Backyard Lover — Merce Lemon

#365Songs: August 16th

There was a widely-distributed 2015 online survey that showed the average music listener stops discovering new music by age 33. “For the average listener, by their mid-30s, their tastes have matured, and they are who they’re going to be,” the study argues. In other words, the vast majority of us keep returning to the songs and artists that defined our earlier, coming-of-age years—to change our tastes requires changing ourselves.

This maps.

You know those people who play the same music every time you see them, or look at you like you’re having a midlife crisis when you share music released post-1994.

With that attitude, you get old fast while missing out on music that can renew, move, and shake you up. Basically, you’re stuck in time, where the past defines the present and the future is nothing more than nostalgia and long ago feelings on repeat.

I’m often banished from playing DJ at family gatherings, events, and parties where the average age is over 30. Though some might claim it’s my propensity to highlight melancholic tracks that hit hard — guilty — I think it’s more that I never play the “approved by the over-30 crowd” hits. That’s not to say I’m not a nostalgia freak. I am, as much if not more so than just about anyone I know. But that’s the thing about new art — everything is derivative of something that came before it, therefore you can easily be transported to those ‘coming of age’ moments without falling into the past trap. Through new music, you’re in the moment, moving forward, still young enough to accept that perhaps the best hasn’t happened yet. In that way, it’s a mindset, a way of seeing and maneuvering through a world that will change whether you like it or not.

I am aimless in my lovin’
Caught the tail end of your set
Before I went to bed

But I don’t get out much
Met a lover in my backyard
Watching from my room
Honey I’ll come down soon

Earlier in the year, I wrote about the standout Waxahatchee / MJ Lenderman track Right Back To It. Pittsburgh-based Merce Lemon’s Backyard Lover hits in the same way, a song layered with so much feeling that it’s difficult not to repeat it over and over for days. The song’s influences and roots are felt throughout, as if we’ve been here before, but it’s in the newness that makes us want to stick around for a while.

In a statement about Backyard Lover, Merce Lemon said, “So many of my songs are touched by and explore death specifically in relation to the loss I experienced of my best friend when I was fifteen years old. That loss has forever changed me and who I am in my relationships to lovers, friends, family.”

Ah, I feel that so much. I’ve lost enough in this life, have lived with grief so long that I can’t process anything new without filtering new experiences through a lens of loss. That’s not to say everything is left with a melancholic film — though often it is — but that to experience anything also requires processing what was here and is no longer.

Merce Lemon’s upcoming album, Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild, is already receiving lots of buzz, dubbed by a few publications as the best they’ve heard this year. A bold statement, but you can hear it in the already-released tracks. There’s a bit of last year’s breakthrough band Wednesday to the sound, and even Big Thief at times, but with a Rilo Kiley-era Jenny Lewis angst-filled playfulness and the Bonnie “Prince” Billy-era “I See a Darkness” melancholy. She lists her biggest influences as “Viva Last Blues” by Palace Music and “Time (The Revelator)” by Gillian Welch, and if the first few track releases are any indication, she’ll make both proud.

Quite honestly, she’s that good.

Now I am falling to a dark place
Where just remembering her death’s
About all I can take

But I don’t get out much
Is being swallowed by a room
Supposed to feel this way?
Maybe I’ll come out
Babe

I often write about how new loss begets old grief, that the darkness aggregates over time. A dog’s death is also the loss of a mother, a friend, a childhood. COVID counts, too, the loss of freedom and faith, in the basic expectations of ongoing daily life. Since her last album dropped in 2020, Merce Lemon has discovered a love for nature, gardening, and even spent a pandemic summer sleeping outside each night. That’s what some of us do when grieving, when at a loss, as we grow more and more encumbered by our present realities. Rather than retreat to what was once comfortable, we seek newness, move to other spaces in search of whatever fresh comfort it offers. From there, a new perspective spawns fresh art, and that’s seemingly exactly what happened with Lemon — whose sound has evolved substantially since those earlier albums.

Now I am swimming in a river
Showing off the butterfly
Enraptured by light

But I don’t get out much
And nothing’s held me so soft
As this water tonight

In an interview with Paste Magazine, she said, “I basically moved to Seattle in response to my friend dying. 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.”

To truly know loss is to expect its next arrival time. It becomes instinct to hold ourselves back as protection from what is inevitable, to keep others at arms’ length or to move around enough so as to never get so close to someone else again. But that instinct also holds us back, in the same way that closing ourselves off to new art does. It keeps us trapped in a past that can never be again. And besides, what a gift it is to be close enough to anything worth losing.

Lemon also said, “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 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.”

And that’s the point of my writing, too. It’s for me, first and foremost, to process the world in the context of things bigger than me, and hopefully, to whatever audience I have, a way for others to connect to their own life. The best art is a reflection of the human experience: a mixed bag of emotions all blurred together, the good and the bad, the laughter and the tears.

So challenge yourself to listen to something new every now and then. Rediscover yourself in someone else’s art, introduce who you’ve been to who you’ve yet to become. Start here, with Backyard Lover. It’s that fucking good.

Maybe she was
She was right
What dying felt like

A wooden spoon tossed in the fire
’Cause nothing’s good enough
You fucking liar
You fucking liar

A sliding hill
A quick refrain
A frozen bird
Melting
An eyelash
For wishing

~

Start following the #365Songs playlist today, and listen to each new song with each new article!