Secret Monkey Weekend - Lemon Drop Hammer

What do you get when you take an old Tiger Beat magazine, combine it with a woman in a kitchen smashing candy with a hammer and a North Carolina family of four, three of whom are in a band together? You get Secret Monkey Weekend and their album and title song, Lemon Drop Hammer. The trio is comprised of bass player Ella Brown-Hart, her teenage sister Lila and their stepfather Jefferson Hart who in turn asked R.E.M. and Smithereens’ producer Don Dixon to produce their second album.

Jefferson explains, “Secret Monkey Weekend were the actual words from a 1967 Tiger Beat magazine. A friend of the family gave us some old magazines and Tiger Beat happened to be some of them. At the time we were playing here in the living room and I kept looking at this and I thought it might be a good band name. We quit looking and that (became) the band name.

As for Lemon Drop Hammer, my wife Laura was in the kitchen and she was making a banging sound. I was probably watching a ball game. I went in there to see what was going on (brave man!) and to see if I could help. She had a hammer and she was banging on a bunch of lemon drops, because they had melted and got sticky. She was breaking them up.

We had the album name, before we even had a song. (The song) “Lemon Drop Hammer,” was the last song to be written, during the week we went into the studio.” 

Ella adds about the song, “We had to force it into existence.”

Jefferson continues, “We already had an album name and it was just too good to not make a song.”

Lila who still is only seventeen years old has now been playing drums, as part of the band, for seven years.

She says, “Having my biological father (Matt Brown) being a drummer, I didn’t have to go to the pots and pans (like a lot of young children use for drums), as I could just hop up onto the drum kit and start banging. About the time that Ella started playing bass is when I became really interested in playing drums. One day Ella and Jeff were playing guitar and bass in the music room and I felt left out. I hopped behind the drums and I just did kick, snare, kick, kick snare, just basic drum stuff and I fell in love with it from there.”

The album is not for children only and not for adults only and we would suggest this is one record that you can confidently describe as a family album. Although, we are averse to putting labels on music, to avoid artists becoming pigeonholed, the music of Secret Monkey Weekend can best be described as Power Pop, with strong electric guitar and bass, backed by an ample number of drums.

Tell me about your song “We Can Be Friends.”

Lila starts, “It was Jeff who wrote the lyrics, but we sat down together one day and we were talking about our childhood experiences, where we played, what food we liked, as kids. I still am a kid, but when I was smaller. The song is an amalgamation of our childhood experiences.

Jeff continues, “It is sort of an ongoing thing with us. It goes back to the idea of little kids, who go you know what I’ve got a green shirt and you have green shoes. We can be friends! You find the tiniest things and that becomes your friendship bond. I remember that and I would say Lila do you want crinkle fries or homecooked fries? I want crinkle fries. I do too. We can be friends! That is what we said in the car and then we said we really should write a song for that.

I was a young stepfather and they both went through these Dr. WHO and Star Wars phases and Lila likes Minecraft, My Little Pony and all of these things. I had a feel for what they were into. They grew up on a street with all of these kids. We were so lucky to have so many children within close range. When I sing that song, I am thinking about them and all the kids.”

Lila takes us back to the Dr. WHO reference, “As kids we both had our toy sonic screwdrivers, which we loved. Ella was the big Dr. WHO fan, but with me being the little sister I wanted to do everything that she did.”

With your writer here being a big Dr. WHO fan, well we just were not ready to let this go, quite yet and a discussion ensued about which actor was the favorite Dr. WHO and which actor was the favorite travel companion of Dr. WHO. If you are wondering some of the names that came up were Tom Baker and David Tennant.

Then Jefferson surprises us with an Easter egg, “There were a series of books published by BBC, about Dr. WHO and in one of those books someone asks Dr. WHO what he is listening to and he mentioned me, Jeff Hart and the Ruins. I had no idea (that was going to happen). In another book, The Hollow Men I was mentioned in the foreword. For me that was my claim to fame, for a long time, that I was mentioned in a Doctor WHO book.”

They agree that as the band has evolved and Lila and Ella have gotten older, Ella now being in her early twenties, that they are appealing more often to standard Rock music fans in the adult age range. They cite as the demographic fans from eighteen to their mid-sixties.  

Now let’s go back and tell me what the backstory is for the Secret Monkey Weekend.

Ella begins, “It started when Lila’s and my dad passing away, when I was nine and Lila was four. Our dad was a drummer, so we always had music in our lives since day one. The way Jefferson came into our lives, I had been learning guitar at the time from our dad died when he died, so Jefferson became my guitar teacher and he became close to Lila and me and our mom. They started dating and became a couple. Eventually, I wanted to switch from guitar to bass, so I said hey, Jeff can you teach me bass? He said of course. We jammed a little bit together and then Lila wanted to jump in on the action. We had drum sets from my dad. It made sense for Lila to jump in on the drums. I know it was a natural fit for Lila.

