#merce lemon

friday chart 4/11

‘watch me drive them dogs wild’ - merce lemon

genuinely one of the best albums i have ever listened to and i feel so blessed to have found merce lemon through bandcamp

the vocals, lyrics, instrumentation and arrangements all blend together for this ethereal and special experience and of course i am as always a fan of the indie twang that this album has, reminiscent of big thief

and how fitting for it to come out at the start of autumn i look forward to sitting down with a cup of chai and listening to this cozy yet bitter album

genuinely in love with each and every song on this album but here are my standouts

Merce Lemon, »For Sophia«

by Owen Stone

It’s funny for a Pittsburgh musician to sing so well about how loss feels when looking out at the expanse of the ocean. I lived in the city for four years and those rivers can be beautiful, especially at night when the stadium lights spread across the cold wet dark. But you can still see to the other side. Rivers are always ending, no matter which bank you’re on. Death is surprisingly less conclusive.

It’s been about 13 years since my sister died. This was supposed to be the decade that my family picked itself back up after the loss. And it has been. Partially. But it’s also been the decade where we’ve come to see that that task is never really complete. The grief will hang on. The love will continue to develop. Which is why the ocean has been such a fitting site for remembrance.

Every year on her birthday my family goes to the ocean to collect rocks. We scope the shore for hours, carefully curating the collection. In March, it tends to be overcast but it’s San Diego so it’s never actually dreadful. But the clouds are still greying and expanding in a way that’s intimidating for our city. So there’s the evolving ocean landscape, the clouds’ gloomy presence and hundreds of rocks, all colored with time. To be honest, I’ve seen my sister in all of these things over the years.

But this would be the decade I moved away from the ocean, to Pittsburgh no less. The first time March came around my family was sending me pictures of the sea and I knew I couldn’t just give up on this ritual. It was pouring outside and I still didn’t have a good coat so a friend lent me hers and I wandered out into the woods. I was stumbling around in the darkness while the rain was really starting to pile up and gain momentum in this abandoned trail I thought might have a good rock or two. As the rain only got worse it suddenly struck me as funny how different my life was now. I was soaked through, fumbling in the mud for rocks, laughing my ass off, and realizing how much I still had to learn about loss.

The first time I heard For Sophia was at a show. I didn’t know much about Merce Lemon beforehand but I felt an immediate kinship the second they started playing. It was the kind of music that fits perfectly in the venn diagram between my parents’ music taste and mine. Immediate and honest and funny and dark and vulgar and sweet and packed with harmonies and even featuring her dad in the band. I found out later that her family used to host artists like Kimya Dawson when she was stopping through Pittsburgh on tour. My parents used to host house concerts in our garage. It felt like some other vision of my family projected into another city. I loved it.

That night a friend of theirs had requested For Sophia. That friend’s mother had recently died and the song had come to mean much more to him since that moment. Hearing them dedicate this song to him at the show was one of those moments where DIY spaces transform into something truly communal.

The song was originally written by Merce Lemon for a friend of hers that died when she was fairly young. I think we must have been processing this loss at similar times in our lives. Both old enough to understand but too young to process.

The first reason I love this song is because I love when people are dead in songs. Death is complicated enough and does not need to be obscured with euphemisms. 

The second is because it recognizes loss as something that is energizing, at times. That it has to be. When she sings “Even though you’re dead your energy is keeping me alive” it has to be true. To be able to claw your way out of grief there has to be a way to turn it into forward momentum. For it to mean something. Especially without much of a religious framework to rely on. There has to be a way that we look at death so that it doesn’t just feel like an ending.

The third reason I love this song is how it traces a day. The first verse you wake up with the sun, then night starts to come in the second, and finally the day is over. It reminds me of the kind of victory that facing the day can feel like when you’re overcome with grief. Greeting the sun, watching it turn into night and letting that night become the end of another day you’ve successfully faced. Rinse. Repeat. Until the sun’s repetitions can start to feel like healing.

My family is lucky for the closeness we feel towards each other. For the trust and kindness and general enjoyment of each other’s company. It’s incredibly rare. And those trips to the beach made me recognize how much of that is due to my sister, Gavyn. She taught us a lot about how to hold each other close while we had the chance. That’s why remembering her is energizing.

And I’m lucky to have traveled so far away from that bond, that ritual, and to have found in Pittsburgh a song that spoke to me so much.

Owen Stone // Instagram: @2manybdays