Lily Seabird is a musician and songwriter living in Burlington, Vermont.
Over nine delicate but sturdy tracks of intimate folk rock, Trash Mountain pares Seabird’s songwriting down to its most resonant essentials. It’s an album of unwelcome exits and uncertain futures, but there’s resiliency and hope at its core. It is Seabird’s most confident and immediate effort to date. The almost titular lead single “Trash Mountain (1pm)” is out now, channeling the overwhelming comedown of returning home from tour into a spry blend of woozy slide guitar and harmonica.
“Between acoustic guitar and bursts of harmonica, she paints vivid pictures: men drunk on ‘twisted tea’ and AirForces dangling from the phone wires. Amid fears over technology and its affect on our collective psyche, Seabird makes a great argument for logging off and being with your people, instead.” —The Fader’s Songs You Need In Your Life This Week
“These hallmarks of home she sings of—a pack of kids playing, a man pushing a shopping cart ‘full of bottles of belief,’ a white ribbon lost to time—may seem insignificant on paper, but when Seabird sings them to life, you can’t help but to hang onto every detail. Gusts of harmonica whirl through the rawness of her voice, like wind slicing an open wound, leaving her gasping for air between words.” —Paste’s Best New Songs
“Narrative and grounded... The bracing honesty with which she assesses the world around her carries easily into the specific tension of returning home” —Consequence’s Top Songs of the Week
“These hallmarks of home she sings of—a pack of kids playing, a man pushing a shopping cart ‘full of bottles of belief,’ a white ribbon lost to time—may seem insignificant on paper, but when Seabird sings them to life, you can’t help but to hang onto every detail. Gusts of harmonica whirl through the rawness of her voice, like wind slicing an open wound, leaving her gasping for air between words.” —Paste’s Best New Songs
“Narrative and grounded... The bracing honesty with which she assesses the world around her carries easily into the specific tension of returning home” —Consequence’s Top Songs of the Week
Since 2023, Seabird’s life has been in perpetual motion, spending nearly half of that time on the road performing her own music and as a touring bassist with Greg Freeman, Lutalo, and Liz Cooper. While she thrives in transit, back home she is anchored by “Trash Mountain,” a pink house surrounded by other artists and creatives situated on a decommissioned landfill site at the back of Burlington’s Old North End. Here, Seabird has found belonging, friendship, and inspiration. It’s a place that hosts artists, puts on shows, and has been passed along in her friend group for the better part of the decade. It’s a symbol of transition and stability: something always evolving and growing but never losing its soul.
Where Seabird’s previous records—2024’s Alas, and 2021’s Beside Myself—were written over the course of a year, Trash Mountain practically poured out of Seabird: three months of songwriting in spring 2024, followed by four days of tracking with Kevin Copeland (Hannah Frances, Lightning Bug, Allegra Krieger) in his Southern Vermont studio in the summer.
The album’s arrangements are markedly sparse and intentional, a shift from the layered past releases, allowing Seabird’s writing to soar and stand starkly centered. Only three songs feature her longtime touring band in guitarist Freeman, bassist Nina Cates (Robber Robber), and drummer Zack James (Dari Bay, Robber Robber). On the stunning “How far away,” she’s backed only by a piano played by Sam Atallah which makes for elegiac catharsis. “I've finally accepted that I'm a singer-songwriter,” she says with a shrug. “Not everything has to be some big rock song.” Seabird cites Elliott Smith, Neil Young, and Leonard Cohen as influences on Trash Mountain, and much like the latter, her evocative, emotionally potent lyrics find her looking for cracks in the darkness where light comes in, sometimes literally. Take the album’s other title track, “Trash Mountain (1am),” where she sings of a nocturnal stroll: “We walk these streets we’ve come to know / memories live on in them after the snow / is all melted and gone / garbage covers the ground / and you pull a flower from the weeds and you spin me around.” Sometimes all you need is a loved one to show you how to find beauty in the mess.
Lily Seabird shows:
Feb 14 - Portland, ME @ Oxbow*
Feb 20 - Montreal, QC @ L'Escogriffe*
Feb 21 - Burlington, VT @ Foam*
* w/ Dead Gowns