Lily Seabird – Trash Mountain

Burlington-based songwriter Lily Seabird announces her new album Trash Mountain, due out April 4th via Lame-O Records.

The almost titular lead single “Trash Mountain (1pm)” channels the overwhelming comedown of returning home from tour into a spry blend of woozy slide guitar and harmonica.

“It started with thinking about touring and then, late stage capitalism, technology, climate change, my shortening attention span, but also shifting relationships and our ability to deal with the past and move forward,” she explains, “I kinda just ended up at my house feeling really grateful for my friends. The house I live at has been referred to as Trash Mountain because it’s on top of an old landfill on the edge of town. It’s also the last place my friend Ryan went before she died, it’s really strange how a lot of our close friends wound up moving in here after she passed, she feels very tied to it spiritually.”

Since 2023, Seabird’s life has been in perpetual motion, spending nearly half of that time on the road performing her own music and as a touring bassist with Greg Freeman, Lutalo, and Liz Cooper. While she thrives in transit, back home she is anchored by “Trash Mountain,” a pink house surrounded by other artists and creatives situated on a decommissioned landfill site at the back of Burlington’s Old North End. Here, Seabird has found belonging, friendship, and inspiration. It’s a place that hosts artists, puts on shows, and has been passed along in her friend group for the better part of the decade. It’s a symbol of transition and stability: something always evolving and growing but never losing its soul.

Over nine delicate but sturdy tracks of intimate folk rock, Trash Mountain pares Seabird’s songwriting down to its most resonant essentials. It’s an album of unwelcome exits and uncertain futures, but there’s resiliency and hope at its core. It is Seabird’s most confident and immediate effort to date. Watch the video for “Trash Mountain (1pm)” below, filmed with her brother Jack. “It was all shot in the Old North End of Burlington on a very cold day before Christmas. I was really inspired by Fatlip’s music video for the song ‘What’s Up Fatlip?’” she shares.

The announcement comes on the heels of 2024’s Alas, originally released as a limited cassette on Portland, OR label Bud Tapes before a groundswell of praise and acclaim led Lame-O Records to reissue the album on vinyl alongside a collection of acoustic demos and b-sides.

Where Seabird’s previous records—last year’s Alas, and 2021’s Beside Myself—were written over the course of a year, Trash Mountain practically poured out of Seabird: three months of songwriting in spring 2024, followed by four days of tracking with Kevin Copeland (Hannah Frances, Lightning Bug, Allegra Krieger) in his Southern Vermont studio in the summer. The condensed timeline allowed her to be present and process how differently her life looks now compared to a few years ago.

The condensed timeline allowed her to be present and process how differently her life looks now compared to a few years ago. She’s coped with transforming relationships and grief, as well as music’s awkward shift from a no-pressure, casual thing to do with friends to a career. Though working in environmental politics and community organizing brought her to Vermont from Pennsylvania, her disillusionment with systemic change led her to become a full-time musician. It’s a transition that requires deep self-reflection. “Songwriting is meditation for me,“ she says. “It’s the way I work through things and make sense of the world. Being on tour so much I’ve been writing more just to understand what’s happening around me.”

Seabird recently wrapped up a Winter tour alongside Trace Mountains, and dates with Margaux & Florist. Next month she’ll play select shows on the East Coast alongside Dead Gowns, including hometown Burlington performance at Foam on Feb 21st.

LILY SEABIRD TOUR DATES:

Feb 14 – Portland, ME @ Oxbow*

Feb 20 – Montreal, QC @ L’Escogriffe*

Feb 21 – Burlington, VT @ Foam*

* w/ Dead Gowns

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