Lily Seabird: Interview With Vermont Singer-Songwriter

L
ast spring, Lily Seabird was walking through downtown Burlington, Vermont, around 1 a.m., singing to herself. Still a little buzzed from a night out, her phone long past dead, she sang the words out loud as they came to her: “We walk these streets we’ve come to know/Memories live on in them, after the snow…”

“I got through the whole thing, and I got home and I wrote it down really quickly,” Seabird says.

She wanted to make sure she held on to those newly written verses before they vanished, but the truth is, her songs are unforgettable. Each lyric hits with crystal clarity, locking you into her wavelength whether you’re listening to her album Trash Mountain — named after the “hippie house” where she lives, overlooking the former site of a town dump — or attending one of her shows. It turns out many of the songs on the album started similarly, arriving like bolts from the blue and sending her racing to jot them down ASAP. “I have a good memory,” she adds with a smile.

When she wrote that late-night meditation, which she dubbed “Trash Mountain (1am),” she’d just gotten home to Burlington after SXSW 2024, where she played bass in singer-songwriter Greg Freeman’s band, as well as leading a band of her own. Freeman was one of the most-talked-about acts at the festival that year; 12 months later, in March 2025, it was Seabird’s turn to floor audiences in Austin with some of the week’s most rave-worthy performances.

Released this spring as Seabird’s third album, Trash Mountain is an exquisitely bittersweet alt-country song cycle about love, loss, and friendship. “I just turned 26, so I feel like I’m pretty young still,” she says when I meet her at a diner in Manhattan, en route to a show in Philadelphia. She sees the album’s autumnal tone as reflecting her stage of life, as she and the friends she’s made in Burlington over the last eight years — a wildly creative bunch that includes Freeman and the cool, arty indie/psych acts Robber Robber and Dari Bay, among others — enter the second half of their twenties.

“When we started all playing in bands, it was purely for fun, just getting drunk and playing a house show,” she says. “And I still do it for fun, but there was a sadness that I started to feel. A sadness of growing up and things changing…. It’s something I’ve maybe always wanted, but there’s this nostalgia.”

Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, Seabird taught herself guitar at age 11 and played in an all-girl punk band in her teens. After graduating high school in 2017, she moved to New York to study at the New School, bringing with her the same two guitars she plays now, an acoustic Seagull and a blue Telecaster.

A self-described huge fan of Leonard Cohen, she was deeply affected by his death the previous year. As we talk, she takes off her denim jacket to reveal two arms full of tattoos, including her second-ever: a sketch of a woman’s contemplative face on her left bicep, based on a line drawing called “Montreal Visitor #2” from Cohen’s poetry volume Book of Longing, which she picked up from a free table in Tompkins Square Park her first year of college.

Seabird found life in New York overwhelming — “I was working so many jobs and going to school and it was way too intense” — and when she heard that some friends were taking a road trip north in the spring, she tagged along, thinking she could see an exhibit on Cohen at a Montreal museum. “I grabbed my backpack: ‘Can I come?’ It was very last-minute, and that one little decision changed my life.”

After her pilgrimage to Quebec, she ran out of money for a bus ticket home, so she ended up crashing with a friend in Burlington. On her first night in town, she performed some of her songs at a University of Vermont open mic, where she met Freeman, another artist her age on the bill. “I think we were both just like, ‘Wow, who was that? Who is that songwriter who was so much better than everyone else?’” Freeman tells me.

Drawn by the creative community she’d found in Burlington, Seabird soon transferred to UVM. She spent her summers working at an environmental nonprofit — she went door-to-door drumming up support for the state’s 2020 single-use plastics ban (“Lily Seabird is partially responsible for banning the straw in Vermont!” she jokes) — and kept writing songs on the side, with Freeman as her biggest cheerleader. “Greg was the main encouraging person to me, as a young girl playing music,” says Seabird. “We’d go to shows and he’d be like, ‘Why aren’t we making a band and playing your songs?’”

The two old friends have continued to make music together since then; though they no longer play in each other’s bands full-time, he added guitar to several songs on Trash Mountain, and she’s listed in the credits of his upcoming album Burnover. “She’s just really raw,” Freeman says. “When you’re at a Lily show, you’re totally experiencing her — there’s not even a tiny bit of trying to be anything other than what she is.”

That’s just as true of Trash Mountain, a remarkably lucid document of Seabird’s interior life. After gathering last summer at the southern Vermont studio of her friend Kevin Copeland with a few musicians she knows well — also including her partner, guitarist Rick Soszynski, and Robber Robber’s Nina Cates and Zack James on bass and drums — she stripped away the stormy arrangements of her past releases to let her words speak for themselves. “It’s softer than my other albums,” she says. “I was feeling really quiet and soft.”

One of the most stunning songs on the new LP is “Arrow,” where she explores complex feelings of love and grief. Her words have a directness that Cohen would be proud of: “There exists this fine line, on either side of it pain and beauty…”

Those words, she says, reflect the loss of a close friend to suicide three years ago. “My world was really rocked when my friend died,” she says. “There’s now this fear of things going away, but also, that’s just life. Things change. And that chorus is saying, ‘I wish that everything could just be the same forever.”

The album opens with a spare, moving ballad called “Harmonoia”: “I wonder where you are, what puts a smile on your face/I wonder if you’ve changed or if you’d know me just the same.”

She explains that she titled the song after a word she found in a book called The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. “It’s a feeling of feeling paranoid when things are too good, that they’re going to end,” she says. “That transience and impermanence of everything.”

Seabird is used to life as a touring musician (“I’ve been road-dogging for a while,” she says), and she’s about to kick off another summer full of solo and full-band shows, starting June 6 in New York. Luckily, she’s learned that she can handle inspiration wherever it finds her.

“I’m the kind of writer where I’ll just sing out into space, without a guitar,” she says. “I used to think that I could only write songs at home, but it turns out I am writing them everywhere.”