Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Those lines, from Mary Oliver’s celebrated poem ‘Wild Geese’, feel relevant to Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild, the new album by Pittsburgh songwriter Merce Lemon. Like Oliver, Lemon’s work is rooted firmly in place, drawing much inspiration from the natural world and communities who live in harmony with it, what the poet Maxime Kumin once referred to as “the thin membrane that separates human from what we loosely call animal.”
Following the release of her 2020 debut Moonth, Merce Lemon found the process of making and performing music began to lose its sparkle. “[It] was just something I’d always done, and I didn’t want to lose the magic of that,” she describes. “But I was just having less fun.” So she put music on the back burner a while and got, quite literally, back to basics. “I got dirty and slept outside most of the summer. I learned a lot about plants and farming, just writing for myself, and in that time I slowly accumulated songs.”
The result of that slow accumulation is a collection of nine songs with dirt under their fingernails, equal parts wild and vulnerable as they reckon with the changing tides of love in all its guises. It’s as if this newfound connection to the land provided fertile conditions for more than just vegetable life, that Lemon had found her place in Oliver’s “family of things.” “There’s seeds between all of my teeth, I’ve been eating like the birds,” Lemon sings on opener ‘Birdseed’. “So maybe I’ll grow wings, wouldn’t that be something?” Across the track, she morphs into other animals (“and my wings turn to fins when I’m swimming”), quite literally embodying this connection with the rest of nature. It calls to mind another line from ‘Wild Geese’: “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”
As it’s title suggests, birds are also the central image on ‘Crow’. “Every year the crows migrate over Pittsburgh,” Lemon describes. “I wrote this song after sitting on my roof in 2019, watching the sky turn black with fluttering wings, flying in mass towards the blue water tower planted on the hill in the distance.” The song is an exploration of several of the record’s central themes—loneliness versus community, longing and belonging, her relationship with the city of Pittsburgh—and it seems important to mention that Lemon grew up in the city, embedded in it’s creative scene by her parents from a very early age and raised as part of one big communal family of artists and musicians.
So when Lemon sings, “They’d make a city of this ghost town,” she could be singing of this community. Something of an ecosystem in itself, a web of connections and relationships that form a support network which cradles and nurtures its members. Like many of the songs on the record, the track shifts gear at around the halfway mark, whipping up into a squall of noisy guitar and full-throated vocals to lend a raw passion to the climax.
Lemon’s songwriting is often gentle, careful and sincere ruminations on love and solitude, but this underlying ferality is perhaps the record’s biggest strength, and the most obvious step forward from Moonth. A reminder the soft animal can still bear its teeth, a kind of wildness that turns heartfelt, mid-tempo folk rock songs into blown-out anthems, building towards crescendos of wailing guitar and pure feeling. Take ‘Slipknot’ with its runaway chorus and shrinking guitar or the dark and crunchy ‘Foolish and Fast’ that seems suffused with a barely restrained energy.
Perhaps the best example is ‘Backyard Lover’, a sober reflection on grief and all that comes with it. “Now I am falling to a dark place” Lemon sings, “Where just remembering her death’s about all I can take”. The song feels like all the album’s threads gathered together and woven into something sad and beautiful. Part resigned, part melancholic, part furious. And it’s the latter emotion that eventually boils over. “But nothing’s good enough, you fucking liar” she growls before a storm of guitar and crashing percussion engulfs everything.
But even in the wildest moments, a tranquillity sits at the heart of Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild, quiet and immutable. That underlying stillness of the world, something which could be mistaken for the sting of loneliness on the surface, but is revealed to be a balm and comfort if only you open your heart and let it in. As if to reinforce this, the closer and title track is perhaps the most sedate moment on the record, all patient acoustic guitar and heartfelt vocals. “And a tree fell, I smell the wood,” Lemon sings, as close to nature, and perhaps herself, as she could ever be. “And the bark is coming off / I write my words down on it.”
Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild is out now via Darling Records. Get a copy from the Merce Lemon Bandcamp page.
