HAPPY: It feels like, from watching your videos and watching your performances that you share the stage with your brother, you don’t take yourselves too seriously. In fact, you revel in self-parody that carries over as well into the video clip for The One.
BRIAN: Well, definitely not self-parody because honestly, when it comes to videos, what I realised after that video anytime we’re in front of the camera, we feel the need to perform. There’re videos that we’ve done since then that we hadn’t felt needed as much. Just knowing that everything around us is right, it’s more important than focusing on moving around a lot. So, that’s something that we’ve just figured out.
HAPPY: It’s an impulse to perform once the camera is upon you, but finding the power of stillness must take time. Can you tell me about the process of making that video, because it’s hilarious? I particularly liked the way you’re really getting into it in the snow.
BRIAN: Well, we were in Cincinnati, Ohio, and we decided to do that. Michael Hili, the director, was there on tour with his wife, who works in theatre. He found all these locations that looked great, there’s so many nice looking places in that town and because it’s very empty it’s great for filming. It was cold and I got this Uncle Sam outfit in a vintage store. We just kept going into the van that Michael painted, he’s very skilled with a background in production design. He was in a storage space for about eight hours breathing in these paint fumes, painting this van in the blistering cold. We had fun because he and the crew were great and up for the challenge.
HAPPY: You do really get a sense of that in the video. I think there’s a scene where you’re both sitting on a motel bed and you glance across at each other. You suddenly catch a glimpse into the relationship. In that moment, I wondered to myself, are those guys brothers? And then I looked online and confirmed you were.
BRIAN: Familiarity, whatever that look was, it’s been done for years and years.
HAPPY: Yeah! And you guys have been doing this project for three years now?
BRIAN: I guess that’s when our first album came out, yeah.
HAPPY: What are your visions for the future? I mean this record’s just come out and you must be thinking about its conception and where it all began. Now it’s out in the public hemisphere and suddenly that mirror is upon you, you’re beginning to see this thing that came from inside, the way the world sees it, what’s that like?
BRIAN: With us, we may generally have the next project pretty much planned out because we always overwrite. We don’t really write for a particular record, we are just in a constant cycle of writing. So, this record was a bit of a reaction to the last record, creatively, because we wanted it to be very direct and to the point, upbeat and fun. The next thing I want to release as The Lemon Twigs, I want it to be delicate and beautiful. Because, we put out all this uptempo material and just kind of want to write something softer, beautiful.
