Merce Lemon Breaks Down New Album Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild Track by Track: Exclusive

The post Merce Lemon Breaks Down New Album Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild Track by Track: Exclusive appeared first on Consequence .

Our recurring feature series Track by Track sees artists guide readers through each song on a release. Today, Pittsburgh singer-songwriter Merce Lemon breaks down her new album, Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild.

Merce Lemon has spent the past couple of years toiling away with new songs, playing shows across the country, and bringing a growing number of eyes and ears to her humble collection of expertly written, emotionally raw folk tunes. Now, the Pittsburgh songwriter arrives with the immaculate Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild , a remarkably realized document that arrives as a result of both creative and personal growth.

“I was grappling with what kind of relationship I wanted with music in my life. It was just something I’d always done, and I didn’t want to lose the magic of that — but I was just having less fun,” she said in a statement, reflecting on the early 2020s. “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.”

The songs that she “slowly accumulated” just happen to be some of the most honest, compelling folk rock numbers of 2024. Over the course of the record’s nine tracks, Lemon muses on themes like love, loss, and nature with a poetic, but never pretentious, pen. She’s often lost in thought, in the depths of her own mind, but her feet are always firmly planted in the dirt on the ground.

“I spent [two winters] carving wooden spoons,” she tells Consequence of some of the songs’ origins. “The simpleness of carving such a utilitarian item struck me. I became obsessed with hunting for fallen green wood, getting to know trees not just by their bark or leaves but their smell, and grain, too.”

Listening to Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild isn’t all that different of an experience. You can smell the wood shavings, hear the rustling of leaves, and start to know Merce Lemon not just by the content of her lyrics, but the timbre and emotionality of her voice, too.

Stream Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild below, and read on for Merce Lemon’s Track By Track breakdown.

“Birdseed”:

Maybe because the kitchen is my favorite room, maybe because baking has a similar escape to me as running, maybe because I can never finish what I make so I have to share it with friends. I wrote “Birdseed” after baking birdseed cookies obsessively for weeks.

“Backyard Lover”:

This is one of two songs on this album that reference the two winters I spent carving wooden spoons. The idea to try such a thing in the first place came from watching a YouTube clip from Dick Proenneke’s Alone in the Wilderness , in which he built a cabin using only hand tools on a remote island in Alaska. The first thing he did when he sat in his cabin for the first time was carve himself a spoon and a bowl. The simplicity of carving such a utilitarian item struck me. I became obsessed with hunting for fallen green wood, getting to know trees not just by their bark or leaves, but by their smell, and grain, too.

“Window”:

My cat Moldy has taught me trust, wildness, and love like no other creature. She brings me gifts and I feed her churro chicken pate. Sometimes I find her sleeping in the garden, nestled deep under the pineapple sage, and I only know she is there because of the rustling of the leaves when she readjusts. She was named after a moldy strawberry. Gray and fuzzy. You can find her in this song “I’ve got a calling/ I’ve got a window/ Where my cat sits/ Where my cat licks my face…”

“Foolish and Fast”:

This was supposed to be a running song before it evolved into a driving song. I started running in the winter of 2021, in an attempt to run off the winter blues, around the same time that I learned to drive. The cliche imagery of the “open road” fueled this one.

“Rain”:

This song is adapted from a poem my friend wrote about processing flax into linen. I think it was also a very dry summer in Pittsburgh, and all the farmers were wishing for rain.

“Crow”:

The oldest song on the album. I tend to be very picky when I use repetition but I loved the imagery of “rest their necks, and nest their young” that I had to say it seven times.

“Slipknot”:

I can rarely trace the inspiration for my songs back to another song, and this one has a lot of pieces of how it came to be, but “Hell’s a Place” by One Hundred Dollars must have been swimming around in my brain when I wrote this one.

“Blueberry Heaven”:

Blueberry heaven is a real place.

“Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild”:

I really wanted a piano song on the album, and until we worked this out in the studio, that’s what this song was. My friend Spencer Smith wrote the chords and I had these words I had been trying to find a home for so I looped it for hours singing along until a melody stuck. It was so loose at first that it took a couple of months for it to really find its home in the chords.

Merce Lemon Breaks Down New Album Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild Track by Track: Exclusive
Jonah Krueger