Pittsburgh-based artist Merce Lemon has shared the third single from her highly anticipated new album Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild, due out September 27th via Darling Recordings. ”Say I was a lonely gust of wind / could I redirect them,” she muses in “Crow”, one of the more hopeful tracks on the record. Its structure is simple, gentle acoustics pushed forward by an ever-present and fluid percussion that guides the song as naturally as Merce hopes to guide the “murderous flock,” forgoing the voyeur in all of our hearts and comfortably settling in the supportive role of a shepherd. “Every year the crows migrate over Pittsburgh,” says Merce, “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.”
Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild emerged from a time of rediscovery and reconnection with nature. The album emerges, enveloped in propulsive guitars and saccharine-sweet songs of blackbirds and blueberries, from the dead-calm center of a pastoral frenzy in a manner that one could argue as erratic, reckless — a grave misconception, as Merce is just as aware of where she’s being pulled from as she is curious about where to go next. Her sound is built upon a reverence and gratitude for the natural world, how paying respect to it charts a more confident path through the choppy waters of the heart. Merce was recently named an ‘Artist to Watch’ by Stereogum, and the ‘Best of What’s Next’ by Paste Magazine, both rising features praising the breakout moment this album presents.
LISTEN TO NEW SINGLE “CROW”
After the release of her 2020 album Moonth, Merce took a step back to reassess during an era of anxiety and lockdown – even the reliably nourishing exercise of sharing and playing music felt precarious. “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 just slowly accumulated songs.” A never-ending creative hunger, supported by the community framework she’d always been able to depend on, had been newly fertilized by the wide-eyed inspiration that came from plunging her hands into both the earth’s soil and her own. Rooting around for an answer, finding and turning in her palms what had been buried there all along – from this rediscovery, imbued with the vitality of earth’s green magic, Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild sprouted forth.
Today’s track is preceded by last month’s “Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild,” a lonely ballad of forlorn projection into an unknown future, and the honest and incisive lead single “Backyard Lover.” Earlier this year Merce shared the standalone single “Will You Do Me A Kindness,” her first song in years and a tour de force demonstration of her newly evolved, smoldering sound.
A staple of local bills, Merce has performed alongside feeble little horse, Horse Jumper of Love, Squirrel Flower, Water From Your Eyes, and more. Merce is on tour now with Teethe, before a headline run in October with stops in Vermont, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and her hometown of Pittsburgh.
Tour Dates:
9/10 – Columbus, OH @ A&R Music Bar *
9/11 – Toledo, OH @ The Ottawa Tavern *
9/26 – Pittsburgh, PA @ The Government Center (Vinyl Listening Party)
10/3 – Catskill, NY @ The Avalon ^
10/4 – Burlington, VT @ Radio Bean ^
10/5 – Brooklyn, NY @ Baby’s All Right ^
10/6 – Philadelphia, PA @ Johnny Brenda’s ^
10/8 – Chicago, IL @ Sleeping Village
10/18 – Pittsburgh, PA @ Bottlerocket
* w/ Teethe
^ w/ Greg Freeman
Tracklist:
01 Birdseed
03 Window
04 Foolish and Fast
05 Rain
06 Crow
07 Slipknot
08 Blueberry Heaven
09 Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild
“I could not be alive alone,” a longtime family friend said to Merce with a smile. “None of us could be alive alone.”
Within the quiet, cascading corners of Pittsburgh lies a community – nothing short of one large family – that spans zip codes, histories, occupations, and generations, always tumbling into itself, propped up by steadfast pillars of conviction toward spiritual and emotional mutual aid. The kind of earnest community scaffolding that gets bandied about, wielded as conjecture, particularly in an age of increasing fracture through digital sublimation, is alive and quite well within the universe surrounding Merce Lemon.
When asked how the city has inspired her creative practice, she responds with a characteristic joke wrapped in an earthen warmth – “There are big hills, three rivers, and more bridges than anywhere in the whole world.” Growing up in a family of art and music in a city with a small, but vigorously supportive scene, Merce has been going to shows here her whole life, even playing them with the “grown up” friends of her parents – as recently as a few years ago, her band was comprised of her own father and his peers in the Pittsburgh music community.
“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” says Merce. “That loss has forever changed me and who I am in my relationships to lovers, friends, family.” In reconciling the quiet conflict of a desire for closeness and a solitude cultivated by distrust, there is a fierceness, a persistence in her vulnerability, matched in droves by the wildness of her band.
These songs range, often within the structure of a single track, from ballads to blown out electric riffs combating feedback, harmonies concealed behind wailing guitars, both dependent on each other as they careen towards new meaning. They build slowly, synthesizing a naturalist’s penchant for romance and nihilism to create the warring, triumphantly escalating nature of Merce’s lyrics and her band’s heavy entropy. For Merce, the only certainty is the endlessly shifting nature of a river, roaring straight past a dogwood, never missing the opportunity to watch a petal fluttering to the ground in the rear view.
There is an oaken strength in Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild that makes it easy to love – once wild, still free, honest and familiar. Its genesis is timeless, its restlessness eternal – it is one cohesive yet unanswered question built around, and dependent upon, the life-giving force of nature that came before Merce.
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