When I first heard Lily Seabird’s music via her second album, 2025’s Trash Mountain, I slotted her into the 2020s alt-country scene that’s exploded in recent years. And there’s good reason for that — her song “Trash Mountain (1 pm)” is the epitome of the sort of twangy indie rock that’s become commonplace in the wake of breakthroughs by Waxahatchee and MJ Lenderman. Though, it turns out, that song is not wholly representative of Seabird’s work — and it certainly doesn’t describe the totality of Lightspheres On Their Way, her latest album.
While the influence of Neil Young echoes through the surly guitar workouts of “Portal To The Past,” the bulk of the record is taken up with long songs with loads of empty space and a noticeable drone, both hallmarks of another core influence, the Velvet Underground. She’s also name-dropped the Grateful Dead and Ween as inspirations, though any suggestions that Seabird has drifted into jam-band territory are reductive at best. She’s going for a kind of expansiveness that doesn’t rely on displays of instrumental prowess, but rather a more ruminative form of patient exploration that plugs into the darker vibes of those aforementioned acts.
A native of Pennsylvania — the Ween fandom is homegrown — Seabird relocated post-adolescence to Burlington, Vermont with her friend and collaborator Greg Freeman, a fellow talented singer-songwriter with occasional alt-country overtones. After playing in Freeman’s band for an extended period, she eventually established her own project, adopting a mangled form of her last name, “Seward,” based on an unkind nickname offered by an ex-boyfriend, an anecdote that’s been subsequently repeated in her album reviews and interviews. “I wonder if he reads these,” she laughed.
You recently played Americana Fest in Nashville, and I’m wondering what it was like for you. Just because “Americana” as a label can be a bit unwieldy, in ways that don’t really apply to your music. Even though some of what you do scans as country rock-sounding indie.
I don’t even think I make country rock. I think that’s a really big stretch, but I keep getting put in that spot.
Do you feel mischaracterized when you get put in that Americana zone? Or even alt-country? I’ve written about you in that context.
I’m really grateful for my team and everything that they have tried to get me to do or have gotten me to do. I’m also really grateful for all the places that had me play last week and wanting to have me on the shows. It’s just I didn’t really feel like I fit. I grew up in Pennsylvania; I’m not from the south. I didn’t grow up around country music. I was raised on punk rock and Ween and the Grateful Dead. But I do think that there’s been this wave of alt-country and music with pedal steel on it, and sometimes I wonder if I’m in this realm because I played in a different band that had a pedal steel. Though Greg’s new record doesn’t even really fit, either, though that band definitely was fitting in at the time. And I’ve toured with Florry, and Francie has said that she makes country rock, so maybe it’s by association. I have a lot of friends that I think make a little bit more country rock than I do. It’s like “singer-songwriter rock ‘n’ roll,” which is a term that Tyler from that band Good Looks told me. It’s still broad enough, but I think that folk and country music really seems like it’s probably more about songwriting than all the chorus-y guitar bands of the early 2010s that I was listening to when I was learning how to play guitar. So maybe that’s what it is. We got rid of the chorus pedals and people started playing pedal steels, but I don’t have a pedal steel or a chorus pedal in my band.
“Portal To The Past” feels the most like country rock to me. It has a Neil Young vibe.
But is Neil Young country rock?
I’d say Harvest is quintessential country rock. But much of his catalog is something else entirely.
“Trash Mountain (1pm)” was the lead single from my last record, which now came out quite a while ago, and I recorded it even longer ago. But that definitely has Americana vibes. That song has acoustic guitars and harmonica. Ever since then I’ve been trying to break out of “Trash Mountain (1pm)” jail because that was just one flavor of me. But that was the first time I put a record out on a label and had a publicist and had a team. That was the first thing of mine that traveled beyond Burlington and New York City maybe.
But yeah, I don’t care too much. It’s not worth it. If you want to call me Americana, country rock, some people call it psych rock, which I’ve been like, “Whoa, that’s a crazy thing. I don’t know if it’s psych rock.” I don’t know what it is.
What stands out to me about this record is the space. You let these songs unfold slowly and you don’t pack in a lot of music or noise in the parts between the notes.
Well, I write really long songs, I think, in general. All of my records, if you look at the timestamps across the songs, I think my average song length is six minutes or something.
But I feel like the songs could have been shorter if you didn’t let them sprawl.
