Lily Konigsberg has been writing songs all her life. Born and raised in Brooklyn, she started playing solo sets around NYC clubs as a teenage, before linking up with Bard classmates Nina Ryser and Ani Ivry-Block to form Palberta. She also performs with Nate Amos as My Idea, and is releasing her latest full-length solo album Lily We Need To Talk Now via Wharf Cat October 2021.
I haven’t been listening to very much music this year, but I have been listening to Kacey Musgraves. She came out with an album this year, Star-Crossed, which I thought was OK, but it led me to discover Golden Hour, which is better.
A couple of my friends a few years ago were obsessed with “Slow Burn” — they showed it to me, and I was like, “That’s a good song,” but I was resistant to checking it out, because I have a problem with not checking things out when people want me to. I changed a lot about my lifestyle this year, so I actually have time to listen to what people tell me to listen to, and appreciate it and not just be in my head all the time.
I work at a cafe now, and I have to find music that the cafe owner is OK with and that I can stand. I tried out the new album, and was like, “Oh! We both like this, this is good. What else has this person done?” So then I found the album Golden Hour.
I became obsessed with it for a while. Now I can’t listen to it anymore, but it definitely made an impact on my year. There aren’t really any songs I don’t like on it; I think I like all of them. At first my favorite was “Slow Burn,” but now I like “Oh, What A World,” because of the line where she says, “You’re here right now, and I know what I feel” — she says it in such a specific way that’s very unusual. Just the way that she phrases it, I feel like I relate to it, like I would write something like that — though I can’t put it into words why, because that’s not my forte. But it just sounds really pretty.
I realized that I have the same range as her, so I can sing all her songs really easily. I don’t know many people like that, who have songs that I like where they all work in my range, because my range is really small and it’s high — but not extremely high. She has a small range too, I can tell, so that was cool. And, she writes all her own songs, and she’s a really good songwriter. There are just a lot of bops on the album.
Star-Crossed doesn’t have as many points of pure hooks, but it’s still a really interesting album. It’s cool, but it’s not as fun to discover, because you keep going through Golden Hour and you’re like, Oh, my god, eight songs down and there’s another amazing song. It’s like an album written to be an album, which people don’t really do that much anymore.
I actually cover Kacey Musgraves when I perform at the cafe, which is a secret thing that I do sometimes. There is exciting stuff in the future, though, happening in February — maybe we’ll include a Kacey Musgraves cover…
As told to Annie Fell.
