house when we were younger because she played at some small DIY spots before when she was still kind of underground. There was a band called Bitchin’, and I still have the T-shirt that they spray-painted in our backyards. They were making merch in our yard before their show in the middle of tour.

Did you ever consider not going into music?

LEMON: I don’t think it was ever any decision, one way or another. Honestly, I didn’t think I was gonna. I did music when I was younger, and then I just played a lot of sports in high school and drew a lot and didn’t play music. I loved music but I didn’t play until I was 17 again. So there was definitely a huge chunk of time where I was playing sports and had creative outlets, but it wasn’t playing music. So I never actually thought that I was going to do music. It just was so a part of my life that I knew it would always be there, but I never was like, “I want to be a musician.” I don’t think I had that clear thought.

I read that you took a break from performing because of stage fright, and then you returned on your 19th birthday. How did that land on your 19th birthday?

LEMON: I moved to Seattle. I was 17, and I was living with my uncle, and he also plays music. So he had a ton of guitars, and I had a ton of poems and I was like, “Maybe I could just turn these into songs.” I’ve always sung, but I never had actually learned how to play an instrument. So I was like, “I guess if I learn like two chords, I could make a song.” I probably learned two or three chords and started turning a lot of my poems into songs. Probably my first demos I put on Tumblr. I actually have been trying to find my Tumblr. I can’t find it. I really want to find those demos.

Then I think somebody I knew booked shows at this DIY place in Seattle, and he knew that I made songs and that I hadn’t played a show since I was a little kid. Somebody dropped off the bill and he texted me, and it was actually on my 19th birthday, and he was like, “Would you want to play this?” I was terrified. I think I played to my roommates in our kitchen with my back turned to them to see if I could even do it. It felt kind of good, scary but good. So my 19th birthday was when I reintroduced myself to performing in front of people.

I read you were in bands when you were 10 years old; what were those bands?

LEMON: One of them was this a cappella group that I wrote most of the songs to and my sister who’s three years younger than me was in, and then our best friend who was perfectly a year and a half between us. I wrote a lot of the songs, and I think we did a couple covers, and the band name changed every time we played a show. Preceding that was my punk band called Two Dragons Black And Red. That was a duo with a friend of mine. I live in the same house as him now. So we’ve been friends for a really long time.

What songs were you covering?

LEMON: The only two covers I remember is this one Delta 5 song called “Mind Your Own Business,” which was probably very influenced by my mom. She was probably like, “You guys should cover this song.” In the punk band, my friend’s mom is the person I learned Spanish from in preschool, and she taught us “We Will Rock You” but in Spanish and totally different lyrics. So basically, just the melody of “We Will Rock You” but completely different words.

To go back to the idea of poetry, I’m curious if there’s a difference for you between writing songs and writing poems.

LEMON: Definitely, and I would say that at this point my life I’m not really writing poetry without music. It was really interesting turning my poems into songs when I was 17 at that point in my life because I had such a different relationship with the music. I was kind of fitting the words to the music. So oftentimes the phrasing was really weird or the timing was weird. And now, since I do it a little more cohesively, it doesn’t have that as much. But I love trying to fit poems that you wrote without music to melody. Like the song “Rain” on the album was a poem that a friend of mine wrote that I just almost verbatim used every single word. I think maybe I took one word out. That song is pretty structureless.

I was really swept away by “Backyard Lover.” You mentioned that a lot of the songs on the album are touched by death, but to me the songs sound so light and almost hopeful, especially that song because the last line is an image of “an eyelash for wishing.”

LEMON: I have a hard time not writing about emotional and intense things that are often very personal. But I think that it’s really important to have hope in songs that are exploring intense things. I appreciate you saying that because that’s definitely something that I don’t know if I always intentionally did it, but it’s always humor mixed in with intense feelings. I think the balance of those two is really important because I don’t want to listen to the most depressing songs in the world that will just pull me into a pit of despair. I think that there’s always a lightness and humor to be found in everything.

