Lily Seabird: The Best of What’s Next

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Lily Seabird didn’t pick up the first time I called. It was an outcome I’d started to anticipate as my phone repeated its buzzy trill, each ring inching closer to a non-response. I let it run its course though, and I’m glad I did, because a frigid robot voice wasn’t there to greet me on the other side of the line. Instead, I was met with a voicemail that burst with personality: “Hey-looo, this is Lil-eee,” Seabird chirped in a goofy, sing-song cadence. “Leave-me-a-mes-sage. [indecipherable vocalization].” The Burlington singer-songwriter picked up on my second call though, reporting from Austin, Texas, in-between sets at the then-ongoing South by Southwest festival. “It was really fun yesterday,” she beams, pointing to her Thursday appearance at the Paste Party, among a couple others around town. “It progressively got more fun playing sets with so many friends and good people. It’s just awesome.”

For Seabird, music has always been a fact of life. Her passion was nurtured from a young age, as she was raised by melophiles: Her dad loves punk, her mom is a stalwart Deadhead, and by scouring the CD collection of her step-father (whom her mother remarried soon after she and Lily, then age 10, moved to rural Pennsylvania), she fell in love with classic rock records like the Beatles’ Anthology albums and Neil Young’s Harvest Moon. Given her early exposure to practically every corner of rock music, it might come as a surprise that the first instrument she learned to play was the saxophone—“I was super into it, and it was kind of my main instrument through high school,” she says, laughing. It wasn’t long, though, before she added the guitar to her musical repertoire, upon finding one in the basement of her step-father’s house at age 12. Soon thereafter, the precocious preteen was writing her own songs. “I was very lonely as a child, so I think [songwriting] was just a way to figure out how to express myself,” she reflects. “It was always just a way for me to interpret what’s going on.”

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In high school, Seabird played in an all-girl punk band called No MacNamara, but it wasn’t until she moved to New York after graduation that she started publicly performing her solo compositions—which were more in the singer-songwriter vein than No MacNamara’s staples, like Nirvana’s “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle” and Ween’s “Dr. Rock”—on and around campus at the New School, where she majored in political science and minored in English. “I really love reading, and I really love poetry,” she gushes. “There’s just something about the way words can make you feel something that’s beyond anything, I feel like.”

After a year of college, mounting financial stress compelled Seabird to drop out. It wasn’t an easy decision, as she’d adored her studies, but, in retrospect, it seems serendipitous. Had she stayed in school, chances are that she would never have ended up in Burlington, the “home” she says she’d always longed for—having moved around a lot as a child—and where she came into her own as an artist. But she never could have anticipated any of that as a 19-year-old—in fact, landing in Vermont was practically a fluke. Fresh out of school, she’d decided to embark on a “pilgrimage” to the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, as it was hosting an exhibit devoted to the then-recently deceased Leonard Cohen, whom she idolizes.

The journey back to New York didn’t go as planned—in fact, it never happened. “I barely had any money and spent too much money drunk with a bunch of people I met in Montreal, and they didn’t have any money to get back to New York,” Seabird recalls. “So, I went to Burlington, where my friend from high school was. She was going to this open mic at this hippie co-op house, and she was like, ‘You can stay with me, but I want you to play your songs.’ I remember I was super nervous, but I did it, and met a lot of folks after that and stayed for a couple days.” The musicians she met—including, perhaps most notably, fellow Best of What’s Next honoree Greg Freeman (who plays guitar in her backing band, and for his band she plays bass)—quickly became like family, and the more time she spent with them, the less she desired to leave. “I was like, ‘I hate living in New York, and it’s really expensive,” she adds. “Honestly, I think I had become accustomed to more of a rural pace of life, living in Pennsylvania the last 10 years of my life. I was like, ‘Well, maybe I should just move here. So, I did.”

For all this backstory, what might be the most significant point of her character development still warrants explanation: How did Lily Seward become Lily Seabird? As it happens, Seabird reveals with a giggle, the pseudonym “came from somebody calling me a cunt!” “One of my first boyfriends was kind of mean to me, and he was like, ‘Lily Seward, we should really call you Lily C-word, because you’re such a cunt,” she remembers. “I was like, ‘What the fuck?’ I was really upset, because nobody had ever called me a ‘cunt’ before. And then, this other guy that he and I were friends with, who was there, was like [in a stoner accent], ‘Dude, you can’t call her that.’ And then, he was like, ‘Lily’s not a c-word; she’s a seabird.’” The eccentric, alternative moniker stuck, to the point that “it’s kind of rare” that people know her real last name—even her grandma thinks she should legally change it. (“Maybe someday,” Lily says.)

The arc of Seabird’s career thus far, in her own words, has been a result of “going with the flow.” The best visual representation of her is the cover artwork of her 2024 self-released sophomore album, Alas,: a chiaroscuro image of her shrouded in darkness, reaching upward towards the light. That actualized metaphor has always been germane to her music—even on “CD,” the opening track to Seabird’s 2021 debut album Beside Myself, an address to a self-destructive friend puking their guts out in the bathroom of a Mexican restaurant. “I wish you could see all the beauty that you are,” she urges, “but instead, you’re just throwing it up in the bathroom.” The scene is quintessentially Seabirdian: gravid with tacit melancholy yet tinged with sweetness, both brutally honest and unconditionally empathetic.

