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RM talks lyrics, home and Leonard Cohen with Lily Seabird.
When listening to Lily Seabird sing, it’s easy to tell her lyrics come from small bursts of inspiration, written bluntly after seeing something mundane in her hometown of Burlington, Vermont, that ignites a curdled beauty within her.
To the genre-hopping indie-rock musician, there is always more to see than what meets the eye, and her music takes you on a winding tour of a landscape that subtly grows as familiar as your own hometown. Come Dec. 12, Seabird will grace our own backyard via a performance opening for Robert Lester Folsom at Cat’s Cradle’s Back Room.
Her most recent album, Trash Mountain, stole its namesake from her home in Vermont overlooking the former site of a town dump—and won her a Rolling Stone Artist You Need to Know title to boot. The nostalgic alt-country sound sets a soft and striking ambiance, but in the words of Seabird, right now, “it’s time to rock.”
“Trash Mountain was a quieter moment in my life,” Seabird tells RM. “I just try to follow the way I’m feeling at the moment, but if you come to the show, it’s pretty loud live. There’s not a lot of people that do both these days, but I feel like singer-songwriters like Neil Young were always playing acoustic guitar then rocking out.”
Through her writing, Seabird covers all the bases—the good, the bad and the ugly—building a raw intimacy with her listeners through stories unmarked by complicated diction. “I used to always feel like, ‘Oh, I wish I could write about things that had nothing to do with me,’ but some of my favorite songwriters are very personal,” notes the Pennsylvania native. “I’m inspired by poets and writers like Leonard Cohen, John Steinbeck and Tennessee Williams.”
The process isn’t uniform—Seabird seems to just hold what she likes and lets the rest sift through her fingers. “I’ll start by singing the words into nothing,” she remarks. “Sometimes I’ll write stuff down. I just try to catch it while it’s falling through space.”
Alongside a striking discography, Seabird’s whimsical mannerisms bring her music full-circle: She saunters through without portraying a hint of anything other than who she truly is. Stop by Cat’s Cradle Dec. 12 for a taste of Seabird’s whimsy, a touch of blunt truth and a lot of rock and roll. @lilyseabird, catscradle.com
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