The song “Birdseed” in itself is pretty hopeful, but the last line is a little joke.

LEMON: That one might be my happiest song. I’m always like, “How do you write a truly happy song?” But that one was a deep pandemic song. I was living at my parents’ house staring out of the window at our cherry tree for like two months, watching it change. I was also obsessed with making this cookie recipe that was like all seeds. So that song is loosely inspired by a cookie recipe and by my childhood cherry tree. And the line about my droppings land where you’re walking… it’s kind of gross, but I thought it was funny.

I was actually going to ask about your birdseed cookie recipe.

LEMON: It’s really healthy, and it’s full of seeds and dates. I really think you could feed it to the birds. It’s not marketed as a birdseed cookie recipe, but I think you could feed this for the birds. I think you could share this treat with the birds. I can share it with you if you want.

There are a lot of birds on the album in general, I was wondering if you felt a kinship with them.

LEMON: They’re fascinating. I was in the river yesterday in Portland watching a bird. I can’t remember what kind; I don’t know birds very well. My coworkers are obsessed with birds. They can hear one and know exactly what it is. So I’ve kind of learned some from them. So I was just watching it flap over me. And I was like, “This is insane that this creature can fly through the air.” The crow migration that happens over Pittsburgh is such an event that it is really powerful to witness, just a mass of creatures that all somehow know to go to the same place and organize themselves in the sky.

Where did the album title come from?

LEMON: It came from a line of a story my friend told me about Michael Hurley. He was telling me a story about staying with Michael Hurley I think somewhere in Oregon. I think that’s a line that Michael Hurley said when he was looking out the window of his house. I hope I’m getting that story right, but that story really stuck with me, and that specific image did, and I feel like it can be interpreted a lot of different ways. At one point I was going to have my album cover be me sitting in my underwear on a chair with that title. It’s just a very vivid image in my head that I felt like tied together all these songs in a kind of strange way.

I read that the song “Will You Do Me A Kindness” is a collage of moments, lines, and feelings you gathered, and I was curious if that’s how most of your songs kind of come together.

LEMON: Maybe half of them. It’s definitely a big part of how I make songs. Maybe one song needs to be five different songs that got sewn together. I think I rarely go into a song knowing what it’s about or having a full vision for it. I let it take me on that journey. So inevitably, it does end up being all of these things that are thematically tied together.

When you finish a song, do you know what it’s about or is there still a sense of mystery?

LEMON: I think I don’t totally know what it’s about all the time. I know what each part brings, and I know where I’m coming from. I really like when other people interpret it and are like, “This is what I got from it.” I don’t claim one meaning to any of the songs. There are some that are about very specific things, like “Blueberry Heaven” and “Crow” are pretty straightforward. I feel like those I wrote more in one sitting and maybe had more of a specific vision because I was very inspired by one event or one place.

I love “Foolish And Fast.” Are you often inspired by driving?

LEMON: Yeah. That started out as me being like, “I’m gonna write a song about running,” because I was really into running at the time, and that’s where the line “foolish and fast” came from — I was thinking about running and it turned into a driving song, which I’m actually really happy about because it’s been four or five years now but I basically didn’t drive my entire life. I was always a biker, but I love the romanticness of driving songs. I had never been able to write one because I actually didn’t really know what it was like. After learning to drive and touring a lot and taking a lot longer of drives, I was like, “Okay, I understand the romanticism of it,” and really wanted to interpret it in my own way in a song.

Do you have any speeding tickets yet?

LEMON: Yep. It actually did not take very long for me to get a speeding ticket, but I learned my lesson. It was on a highway with nobody on it in Ohio. And everyone was like, “Ohio is the worst place to speed.” I was going 92 driving me and my band to a show. It was like an hour into our drive leaving Pittsburgh. I was like, “This is the beginning of tour.” But I haven’t gotten one since. I think you kind of need to get your one. And I’m just more aware of where the fucking cops are hiding.

