Lily Seabird feels slightly less like an impostor now

Much of Lily Seabird’s album Trash Mountain, released in April, captures a stretch of the musician’s mid-20s when it felt as though everything were shifting, her songs shaped by a new awareness of mortality, the reality that many of the people she created in community with were moving onward, and a deepening understanding that nothing is forever. 

“How are we supposed to remember things,” Seabird sings on the observational “Trash Mountain (1 p.m.),” when memories come and go?”

Now, less than a year later, Seabird again finds herself in a similarly liminal space, hopping on an early March video call to talk about her previous album when she already has a new full-length recorded and planned for release in the fall. 

“I wrote all those songs [on Trash Mountain] in the spring of ’24, and it was during this transition when everyone in my life started taking music way more seriously, and then no one in my band could play anymore, because they’re all frontpeople of different bands,” said the Vermont singer and songwriter, who in those nascent years was backed by the likes of Greg Freeman, currently crisscrossing the globe in support of his sophomore album, Burnover, and Zack James, now drumming for Unknown Mortal Orchestra. “And then it was like, ‘Oh, shit. Am I just gonna play alone now? … And I thought the songs sounded really good stripped down, because that’s just where I was, and I wanted the record to sound similar to the demos I made in my room.”

For this upcoming record, however, Seabird opted to crank the volume, leaning into a heavier, rock-oriented sound shaped in part by the fact that she now has a consistent band in place but also attributable to a more inward shift.

When Seabird began recording Trash Mountain, she didn’t know where it might lead, and she said that she had no plans to tour behind the release or even really leave Burlington. “It was like, ‘Maybe I’ll just hang out in Vermont and keep doing this,’” said Seabird, who then added that the impostor syndrome that has long plagued her musical pursuits had in recent times decreased from 100 percent to somewhere around 90 percent by her estimations. “And that is a big shift. And I still feel uncertain all the time, but now it’s like, I’ve made four albums, I guess I can kind of do this.”

Seabird described the act of songwriting as “a survival instinct,” acknowledging how it has helped her to process her interior and exterior worlds since she first picked up a guitar and began to compose her own songs at age 12. Over time, though, it has become a more consistent practice, Seabird sitting down with pen and paper at more routine intervals rather than exclusively when in an emotional rut. 

“It’s being intentional about sitting down and getting in the practice of writing,” said Seabird, who headlines a concert at Rumba Cafe on Thursday, March 12, supported by Columbus’ own Villagerrr, which last week released “Locket,” the first single from a new album due in May. “I think I keep getting closer to making music that I like and would listen to.”

Befitting the gnarlier musical soundscapes, Seabird said the songs on her forthcoming record began as darker, wildly expansive poems that she then pulled snippets of lyrics from, her writing partially informed by lessons she absorbed from her friend, the New Orleans musician and writer Thomas Dollbaum, who told Seabird about a poetry class he took in graduate school a decade back where the professor instructed him to pick an emotion and then write about the town in which that feeling resided.

“And for this next record, I really took that [idea] and ran with it,” said Seabird, who has a wooly new standalone single, “Demon in Me,” arriving on Monday, March 16. “I went through some really difficult times in the last couple of years. … And I think [the album] is a reflection of that. And in a way, I was just like, I’m not going to worry about what anybody else thinks, or if I sound crazy, or if people are going to be worried about me. And nobody has said any of those things to me since it’s been finished, and my team has [the record]. And I wasn’t actively thinking about what other people felt when I made my other records, but subconsciously I was very worried about it. And I think getting through those difficult times made me just confident enough to be like, I’m going to do whatever I want now.”