Lily Talmers is the band leader for the new age of Americana — her Midwestern-accented and poetically inclined melodies are informed by Greek, Lusophone and classical music, taking you on a unique journey into Lily’s strange intervallic insides, bursting with lyricism coated in intimacy and refined wit. Her vocal delivery is akin to Adrianne Lenker with musical and lyrical nods to legends such as Leonard Cohen, Edith Piaf, and Judee Sill. 

Growing up in metro-Detroit, Michigan has been the catalyst for Lily’s unique blend of what is dismal, forlorn, and sludge-covered, alongside all the wondrous and hopeful idealism of a child. She played classical piano and cello growing up, finding herself always more moved by resonance and melody than by the discipline of notation and study. She avoided studying music in college, graduating from the University of Michigan in 2020 with a degree in comparative literature and philosophy. Her academic work, though,  detailed the music of lament-- she studied Portuguese fado and Greek rembetika, both styles known as analogous to American blues music in their respective nations. In the process, she even joined a Greek folk band. 

Her work as a recording artist and performer expanded post-graduation, despite the immensity of restrictions imposed by COVID. In fall of 2020, collaboration with Ann Arbor funk band “Sabbatical Bob” unfolded through the worst of the pandemic first yielding “Remember Me as Holy” (released in February 2021),  an acoustic, indie-rock-adjacent record, whose metallic twinges and beds of brass harmony create a sound all its own. Songs like “Middle of America” and “Miss America” name and lament the complexities of an American upbringing, while “No Woman” and “Into The Air” detail the holding of a feminine identity which floats toward boundless love, facing a heavy recoil when it reaches its limits. Lyrically, Lily finds expanse, recalling all the edges of loving others-- there is regret, anger, bitterness, nostalgia, longing, and admiration laced into a narrative of self trying desperately to beautify its desire in real time. 

In July and September of 2022, Lily is set to release a double album, part one titled “Hope is the Whore I Go To” and part two “My Mortal Wound,” immediately proceeded the making of Lily’s first LP. Her production of it started just after finishing the first record, when she began writing with full band arrangements in mind, unapologetically making known the sorts of diverse stylistic influence her musicianship. “Hope is The Whore I Go To” was captured live, full band, and features stylistic nods to musical tradition from around the world-- “Hope, You Whore,” a song with Brazilian samba percussive stylings, dramatic strings, and a blaring and layered mariachi horn solo, gives way directly to “Hope is a Human,” a stunning Lily-and-string-quartet moment, which features heavy-handed allusions to classical stylings, including direct reference to Alexander Borodin’s opera “Prince Igor.” 

These dramatic sorts of tonal shifts are what really put this record into a category of its own-- “Life’s So Fun,” a frantic, soaring-trumpet-featuring, surf rock satire song (whose chorus chants “Time! Enough! Run!” of a love destined to go wrong) melts into “Prayer for Nearly Nothing,” arranged as a New Orleans style funeral dirge with heavy swing. The narrative of the album is centered on imaging Hope alive, as a human, and the triumphs and miserable disappointments that result in saying “yes” to her as she extends her hand to you. As with “Remember Me as Holy,” Lily’s writing on this project maintains cutting earnestness and theological sorts of unearthings, and Biblical and cultural references which contain secrets that reveal themselves only through many listens.

“My Mortal Wound” is the soft underbelly of its twin, featuring primarily just Lily and a nylon string guitar, playing live inside of a cathedral. Thematically and musically, it is drawing from the same well, with a gentler, and at times more dismal, sort of presentation. The title track features immersion into synthetic textures akin to the harshest of midwest winters, a send-off into the sonic world of the album. The songs detail a certain recoiling from the risk of the reach of love. The exit from this sonic escape takes place in recapitulation of the first, title track, in the final track, called “Part of It.”

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