Where do you think is the ideal place to listen to the album?

LEMON: I like when you said that it was the perfect walking album. I think that’s a good way of experiencing it, because a lot of the imagery in it is me walking around and noticing things and being very present in my surroundings. Walking around a neighborhood, looking at the plants or the woods, but moving with it.

I heard you have a symbiotic relationship with your outdoor cat Moldy.

LEMON: She’s like my roommate more than my cat. She was born in a woodshop at my dad’s friend’s house an hour or two outside of Pittsburgh and they were just getting rid of all the kittens and I took her home in my dad’s friend’s polo shirt in my lap. She was really young and as soon as she was three months old she was crying at the window to go outside. She’s wilder than other cats. She was never satisfied with being inside. She’s been going outside since she was very young.

I was pretty anti-tracker or any sort of surveillance, but she started pulling stunts where she wouldn’t come home for a few days and then it turned into 10 days at a time. She would not come home, but then show up completely fine sitting on my front porch as if nothing had happened. I was like, “I kind of just want to know where you go,” and when I got this tracker for her, I was like, “Why can’t she hear me when I’m calling for her?” She’ll go like five miles in a day. She’s going through people’s backyards and stuff. So the route that she takes would probably take me like 15 minutes to walk to her.

So she’s my roommate, but sometimes she doesn’t come home so it’s still lonely sometimes.

I don’t know if you’ve seen any of those videos where cat owners put a camera on their cat somehow, but it’s actually so insane.

LEMON: Yeah. I have the tracker so I know her crazy routes and stuff, but I’m so curious of how she entertains herself. She’s kind of a loner. She’s really just a free spirit out there stalking prey and stuff. I have a bell on her, because she is a murderer and I would prefer it if she killed less things.

I actually had a really hard time letting her be free. I grappled with my morals of like, “If I keep this animal inside or try to tame it in some way, am I doing it for their safety or am I doing it for me?” I’m at peace with the fact that this is the life that she is asking for. If I kept her inside and she stayed alive for 20 years, I think she would be miserable. I’ve accepted her freeness and wildness, and it was really hard for me to let go.

I had a lot of anxiety around it and I feel like we’ve built this trust with each other. There was one time recently I left for 10 days. Immediately, that first night, she didn’t come home and the person taking care of her couldn’t find her. I came back 10 days later, no one had found her. I go looking for her for like three minutes, she hears my voice, and she came running. So I always know she’s going to come home at this point, and I always know how to find her. I know all her secrets.

Is there anything about her on the album?

LEMON: She is in “Window.” The cat in the window.

What’s your favorite moment on the record?

LEMON: I don’t know why this is so hard for me… Sometimes I forget what songs are on the album. I think my favorite sneaky part that I’m like, “Should I give this away?” but don’t think it’s giving it away is on “Foolish And Fast.” I snuck in some George Jones lyrics. That’s probably one of my favorite songs to play. And that’s one of my favorite George Jones songs, and it’s also in my song now. I’m not going to tell anyone what lines are. They have to figure it out.

BIRDSEED COOKIE RECIPE

220 grams rolled oats (divided)
110 grams raw sunflower seeds
60 grams dried sour cherries
50 grams chia seeds
40 grams pepitas
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp baking soda
120 grams soft dates
70 grams coconut oil
60ml non dairy milk of choice

preheat oven to 350 degrees, place parchment paper on cookie tray

using a food processor, make a flour out of 110 grams of rolled oats, 50 grams of sunflower seeds, and 20 grams of pepitas
place flour and rest of seeds/oats/salt/baking soda in a bowl and set aside
using the same food processor, blend the dates, coconut oil, and milk until a paste forms
add wet to dry and mix with your hands
form balls and press them onto the baking tray
bake for 13-15 minutes (until the edges are golden)
let cool on baking tray before transferring to a rack
share with the birds

Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild is out 9/27 on Darling Recordings.