The atmosphere before the song, really setting the vibe and setting the tone instead of jumping straight away into it, is important. A lot can be communicated without words. These are songs that deal with time and how we perceive time, so it makes sense that to be able to contemplate these themes that there is the time to do it.
It really is a patient record.
I’ve taken that from a lot of my influences. Some of my favorite songwriters have long songs with parts that allow it to sink in more. I hate when a song is over too soon and then I’m like, “Oh, I have to listen to it again.” I think Bruce Springsteen actually is a huge influence on me, and he has some quite longer, ballad-y songs that I’ve definitely drawn influence from. I’m a big Deadhead also, so I think that something comes from that. I think that also there’s something to a droning. A lot of these songs, I have my guitar tuned, so there’s always a droning note that goes throughout, especially all the ones right in the middle. It’s like a meditation. It creates something in the mind that is satisfying to me at least. “The Pulley” is the opening track, and if I could have had my way, it would’ve started with four minutes until I started singing. “Portal To The Past” was almost 11 minutes and I had to get rid of parts of it. Maybe one day I’ll have extended versions of these songs that are my versions.
I guess now that I’m saying this out loud, you said the word “patient,” it is funny to put out something that is so patient and long in a time of instant gratification. I mean, there was something that I think crossed some people’s mind when I was like, “Here’s my record, everyone,” that was like, “What’s the radio song?”
You mentioned the Dead, who have come up in reviews of the record. But when you talked about droning it made me think of the Velvet Underground.
Well, I was going to say the Velvet Underground is one of my favorite bands, too.
You’re into more of a minimalist thing than jamming.
I like the repetition forever. That’s how the end of “Lightspheres On Their Way” goes. When we play it live, we go for so long and then we get quiet and we get louder and then it breaks apart. One of my biggest influences as a kid was the Velvet Underground’s Live At Max’s Kansas City. I had that on vinyl. It was that and I had Operation Ivy. I had those two records.
This might be sort of a trite music critic observation to make, but is there anything to that drone somehow reflecting the lyrics, which often have to do with grief and memory and how those things feel like a drone in your mind? Is there anything to that?
I think so. I wasn’t thinking about that when I was doing it, but what I really appreciate in music is when I feel like the themes of the lyrics are reflected in the music, I think Leonard Cohen does a really good job of that, and I think that’s something I’ve always been trying to emulate. A lot of the times throughout my making of my songs, I’ve emulated that through dynamics, like the loud/quiet thing. I do that a lot. I just remember being in band class as a kid and my band teacher being like, “The most important thing is dynamics,” when I was with my saxophone. It’s like, “this piece is not moving if it’s just one sound the whole time.”
I feel like with singer-songwriters, there’s sometimes so much focus on the words that the music seems to get overlooked. But you seem to think as much about the musical textures as the lyrics.
I think that’s because I spent so much time being in the band. I have played in so many bands. I’ve been in so many bands where I’m not the front person. Honestly, only the last two and a half years have I been just doing Lily Seabird. Before that, every ounce of my energy was being poured into Greg Freeman’s project. I was really thinking about the music because I wasn’t the songwriter. So, I think in that way, being in the band, being just someone who’s in a songwriter’s band has influenced me on how I’m going to have my band sound or how it’s going to work. I think in that way, we don’t really have a classic thing in my band where it’s the songwriter in the band. We are a band, even though it’s called my name.
Before I let you go, I have to ask you about Ween. Because you love Ween and I love Ween. Do you have a favorite album?
I really like the live thing, the live Ween that has the five versions of “The Stallion” on it. What’s that one? It has a black-and-white cover.
All Request Live.
I love ripping that one sometimes. I really love a live album, to be honest.
Oh, me too.
I think that’s something I love so much about Ween, is that none of their albums sound the same and they never did anything because somebody told them to do it. It seemed like they just did what they wanted to do. And then the live show was just a crazy rock band. It’s so awesome.
I saw them a bunch back in the day, but seeing them in 2007, it was the darkest audience I’ve ever been a part of.
It’s dark vibes.
It was very druggy and weird. It felt like Altamont.
The dark jam-band vibes, I know them well, and it’s something that changes you and makes you feel really weird when you see it happening. Honestly, I’m addressing some of those vibes on this record.
I was going to say, your record doesn’t sound like Ween, but it does feel like the air above the Ween show. That dirty, heavy air.
Yeah, it’s the feel of the Ween audience.
