THE SCENE

New American Myth

Lillian Seibert, aka Lillian and the Muses, is bending genres, combining Americana and hip hop to craft songs for a new sensibility. And in the midst of the pandemic, the Vermonter hit the road for California in search of endless spring, collaboration, and new visions. Here’s a peek into the process of a musician who is breaking ground for a generation on the rise.

TEXT DOUG SCHNITZSPAHN

After drivinig 10,00 miles and spending three months on the road, Lilian Seibert found her muse—make that Muses. A musician, photographer, and videographer who was raised in rural Vermont and studied at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, the 24-year-old Seibert records and performs as Lillian and the Muses, but the pandemic hit the up-and-coming talent hard, as it has so many performers. And like so many other musicians faced with the isolation of COVID-19, Seibert created art in the midst of it all. Lillian and the Muses combine song and sight; Siebert often sees the visual narratives of songs as she writes them. So the Vermonter headed to the sunny sands of Los Angeles to fi lm videos of “Cigarettes” and “Devil in the Details” from Lillian and the Muses new, eponymous EP. The plan was to collaborate with Alissa Lise Wyle, a friend from Berklee who creates as Holy Smoke Photography (holysmokephotography.com) and chase spring across a country slowly awakening from the pandemic (“Spring” is also the title of Lillian and the Muses fi rst single, which features a video shot back home in Burlington, Vermont). So Seibert and her father converted a van, and she was off to California for a few months before chasing spring back to Vermont.

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Lillian and the Muses may just be hitting the scene, but the music hinges on the crest of a wave of young artists who are not afraid to mash up genres. Trained in opera, Seibert centers herself in Americana and is infl uenced by a line of Green Mountain State stars she saw growing up, including Grace Potter and Anais Mitchell. But the new EP puts hip hop beats down under multi-layered vocals. It’s a unique sound representative of Gen Z’s streaming and genre-bending sensibilities but grounded enough to be an ear worm for any generation. Seibert took the time to talk to Sensi about her art, process, and, of course, muses.

You are a musician, a photographer, and a videographer—how do the visual and the musical come together in what you do?

I see them as intertwined. I can’t really have one without the other—at least in my mind. When I’m writing, I’m doing it from a place of a vision or a story, and, to do that, I need to be picturing it. So when we are making music videos, it’s a process of bringing that initial vision back to life. The video is very important to me—almost as much as the music. I grew up with a lot of Americana and outlaw country, so I am heavily infl uenced by stuff like John Prine and the glam of Dolly Parton. Then there are current artists I’ve always been into like Rachael Price from Lake Street Drive and Lana Del Rey, and there’s a great Norwegian singer Aurora who I really love. A lot of those groups focus on pretty dramatic retellings of music through a video.

How do you think about transforming a song into a video?

It usually takes the form of sitting down and listening to the song on repeat with my eyes closed until I can picture every second of every frame. Then I just write it down like a crazy person. I just start scribbling. I have a tendency to know exactly how I want the shot to be done because I’m familiar with lenses and framing. So I usually come in with an

Excel spreadsheet with a second-to-second time code. Then we take it from there.

You are a videographer yourself, but you hired LA-based Alissa Lise Wyle of Holy Smoke Photography to make videos for the songs “Cigarettes” and “Devil in the Details” from your new EP. Why?

So this is funny. Alissa and I have completely opposite styles when it comes to video. But I absolutely adore that; it’s why I hired her. I wanted what she can do, and that is not my specialty. It was one of those things where I could outsource to someone who’s awesome. And I was happy to do that because I appreciate her work. As far as shooting my own stuff goes, I’m a big proponent of anybody who can do everything on their own—make their own beats, sing their own stuff , shoot their own video—but I’m really focused on community. I would so much rather have specialists and people who are invested and excited in my work to create something you can all be proud of instead of trying to go it alone.

It was exciting because I was going to be able to give Alissa more wiggle room with a narrative. I’m always trying to structure everything perfectly, so that everything’s cohesive and the little nods to each moment make sense in a storyline—but with “Devil in the Details,” there’s a lot more room for metaphor. It’s much more aesthetically driven, loose, with imagery that can be interpreted however the audience wants to interpret it. That gave Alissa a lot more freedom. I said, “Okay, these are the scenes that I’m picturing. You go crazy and have fun.” That was great because, I really want to give the artists I work with a chance to make something that they are proud of, not just something to which I’m looking forward.

Who are the Muses? Are they your band?

So I am Lillian and the Muses. The Muses name is derived from Greek mythology, and the idea of diff erent muses for poetry, music, art… I’m very much of the mind that the world around you infl uences your work. So I think of myself as Lillian and the music is something omnipresent. That being

said, it’s also great when I have people on stage with me; they suddenly become the muses. The music takes on a more acoustic, soft Americana country sound to it, much truer to my roots.

You say you are infl uenced by Americana but, in the studio, you’re bringing a new twist with hip hop. How do you see that working, and how do you like to meld those very diff erent infl uences?

I try to not be too precious with each song that I write. I think a song can be produced by so many diff erent people and have a completely diff erent sound. On the EP I just released, the beat maker is Jarv, a rapper and producer based in Vermont. He had been intrigued by the idea of taking my acoustically written, pretty, country-inspired music and seeing if we could make it kind of classic hip hop and see where that would go. So we just started playing around with it, and we found stuff that we really liked. We started mixing in a lot of my layered vocals, which added a completely diff erent texture. It maybe pulled us a little bit away from classic hip hop, but much more into my own sound.

I’m just trying to do my best to pay homage to what I know is my sound and also try on diff erent hats while I’m doing it. I’m not afraid to try a new genre or a new producer because who knows? It could sound awesome. It could sound awful. It’s like cooking—give it a try, add something. It might seem weird, but I’m sure the fi rst person who put salt on chocolate said, “This has gotta be nuts.”

And, to spread out the infl uences even more, you studied opera in college. Is that still a big part of your music?

Opera prepared me for my work now, but it’s defi nitely not where my heart ended up. That being said, you can defi nitely hear it in the layered vocals in some of the work I’ve done. There are some pretty high operatic things happening in the background. There’s a sweet spot in my life for opera, but specifi cally choral music has always been something that I adore. I started it in middle school and didn’t stop all through college. I was so inspired by the layering of many, many voices, which is refl ected in my music when I do all this vocal layering. I love that

feeling of a choir, how it can be so immersive like an ocean, an overwhelming presence. When I’m writing, I write almost everything a capella in lieu of instruments, with vocal melodies that I just layer on top of each other. Sometimes, I take that to some of my bandmates and they’ll just interpret it into chords and play instruments instead of the vocal melodies. In some cases, like in “Spring,” we just keep the vocal melodies and that’s the heart of the structure of the song.

What do you most want listeners to get out of your work?

The music has to speak for itself. You can talk music all day, but you can’t really explain a sound or a feeling. So I’m excited to fi nally have this debut project out so that people can get a feel for it. I’m excited to incorporate more live instruments in the future as well. The sound of the pedal steel is something that I’ve been dreaming of for years, and I’m so excited to integrate it into my music.

What’s next?

I’m going to be putting out more music, more singles that are going to accumulate into an album. I’m excited about exploring some more of this kind of acoustic space and tracking some of that music, because, you know, muses are fl ying in and out. I want to make sure that Lillian and the Muses continues to be a malleable voice that grows and changes.

LISTEN UP Check out Lillian and the Muses’ EP on Spotify and catch the videos for “Spring,” “Cigarettes,” and “Devil in the Details” on Lillian and the Muses YouTube channel or on the website. Follow Lillian and the Muses on Facebook and Instagram.

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