Lightspheres on Their Way

“Sometimes life gets so dark, it starts to feel like a bad trip,” 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.” For fans of Big Thief, Wednesday, MJ Lenderman, Geese Though Lightspheres marks a moment of ascension for Seabird’s songwriting, she asserts that “the most emotional parts of the record are instrumental.” 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. Lightspheres 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.