On Seabird’s new album Trash Mountain, she continues plumbing the depth and humanity beneath life’s grimiest surfaces. Her lyricism is more incisive and intensely imagistic than ever. Grief, as presented on closing track “The Fight,” is “dozens of shoes never to be worn again”; elsewhere, there are unflinching lyrics, like “I gave myself this black eye / Loving you didn’t make me do that” and “Just hold me to one thing / And let it be loving you”—language that lodges itself into your skin like bits of glass. But, frankly, that would be true of every letter in the alphabet, if Seabird sang it aloud—her twangy, jagged whine is an undeniable force, immediately distinctive and endlessly evocative: tragic yet self-assured, blood-curdling and beautiful, resounding with hard-earned wisdom and urgency. She’s one of those rare vocalists who can stop you in your tracks when singing about the simplest of things, like beer cans littered about the yard or a sole flower growing amongst a tangle of weeds. What she teaches us, implicitly, is that we ought to think twice before crushing those cans or flowers under our feet—for, they aren’t just backdrop props in the stories she tells; they tell stories of their own, too.

While lightly shaded by the blown-out grunge revival aesthetics Seabird has long kept in her toolbox, Trash Mountain is Seabird’s most sonically stripped-back full-length album to date, arriving like a natural progression from its immediate predecessor, the sublime Alas, (acoustic versions) EP. Primarily of an alt-country or alt-folk strain, these songs are sparse but far from threadbare; tasteful studio production heightens the arrangements’ built-in intimacy and whets the edges of Seabird’s jagged drawl which, unobstructed by blankets of reverb, cuts straight to the core. Two tracks, “How far away” and “The Fight,” are just Seabird and pianist Sam Atallah; reminiscent of Joni Mitchell’s Blue-era confessionals such as “River” and “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” they rank among Seabird’s most open-wounded compositions to date. “I think I always had a fear of being vulnerable enough to make music like this,” she reflects. “Somehow, I mustered up the confidence to make a record like this, because I feel like in the past, it would’ve been like, ‘Is this allowed?’” The musical shift, like so much of her life, wasn’t a premeditated decision, though—Seabird says paring things back is just what felt right, in the moment. “It’s just what happened, and I let it happen, and now it exists,” she explains. “I feel pretty stoked about that.”

Trash Mountain also distinguishes itself from Seabird’s previous efforts in that only one song, “Arrow,” is structured around an actual chorus. The other eight tracks arrive more as streams of consciousness, composed of run-on sentences that unspool along similarly unhurried melodies. Often, you get the sense that Seabird is singing about memories as they come to her (there seems to be some preternatural gravitational pull at work on her voice, drawing the words out of her body so urgently that they come out sideways and splitting) like on “It was like you were coming to wake us back up,” a song recounting a time she and her friends saw a stranger who bore an uncanny resemblance to her late friend, Ryan. “Well, it was like you were coming to wake us back up,” Seabird begins the song in media res, making it feel like you’re peering into her mind, mid-thought: “You were riding your bike, all the silvery stuff / Was floating around your beautiful head / It was like we’d forgotten that you had been dead.”

There’s an immediacy to these songs that is reflective of their brief gestations—Seabird wrote all nine tracks within a span of three months last spring and tracked them over the course of just four days with Kevin Copeland (Allegra Krieger, Hannah Cohen, Lightning Bug) that summer. For Seabird, songwriting has always been a process that is as instinctive and inexplicable as breathing. “When I write music, it’s always just, like, full—” she pauses, searching for the right words. “—it just comes from a different space than I’m usually existing in. Something will come over me, and then I’ll just play the whole song, and then be like, ‘Oh, there was a song.’ And then, ‘Okay, play it again. Try to write it down.’ And sometimes it melds as you play it a couple times, but almost every song I’ve ever written has come about that way. It’s just some kind of mystery and burst of inspiration.”

The spontaneity of Trash Mountain keeps you rooted in the present, which is apt; for, that’s exactly what its namesake—a dilapidated, yet charming pink house situated on top of a landfill at the edge of Burlington—has done for Seabird, who has lived in its basement for the past two years. “It’s a place that’s really grounded me and been beautiful in this fucked-up world,” she says. On the album’s two quasi-title tracks, “Trash Mountain (1pm)” and “Trash Mountain (1am),” Seabird takes a snapshot of the titular landscape and practically every little thing in its immediate vicinity, from “a pair of Nikes on the wire” above her head to a man “yelling about the taxes and drinking a Twisted Tea”; even the music seems to materialize the landscape, with gusts of harmonica slicing through her drawl like a crisp breeze. By paying homage to the mountain, she’s also commemorating the local music community, for which the site has long been a crucial setting. “Lots of musicians and artists and farmers, great people [have] always lived there,” she says. “One of my roommates was like, ‘We’ve got the rock and roll motel going on.’ If people are coming through town and playing, they stay at Trash Mountain—people call the house Trash Mountain, too. If there’s a house show there, they say it’s at Trash Mountain.”

