Lily Seabird

“Sometimes life gets so dark, it starts to feel like a bad trip,” at least that’s how Lily Seabird reflects on the seasons that led to the making of her new record, Lightspheres on Their Way. Seabird’s third record in as many years for Lame-O Records deals in mortality and reverence for the innately human, piecing her troubadour-ish folk to a grungy rock sentimentality. Though born from a period of reckoning and renewal, Seabird orients Lightspheres on Their Way around a holistic realism that buoys the spirit, with loose, earthy arrangements that meet intensity and depth with both twangy spaciousness and searing drive.

Across the record’s nine tracks, the Vermont-based singer and songwriter orbits around the concept of “lightspheres,” a catalysing presence or force that visits time and time again and shifts stories, feelings and trajectories. “A lightsphere can be so many things” says Seabird, “ an actual light like a star, the sun, a UFO; headlights, a flashlight in the night; but also life, living things, people, relationships.”

Weaving the esoteric with hard, unadulterated truths, Seabird’s songwriting has evolved away from the diaristic of Trash Mountain and Alas, to a more observational approach. OnLightspheres, her perspective is novelistic and alchemical, channeling memories, events and characters from her life into a collection of songs forged from the hard-fought journey of self actualization, and the awareness of how precious and fleeting it all really is.  

Seabird wrote most of Lightspheres on Their Way in a state of transience, contrasting Trash Mountain’s songs which emerged from her home of the same name at the time. She recounts capturing the lyrics to “Blackstar” on a paper napkin in the back of the van leaving Austin, and writing “The Afterglow” at a coffee shop on an electric bill, moved by the recent death of folk legend Michael Hurley. The heart-wringing soliloquy “Slipswitch” was written in two parts, nearly a year of space between, its latter a careful reflection of the former. “It was painful and it was ugly, but at the root of it all it was love burning” sings Seabird in the winding, intimate missive, accompanied by only guitar and Wurlitzer.

Like the collage that constitutes the album art, Lightspheres on Their Way presents a true amalgamation of Seabird’s history and influences, resulting in her most dynamic and wild work yet. It’s full of nods and sonic offerings to Bowie, Joni, Elvis, and the jam bands that her mother followed closely in the 80s and 90s like the Grateful Dead and Ween. Lightspheres is also interspersed with Seabird’s writerly influences, taking inspiration from Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers as she questions God on album invocation “The Pulley.” “Bindlestiff” is informed by the wandering, lonely men of Steinbeck’s East of Eden, its ten verses delivered in sequential rapid fire by Seabird’s snarl.

Though Lightspheres marks a moment of ascension for Seabird’s songwriting, she asserts that “the most emotional parts of the record are instrumental.” It’s true—the Crazy Horse stomp of “Portal to the Past” and others stretch into spacious, jammy interludes and outros where Seabird and Rick Soszynski revel in fuzzy, gritty guitars. They act as moments of emotional decompression, like rolling down the windows and surrendering to the expanse of the open road.

Recorded and co-produced with collaborator Garrett Linck, Seabird and her band tracked Lightspheres over the first few days of 2026, holed up in Linck’s home in rural Maine. For a makeshift studio using a wood stove for warmth, Seabird and Linck capture studio-quality sonics throughout. This is most notable on the ferocious Albini-channeling single "Election Day," where Daniel Snyder's drums propel the band as Seabird expertly expands its title as not political, but rather making a painful decision between two unideal outcomes. Cellist Eliza Niemi adds a tender, bittersweet color to “Pennsy” while Linck lets an e-bow skip along guitar strings to approximate Seabird’s lyric about feeling “static on my fingertips.”

Lightspheres on Their Way is a testament to the depths one can reach in their art when you stop trying to tell the story of what happened to you, and instead start talking about who you are. “There is a boldness that comes with getting older, understanding myself a little more,” says Seabird, reflecting on the clarity she’s found in the last few years. That clarity and self-knowledge serve as an anchor as Seabird navigates the murky depths, looking into the face of loss, addiction, mortality and disillusionment and meeting it with empathy and genuine care. How do we meet the inevitable moments of change and transition with reverence and bravery instead of fear? With the knowledge that everything is a "lightsphere,” on its way somewhere new, moving away from where and what it's been.