Been Stellar – ‘Scream From New York, NY’: smart, fresh songwriting and tender moments

When she was still in high school, the artist known as Merce Lemon legally changed her surname to Lemon. That potentially audacious move tells you everything you need to know about the Pittsburgh native’s ear for poetry and absolute confidence in her own vision. That’s “Lemon,” as in the fruit. Go ahead, say it back; run it between your teeth a few times. Even before you hear a single note of her music, you have the sense that she’s only going to do things her way.

That current of surety runs through her folk- and country-tinged new album, Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild, which is warm, rustic, and fundamentally big-hearted—as indebted to softies like Lomelda as to rockers like Neil Young, with Lemon’s unhurried vocals as an anchor. Lemon pulled the title from a (maybe apocryphal) story about an old singer howling at a pack of dogs through his living room window, and wrote the album’s closing track around that idea: a Frank Lloyd Wright-ish melding of indoor and outdoor space, domestic scenes rubbing right up against the wilderness. Here, “lime zest on a bed of leaves” and “thoughts of a husband”—a slow, loping refrain that lends the song its center of gravity—are on equal footing. Lemon is as comfortable writing about frozen creeks and blueberry-laden branches as she is contemplating days spent alone and aimless in her room, staring at a wilting houseplant or tending to her cat, Moldy.

Lemon’s last album, Moonth, tapped into a similar dichotomy but kept things a little livelier, a little more playful. Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild is a profoundly sad album. Lemon grew up in a musical household and has said she was influenced from an early age by Kimya Dawson, who even ended up staying on her couch when she came through Pittsburgh. But this new album is less Moldy Peaches or Frankie Cosmos than Hand Habits and Ethel Cain; you’ll find no miniatures here. Lemon is grasping at something big and resonant, something unconstrained by detail. To wit: The songs on Moonth had titles like “Hysterical Clavicle,” “Golden Lady Sauerkraut,” and “Chili Packet.” The tracks on Dogs are called things like “Rain,” “Window,” and “Crow,” and often sprawl out toward the five-minute mark.

Maybe that’s just part of growing up; the vocabulary of whimsy can start to get old when it no longer speaks to your experience. Still, Lemon hasn’t lost her sense of humor. “Rain,” adapted from a friend’s poem about processing flax into linen, opens with a funny juxtaposition of direct and meta imagery:

This sounds like a song
I barfed out in the drought
A love song for the rain
I miss you like the wind hugs wings

It’s one of the album’s least structured songs, and the production is spare under these lilting lines—just a hint of strummed acoustic guitar—but you’d be hard-pressed to find another instance of the word “barf” expressed as sweetly as here.

“Backyard Lover,” a smoldering highlight, builds to one of the album’s purest moments of emotional catharsis, and encapsulates many of its disparate threads. The song peaks with genuine shredding: the ecstatic moment when, over peals of electric guitar, Lemon calls out, “You fucking liar.” This is a track about grief and self-loathing, a reflection on the death of a friend, and there’s an extraordinary depth to the sadness she’s describing. Lemon is angry, but she’s ultimately also resigned. She wants to be alone, but she needs her friends. She’s struggling, but she’s trooping through it. She sounds like a lot of things—which is to say, she sounds like herself.