Lily Seabird
Eliza Callahan
It’s mid-afternoon in Burlington, Vermont and singer-songwriter Lily Seabird is giving me an MTV Cribs-style tour of her home via Zoom. Dubbed “Trash Mountain” by tenants long before the singer-songwriter and her friends moved in, it’s a pink house on a decommissioned landfill site that Seabird makes sound romantic and grimy in equal measure. The pink and yellow slats on the outside lead to a ramshackle interior filled with wooden ladders and doors that need to be taped shut at night. The property houses seven other people and has blossomed into a community hub, hosting neighbourhood clean-ups, pot-luck dinners from produce grown in a nearby garden, and gigs from local and touring musicians. “You write ‘Trash Mountain’ on a flyer and people know where to find you,” Seabird says proudly.
The house’s character and “unknown lore” inspired the name of her new album, Trash Mountain, due out on April 4. The 25-year-old Seabird was never a homebody until she moved to Trash Mountain. She was used to being away for months at a time, spending the past few years touring both solo and as a bassist for fellow Vermont-based folk-rock artists Greg Freeman and Lutalo. Her first two albums —2024’s Alas, and 2021’s Beside Myself— buried the grief of losing her best friend to suicide beneath howls of despair and heavy arrangements that threatened to topple underneath their own weight. They are songs that sound fierce and alive, but undeniably come from someone uncomfortable with sitting still.
Trash Mountain sounds far more settled. “In the past I always came to songwriting in a time of crisis,” she says of wanting to change her previous approach. “This time I experimented with writing about other feelings besides the big scary ones.”
Eliza Callahan
Scenes of domestic bliss can be found throughout the album, which trades in the heavier dynamics for acoustic singalongs and rangy, country-fried harmonies. “Garbage covers the ground and you pull a flower from the weeds and you spin me around,” she sings on “Trash Mountain (1am).” Elsewhere, twanging guitars on "Sweepstake" lay the ground for romantic lines like, “Blueberry pancakes and a walk to the car, we took the long way cause who cares how far?”
Seabird’s growing self-belief resulted in the more grounded and introspective sound. “When I was younger I didn’t have the confidence to just do what I wanted,” she says. “In my early twenties I felt a pressure to make really loud rock music. At some point, the idea that nobody wants to hear me play acoustic guitar got drilled into my head.” What changed? “Something just clicked. And I was like, what the fuck? I'm just gonna do it.”
The songs of Trash Mountain helped Seabird excavate the person she is beneath her people-pleasing tendencies. She admits to feeling “very untethered” while writing the album and quit a job at an environmental nonprofit she had joined after college. Climate advocacy was something she had seen as a lifelong pursuit but, as she got deeper into the bowels of the system, she began to see issues that sapped her energy and optimism. “I wholeheartedly believe that the climate crisis is not going to be mitigated under a capitalist system,” she says. “The system that created this problem can’t solve it and that’s a hard pill to swallow.” Seabird holds her hands up as to not having the answers, but knows that raising money from wealthy people while global corporations continue to poison the water supplies isn’t it.
Eliza Callahan
Trash Mountain wears its malaise with a light touch. “Albany,” a brittle lament built around a twinkling piano, could be seen as the most direct nod to a cracked society as she asks, “When did things stop working and when did things seem to get so hard?” A line on “Arrow,” a lap steel-flecked lullaby about romantic delusion, perhaps sums up her outlook in a neater fashion. “There exists this fine line on either side of it, pain and beauty,” Seabird sings with a crack in her voice. Her music sits between the two extremes, stricken with one and striving for the other.
“Living in this world kinda feels like end times,” she says of the place that exists outside of her pink walled kingdom. “Just being in America right now is insane.” Seabird, like many around her, see community as a way to hold off the apocalypse. At a time when buying property, building a career, and starting a family are increasingly challenging propositions, she takes comfort in the escape she’s helped build on top of other people’s rubbish.. “Finding beauty in a place called Trash Mountain to me is just funny,” Seabird says.“It’s the perfect metaphor.”