If Trash Mountain were to have a one-word thesis, it might be “harmonoia,” the title of the album’s rapturous opening track. If you’re unfamiliar with the word, that’s probably because it is, quite literally, made-up. Several years ago, soon after Ryan’s death, Seabird came across a book that stopped her in her tracks as she was walking to a band rehearsal: The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, which is exactly what it sounds like: “a compendium of new words for emotions,” as billed on its website. One of the words that struck Seabird was “harmonoia,” which stems from “harmony” and “paranoia” and refers to an uneasy state where these contradictory sensations commingle: “an itchy sense of dread when life feels just a hint too peaceful—when everyone seems to get along suspiciously well, with an eerie stillness that makes you want to brace for inevitable collapse, or burn it all down yourself.”

It’s a feeling Lily Seabird understands quite well. Like most twenty-somethings, the last few years have provoked near-endless emotional whiplash for her, encompassing the loss of friends, falling in love, and unprecedented career advancements. These major life changes directly influence Seabird’s lyrics, which etch her feelings, friends and homescapes into the songs on Trash Mountain; her meditation on their ultimate ephemerality was also prompted by something her friend Will Krulak—lead guitarist of Burlington indie rock band Robber Robber—said to her several years ago: “I can’t remember exactly what they said, but the gist of it was, ‘It’s gonna be really sad when we all leave this place and when this is over.’ In that moment, I was like, ‘What do you mean? This is never gonna end,’” Seabird recalls, assuring that the scene’s not dead. “But things have changed, because everybody’s touring; I’m touring. All my homies are all over the place. And everyone had a dream of doing something like that—and none of us are doing it in a ‘we made it’ way—but it’s not the same as just being 22. It just felt like such a beautiful, blossoming place of friendship, being up there in Burlington. [Trash Mountain] is trying to capture the fleetingness of a special time, finally reckoning with the fact that things are a little different now.”

On the slow-burn ballad “Arrow,” Seabird’s narrator is torn between accepting the ultimate transience of love (“I don’t wanna go, but I know by now / The best things never stay”) and fighting tooth-and-nail to hold onto it, nevertheless (“Stay, please, stay,” she implores on the explosive final chorus, her voice catching on desperation as a full-band crescendo holds together her fraying yowl). It is, perhaps, the most devastating moment on Trash Mountain. But earlier in the song, she sings, “There exists this fine line / On either side of it pain and beauty”—and that, I think, is exactly> what it means to realize that everything will eventually pass in spite of beauty.

Trash Mountain captures both sides of that fine line; its grief and melancholy are counterbalanced by exultations in the purest iterations of beauty, the simplest sources of pleasure. Attenuating the most emotionally heavy moments with those of levity was a conscious effort, on Seabird’s part: “I’ve done a lot of dark music. I was telling you about tapping into this mysterious thing [when writing songs], and it would only happen in times of crisis or whatever, because I was always doing other shit, like a bunch of jobs, and going to school, or just being in my early 20s or a teenager and not knowing what the fuck is going on,” she says. Admittedly, she still feels that way sometimes—it’s only natural that her near-chronic touring schedule, as a solo artist and bassist for several of her friends’ bands, is occasionally draining—but it’s also made her homecoming all the sweeter. Upon returning to Burlington after a tour early last year, she almost immediately felt that irrepressible itch to write—and it didn’t stem from a place of pain, as it often had before; rather, she was creatively galvanized by her boundless love for her home and its vibrant community. “I was trying to just write on time, and that’s something I’ve never done before. I was trying to write about stuff that wasn’t just when I was upset, [because] I wasn’t upset every day,” she says.

One of my favorite songs on the record is “Sweepstake,” a campfire strummer with lacy fiddle ribboned throughout. Seabird narrates as she drives up Interstate 89, looking back in her rearview on days spent traveling with old friends and sustaining themselves on a traveler’s diet of whiskey and blueberry pancakes. Those days of innocence have passed, she acknowledges, but she isn’t upset about it—instead, there’s a sparkle to her voice that suggests a joyful appreciation to have lived them at all. With that, she looks to the uncertain future with optimism: “‘Where are we going’ is a question I save for halfway,” she sings, “Tonight, the kingdom and tomorrow, the Milky Way.” Only time will tell where Trash Mountain will take Lily Seabird, but it leaves no question that the road she’s on is paved with love, as she’s carrying with her a reverence for every friend made along the way, every lodestar that’s winked at her in the darkness. And, maybe more than ever, listening to her music feels like she’s fastening her gaze upon you, baring her heart and extending her hand, inviting you into her world. You’d be remiss not to take hold—what awaits her in the sky isn’t too far out of reach now.

Trash Mountain is out April 4 via Lame-O Records.

Anna Pichler is one of Paste’s music interns. When she’s not writing about music, she’s working towards an undergraduate degree in English Literature from The Ohio State University. You can find her on X @_Anna_pichler_ and Bluesky @annapichler.bsky.social, where she mainly shares her work and reposts her favorite Bob Dylan memes.