Michael and Brian both take lessons with the same teacher whenever they’re in town. W hen he was 12, Brian started taking classical guitar lessons, which he credits with not just helping round out his songwriting skills but also giving him his life’s mission. We can’t learn anything about The Beatles. “ we’re not going to learn anything new about The Beatles. “We just saw the new Beatles movie,” Michael says, referring to The Beatles: Eight Days a Week, Ron Howard’s documentary about the Fab Four’s early years. That tells you all you need to know about where the D’Addario brothers are coming from. That may sound naïve or quaint, in a way-how much could he really have absorbed or understood in his first nine years of life? But that stretch is almost half of Brian’s life, and he spent those years dedicated to obsessing over everything The Beatles ever did. That’s right: the nine years Brian D’Addario spent exclusively obsessed with The Beatles were his first nine years on Earth. He proves just how long that is by adding, “Until I was like nine years old I didn’t get into anything else.” Brian says that he listened to The Beatles almost exclusively for years: “Other things, here and there, but no one topped it for, like, nine years,” he says. “And that was the result of being into it.” They poured over every Beatles album and watched every installment of The Beatles Anthology TV documentary from the 90s. “That was like our whole lives,” he says. The two listened to a lot of musicals growing up, too, but Brian says they were “super obsessed” with The Beatles. So that was a big influence on us when we were young.” He’s got a record Falling For Love, which is a great record. “My dad’s a musician and he writes great songs. “Music was important to both my parents, I’d say,” Brian says. The brothers come by their influences honestly enough, though, having grown up in a musical household. And there’s nothing affected about their 60s pop sound, though you might be tempted to think so when you see Michael’s Ziggy Stardust mullet or Brian’s shaggy haircut and the vintage clothes they favor, which first went out of style three decades before they were born. It abounds with catchy Beatles-esque melodies, twangy Kinks-esque guitar riffs, and flawless Beach Boys-esque harmonies. If you were to listen to Do Hollywood without knowing anything about the band that created the album, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was from the late 60s, production quality aside. It was a great question, and a perfectly apt one for the D’Addario brothers, because it just so happens that they do play “real rock-and-roll,” in more ways than one. “I only like real rock-and-roll,” the waitress told us. She, however, didn’t recognize him from the visit. Later, after our waitress caught on that Michael and his elder brother by two years, Brian, might be something of a big deal, the younger D’Addario told her that he’d been in the diner recently with his girlfriend, and she had waited on them too. Michael demolished a cup of chicken and noodle soup with the intensity that only a very hungry 17-year-old could muster for a cup of Long Island diner chicken and noodle soup that came free with his gigantic chopped steak. Do Hollywood, their debut album for UK-based 4AD, one of the most storied tastemaker labels of the past 40 years, would be out in weeks, and they were about to embark on a month-long North American tour in support of Brooklyn’s own Sunflower Bean.īut at that diner, they were kids from Long Island as much as budding rock stars being interviewed for a cover article. The week prior, the brothers and their band, The Lemon Twigs, played The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and a couple days before that they headlined a gig at Manhattan’s Irving Plaza. S itting in a booth at a Long Island diner with Brian and Michael D’Addario, it’s easy to forget that they’re on the cusp of a likely and glorious rock-and-roll adventure.
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