“I think Philly is such a hub for interesting, smart, unique individuals who are into culture, and they’re the smartest people,” says LA-based indie folk singer/songwriter Lily Kershaw during a recent phone interview which evolved into a nearly-three-hour chat about slightly obscure classic cocktails (Are there any places in or near Fishtown to get a good French 75?), potential Halloween costumes inspired by Criterion films (Daisies and Funny Games are at the top of our list.), and how I should become a poet (or may already be one) who writes about my, “flip phone life.” I’m pretty sure we’re one level below “besties” at the moment…
At the time, the 22-year-old artist had just released her first studio album, Midnight in the Garden, via Nettwerk, who are currently set to release her third LP, Pain & More, on September 13th, so I’m curious what she considers to be some of the highlights of her musical career in the 11-year interval. “The biggest highlight is just that I’m still writing songs, first and foremost, and that I still enjoy writing songs,” Lily tells me, but admits that it’s always quite cool when an artist that she’s a fan of talks about her in an interview, and that when she opened for Air Supply a few years ago it felt like kinda a big deal: “I love them!”
I’m also curious how Kershaw currently feels about Midnight in the Garden. “I feel really proud of what I accomplished at that time. I was 20 or 21 and I wrote those songs in my late teens,” she tells me, before noting that the entire LP was made in two weeks. “I would really happily re-record that album,” she says, explaining that now, currently in her early thirties, she feels like she has a better grasp on those topics she was writing about more than a decade ago: “I love being in my early thirties… That first album definitely had some nuggets of truth, but I hadn’t experienced as much.” But she says that she’s still a fan of the person who wrote those songs: “It was cool, it worked for the time.” She even confesses, “She was cool, she was so brave. I think I was more brave then [laughs].”
2019 saw the release of Arcadia, Lily’s sophomore album, but apparently there was quite a bit more work that was composed in that time that never saw the light of day: “I created a few other bodies of work I just decided to not share.” However, she does tell me that all of her musical experiences since her debut have helped her develop a far greater skillset than she had on Midnight in the Garden, even if she’s had to adapt to certain differences as a performer: “My voice is a little lower now. Thank you, acid reflux and allergies [laughs]. But it’s stronger!”
Unlike Midnight in the Garden, Lily explains that Pain & More was created over quite a long period of time: “It took three years to make, but we were in a pandemic [laughs]… I took 10 months to write this album and then I wrote some more after we started recording and scrapped some songs, so I was given time to continually reassess everything.” Lily worked on the album with producer Brandon Walters, who she tells me really helped to achieve what she’d envisioned for the collection: “We really got it to where we wanted to go, sonically, I really got where I wanted to go.” However, she says that her favorite thing about the album is that it still feels personally relevant: “The thing I’m most excited about is that I finished it a year ago and I still love it.”
A lot of the themes explored on Pain & More revolve around Kershaw’s ongoing depression, which she suggests the thirtysomething is able to much better process and address than her younger self: “I was looking at mental health for this record and my experience with mental health… On the first album, I didn’t have all the experience yet. With the first album, it was like, ‘I know what I know, and I know what I have to embellish.’”
While Pain & More is still more than a week from officially dropping, Lily has already released 7 of the album’s 11 tracks as singles, most recently “Call Whoever This Makes You Think Of (Except Your Narcissistic Ex),” which has been out since mid-July. And she tells me she’s been a bit caught off guard by some of the fan favorites: “I really love non-traditional song structures… It’s been so interesting to see what songs connect with what person at what time, and I’ve actually been really surprised… It was really cool to see people listen to ‘Poem Song,’ because that song’s basically just a poem with a melody… talk about non-traditional song structures.”
Lily tells me that that particular track even has ties to our neck of the woods: “For the video for ‘Poem Song,’ we shot it at the Bethlehem SteelStacks, because my parents moved there and I love my parents, so I spend a lot of time there.” And apparently the song’s origins are also in the Lehigh Valley: “I wrote ‘Poem Song’ in Bethlehem, PA, and I’ve always loved the SteelStacks… I wrote ‘Poem Song’ in an upstairs bedroom in a house built in like the early 1800s, which is such an interesting place to dive in and write music.”
At the moment, Lily Kershaw is preparing to embark on a tour supporting singer/songwriter and internet sensation Genevieve Stokes, which kicks off October 14th (my 40th birthday) in Washington DC and will have Kershaw and Stokes at Johnny Brenda’s on October 15th. Although Lily tells me she and Genevieve haven’t met yet, she is a big fan (and they do “follow” each other): “I discovered Genevieve maybe a year or year-and-a-half ago on TikTok… I know [laughs]… Her phrasing and her voice just like hit me in the chest, and I Googled it that night!”
“My rough outline is that I am prepping for this tour right now and focusing on that, getting my head in the game, because I haven’t done that since the beginning of 2020, before everything shut down,” Lily tells me of her current mindset. Kershaw will be playing these dates solo (which she hadn’t decided at the time of our last phone chat… we text frequently, though), but she confesses that there’s one thing audiences can always count on, regardless of whether she’s playing solo or with a band: “I will probably be too honest onstage, like tell a story that I’m like, ‘I probably shouldn’t have told that,’ [laughs].” However, she also admits that there’s already new-new music in the works.
“Right now I have two rough album ideas, both of which I talked to my label about. I don’t want to wait as long as the last time. I have a lot of songs! I love writing and I love recording and I’d love to share some more music… I talk a lot about mental health on this album and I am interested in exploring some other things, as well.”
*Get your tickets here.
