Merce Lemon has been a mainstay of the consistently prolific Pittsburgh music scene for longer than most people can claim, or even remember – it’s where the music in her life began, and is where it’s since returned to bloom perennially. “I grew up in a house full of music, and I’ve been making songs for as long as I can remember,” says Lemon. “Both of my parents played in bands when I was kid. I had an acapella group with my sister and friends when I was nine or ten that I wrote all the songs for, and I changed the name of our band every show we played.”

Shortly after this motley, earnest interpretation of her creative life force, she developed a stage fright that pushed her into sports and visual arts as an alternative to the calling she’d been pulled to all her youth. A series of chance encounters in Seattle, where she lived for the latter half of her teenage years, led her to her first show since those days of childish play – thankfully, that same spark quickly reignited tenfold, and the eternal fire surged all the way back to her roots.

“When I moved back to Pittsburgh at twenty years old, my new band consisted of my dad, his friend Jim Lingo, and Al Ebeling on drums. I called it my ‘dad band,’ and we toured and played shows with that lineup for four years.” The era of the dad band has since come to a close, but Merce’s has just begun anew.

Nothing more distinctly showcases her exponential growth, as an artist and storyteller, nor more adequately prepares us for this new chapter to come, than “Will You Do Me A Kindness” – her first original music since 2020’s Moonth, it follows a recent single-split alongside Colin Miller (MJ Lenderman) of Bonnie Prince Billy covers, I See a Darkness / Gulf Shores, and reshades the hue of her trajectory with a new, determined brilliance.

“The phrase ‘will you do me a kindness' came from a YouTube video Colin showed me while we were recording last spring,” says Lemon. “This song started with those words, and I built a story around it. Some of the imagery came from pictures Colin sent me of his home at Haw Creek - especially the collection of outdoor chairs that the storms often blow around in his front yard. I wanted to make a flip book of those images.”

It’s a song at once full of yearning and spite, a faded scrap from an old photo album, adorning the foundation of a porch reinforced by the conversations it’s witnessed wind deeply through the night. Like those familiar, amiable tirades under a silver moon, it waxes and wanes in energy, as if fighting to decide whether to absorb or expel overwhelming, melancholic feelings of solitude, ultimately always relenting to the weight; “Will you do me a kindness? / Point the sun right into my flesh / I want nothing left.”

In Lemon’s romantic deference to the power of memory – past, present, or a nostalgia to come – lies a formidable strength, manifested through the rip current of her vocals and guitar dueling with the open wildness of her band. It is entropy with intention, a tear in the fabric of domestic quietude.

An ace up the sleeve of a veteran card player, “Will You Do Me A Kindness” cements Lemon’s place within the contemporary canon of a burgeoning “countrygaze” scene, directing its irreverent bow toward even more earnest, exciting waters.