We started playing just for fun, but then we thought this was an operation that could go places. We played at a labor day party and somebody’s birthday party.

We started playing at school festivals and libraries and then opening sets for local bands that we knew.”

Then they made their debut at the Carrboro Music Festival in 2017.

In 2023 PBS aired an Emmy winning documentary about Secret Monkey Weekend.

So Much Joy is a contagious poppy song for which Jefferson says, “Ella had the lyrics. Often Ella will come to me with something that is almost finished and I will help her finish it up. With this one Ella had lyrics and I got to work on it right away. I kind of knew (immediately) what I wanted to do. I wanted it to sound mid-sixties, about ’65 to ’66. That is what I was shooting for. I think the guitars did that. I think the backing vocals did that and I almost had the arrangement in mind right from the start. If somebody said they had a movie in 1965 –’66 and I want you to write a song for it (that would be it).

Picking up the discussion Ella says, “I wrote that song after my high school graduation. I wrote it like a poem with no musical ideas in mind. I went through a really rough semester, but I had this party and I thought this is good, all these people are so happy for me. I am feeling so much joy and that is where the idea came from. I wrote it all in about forty minutes.”

“It was around the time of her grandparents dying and she was the caregiver for her grandmother. It was good to have some positive feelings after being in a place with the opposite feelings,” says Jefferson.

Lila says, “One of my favorite songs on the album is an old one of Jeff’s and that he brought to my attention and Ella’s attention a couple of months before we recorded the album. It is called “Walking Between the Raindrops.” From what I understand originally it was kind of a Jazzy song, but we have turned it into a Power Pop song. It is one of my favorite songs to listen to and to play from the album. I think it is brilliant.”

Jefferson expands the conversation, “That song was right before I started playing with Chris Stamey. I slipped him a cassette backstage, before a show. It was on the Mavericks tour with Peter (Holsapple) in late ’92. I had just put out this record or EP and that song was on it. The next year he asked me to start playing with him. There were times when we would play some of my songs. I have a video of him playing this song with me.

I originally wrote that song with a Beach Boys feel, so I recorded it in ’91 / ’92 and then I didn’t play it for many years. After being married, we thought there might be some songs from way back that would be a good fit if we just rearranged them. That song fit the bill. I changed the key, turned the guitars up. I think the proof of a good song is if it stands up under different styles. Lila likes it and if it appeals to a seventeen-year-old, maybe I am doing something right.”

Lila put her stamp on the song “Marida,” named after a character, a cat named Marida that she really liked in the Pixar movie Brave (Marida).

As for working with producer Don Dixon on both their albums, Lila says, “I think it was a special experience and I wouldn’t want anyone else to produce our album. Don made Ella and I feel really comfortable recording. We were about 14 and 18 at the time. We were really young and never been in a studio before. He made us feel comfortable. He made us feel welcome.

Ella adds, “He is a very welcoming person, but he is also very knowledgeable. He was able to get out of us the sound that he wanted. He wasn’t dictatorial or anything like that. He is very kind, but a great producer.

Jefferson continues, “He has a great sense of humor. I am a lot closer to his age than they are obviously and we have a lot of common knowledge and reference points in Pop culture. When I was their age, I was at the front of the stage watching Don play with a band he had in North Carolina called Arrogance, so Don was like a Rock idol for me, probably forty-five years ago.

Working with him on two albums, it is not a reach to say, it is a dream come true. He and Mitch Easter were the guys that I thought were the main producers when I was into my hot and heavy record buying days.”

We were thinking there must be both rewards and challenges to being a family band.

“I think the nice thing about being a family I feel like there is a level of patience and understanding with each other that sometimes people who are not related do not have. We have to be there for each other to a certain extent and we are. We know each other’s flaws and quirks better than anyone and if there are (issues) we work them out quickly,” says Ella.

“Lila likes to draw and sketch and I have noticed that when Lila really needs some alone time, I will find her off in a corner or in another dressing room or maybe even under the merch table sketching something. Lila knows how to deal with tension in a creative way.

In some ways we have it easy, because if we were not related and we were just random people, sometimes the other person doesn’t know how you feel about them. Does he really care about me, does he love me. Is he my friend or does he just care about my music? We are lucky, because we know we love each other and we know that the band is a big part of our family. Even if we didn’t have the band, we would still have a great time. We enjoy each other’s company. We watch movies together. We do things together. We take walks with the dogs together. Ella and Lila are best friends even thought there are five years between them,” Jefferson says.  

Although twelve songs were recorded for Lemon Drop Hammer, only ten were included on the album with the intent being that two of the songs would be released separately as digital singles. One of those songs is named “Grant Hart Morning Star,” no relation to Jefferson Hart, but a close family friend, who has since passed away.

You can follow Secret Monkey Weekend on Instagram and listen to some of their music on YouTube here. Return to Our Front Page