Lily Seabird didn’t want to name her new album Trash Mountain.
“It’s kind of a gross way to describe a place that’s really the center of my community,” the singer-songwriter — real name Lily Seward — explained in a video call from her room at the pink house in Burlington’s Old North End known colloquially as, yep, Trash Mountain.
Close proximity to a landfill gave the house its name, but its recent history as something of a clubhouse for the Burlington music scene is what ultimately inspired the record’s title.
“My friend Ryan always used to say, ‘The world is trash,’ and we’d laugh about it,” she said, referring to her late friend Ryan Collins, whose death in 2022 threads through many of Seabird’s songs. “But it’s pretty ironic that the place that has held me the most literally has the word ‘trash’ in it. So eventually I abandoned all of the other shitty titles I had thought of and just called it what it is.”
Trash Mountain, which drops on Friday, April 4, on Lame-O Records, is Seabird’s third LP. It represents a sonic shift for the 26-year-old, a move away from the grunge and darkness of last year’s Alas and into country and folk territory. As Seabird noted, only four songs on Trash Mountain have drums, a subject of some anxiety on her part.
The new album coincides with a new phase of her career. Following several years of hard touring as a solo artist and supporting her friends and fellow Vermont indie rockers Greg Freeman and Lutalo, as well as Nashville, Tenn.’s Liz Cooper, Seabird has gone pro. The former Vermont Public Interest Research Group employee has decided to go all in on music.
“I just counted recently, and I’ve been on 26 different tours,” she said with an exhausted laugh. “I feel more like myself when I’m on tour than when I’m back home.”
Indeed, there’s a line in the album’s title track that sums up Seabird’s struggles readjusting to life off the road: “Coming home, it’s so easy for you / but I just forget things and remember them / looking for something to do,” she sings in a twang-inflected melody, the slight quaver in her voice eliciting a sense of both intimacy and confusion.
Becoming a road warrior is just one aspect of Seabird’s continuing evolution as a musician.
When she first started playing in Burlington as a University of Vermont student, Seabird’s experience was pretty similar to that of most college musicians. She’d write some songs and get together with her friends, drink beer and rock out. That youthful energy translated to more of an indie-rock sound than an indie-folk one, which she captured on her 2021 debut record, Beside Myself.
Her friend Collins’ death prompted the confessional and heartbreaking Alas. That album is as bleak as it is beautiful. “I don’t think I’ll ever get as dark as that again,” Seabird said. “It was just too intense.”
Writing and recording Trash Mountain last year was a much different experience for the Pennsylvania native. She had just returned home from a long stint on the road — including a performance at SXSW in Austin, Texas — and wanted to make a record essentially on the spot. She drew inspiration from friends such as Nina Cates of Burlington indie-rock outfit Robber Robber.
“Nina told me once that before she was in Robber Robber, she didn’t always feel like she was making music she could relate to,” Seabird said. “That really made me question if I was doing that and, if not, what might happen if I did.”
She thought about Elton John and Joni Mitchell, two versatile artists she listens to regularly, and how they could both make what she described as “sparse, gorgeous records.”
“I love songs. I want to hear the lyrics, and I want sparse arrangements,” she said. “You can’t always be rocking out, right?”
She was also tired of writing “from a place of crisis,” she said. “I wanted to get back to writing as a way of understanding the world around me.”
With that intention, Seabird wrote 25 songs in her room at Trash Mountain. Then she called her friend Kevin Copeland at Science Is Magic Studios in Arlington and headed to southern Vermont for a whirlwind recording session, tracking the entire nine-song album in three days.
“It’s wild when I think about it,” she reflected. “I have the vinyl copies of the record sitting right here in my room, and these songs didn’t even exist a year ago.”
Advance single “Trash Mountain (1am)” revealed Seabird’s new direction: no more distorted guitars; no big, rocking drums. Just a focus on her drawling vocals, indie-folk arrangements and stark, affecting lyrics.
While Trash Mountain is sunnier than Alas, Seabird hasn’t stopped writing about the loss of Collins. Her late friend inspired the song “It was like you were coming to wake us back up,” as well as the tender ballad “How far away,” the album’s second single.
“Called you on the phone,” she sings on the latter, “but there was nobody home / so I left a voicemail anyways / just in case things might change.”
Seabird’s grief is more processed this go-round, as opposed to the all-encompassing sorrow of the previous record. The majority of Trash Mountain is focused on the thriving Queen City artist community that Seabird holds close — a scene that is starting to get noticed around the country. At a recent show in Los Angeles, she said, fans were coming up to her after the set and mentioning their love of Vermont music, name-checking Freeman and Dari Bay, as well as Brattleboro indie rockers THUS LOVE.
While Seabird hasn’t announced a local release show, she is scheduled to hit the road again this summer, including a European run starting in August.
“I haven’t figured out where I’ll do a local release show yet,” she said. “The venue situation in Burlington is kind of off these days. There’s just not a lot of places to play. Maybe we’ll do it at Trash Mountain, who knows?”
More likely, fans will get their first chance to hear the record live at the Waking Windows festival in Winooski in May. While the lineup hasn’t been announced yet, the burgeoning Burlington indie-rock scene will certainly be represented, and there are few musicians out there flying the flag as high as Seabird, who is expected to play.
“The album is about Burlington, really,” she said. “It was all written right here at Trash Mountain.”