Single in Brooklyn
She keeps a cow skull under her bed.

"In my defense, he's kind of … Read Full Bio ↴She keeps a cow skull under her bed.

"In my defense, he's kind of like a protector, maybe a shaman or a dreamcatcher... besides, where else can I keep him in NY?"

Once you hear Lily Virginia's music it all makes sense. You can almost hear those bones, feathers, shells - forgotten exoskeletons - scattered throughout her songs.

Her delicately powerful voice and carefully crafted lyrics hold a strength in their raw vulnerability. With influences as varied as Fleetwood Mac to the Pixies, PJ Harvey to Bon Iver, Lily Virginia brings together americana, rock and pop to create an experience where each song can exist on its own. "It never mattered to me to play one genre, or to have one message... so it's the same if I'm whispering a lullabye, humming something catchy or reaching into a gritty part of myself. It's always been about singing a story, being honest, and connecting with something spiritual."

Raised in the wild hippie west of California, Lily has lived a few different lives. From studying music in Argentina and Brazil, to a 7 year stint as a ninja, to love, heartbreak, and magic, she's carefully folded these experiences into her knapsack of songstories. She unpacked her bag 4 years ago in Brooklyn and has called NYC home ever since.

Lily has played all over New York and has even had a song featured on ABC's '666 Park Avenue'. Now, on the verge of releasing her debut EP, she is excited to finally share all her music with the rest of the world!
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Single in Brooklyn
lily virginia Lyrics


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The lyrics are frequently found in the comments by searching or by filtering for lyric videos
Comments from YouTube:

KineticZen

I'm not sure if this is, at heart, an optimistic or pessimistic song - whether it's about the reality of those "for a while" relationships that seem so readily available in the great, teeming metropolis of New York (to the beautiful, funny, or generally sociable, at least), or the tragedy of one's own ideation of the "perfect" partner breaking apart & crumbling into the void in the merciless face of Reality.

Each time I've visited New York, I felt more profoundly alone than I ever had in my miserable little low-tier city up in NH - so many people, but as many (or more) invisible, impenetrable walls around each one of them: in-groups I could never hope to truly belong to as just another tourist. I was an obstacle. I was an unleashed pet with a bad case of mange. I was a negligible neutrino in the greater organism, even with the citizenry being themselves no more than atoms.

I can't imagine being an atom is much better, but at least you might get to pair bond on occasion. The alternative is familiar to everyone: a heightened awareness of the decay & death that we're all doomed to from the moment we're born, and worse, given understanding of its horror & ugliness through the evolutionary misstep of consciousness. Knowing that your life was always forfeit, and that the only thing you can do to stave off the misery, the long silences, the boredom of the world of mere things, is to distract yourself - through drugs, through drink, through the secondary narcotic of dreaming & imagining & creating, flawed as it may be in transferrence from the strictly mental realm of pure Idea to the fundamentally imperfect world of fleshly living.

There is nothing but the intimation of something, in the unknowable, foreign world of human connection that some of us are forever forbidden from experiencing, whether through repulsion or apathy.

KineticZen

First, thank you very much for considered reply. I enjoyed reading your thoughts.

It's good to know that I was pretty much on-point, in my own roundabout way, and that you're so aware - of the world, of your material, of the need to exist schizophrenically, both a part of & outside of your music's subject matter, as a professional songwriter (as does most any performer/entertainer, really). I take a more pessimistic view of the concept of love: I wonder, with so many lost in the wilderness of solitude, if a way out ever existed at all, except in dreams.

So many of the superficial aspects of modern courtship might seem foreign to people who didn't grow up with constant exposure to the Internet zeitgeist, but the fundamentals have never changed. Capitalism has neatly conjoined its parasitic suckers to the brain's base human impulses, magnifying the darker impulses of sexual & romantic interest: displays of status, wealth, power, and dominance over other, lesser contenders in a thousand perpetual, invisible wars between skull-sized kingdoms. Personal merit (sometimes extrapolated unto basic human validity) is gauged increasingly by the pretense of the advertised public Self - a heavily airbrushed rendition of our character from only the most flattering of angles.

Is there any hope for the seemingly naive principle of unconditional love when the whole system of human intimacy is based on deceit? Or is "love" just another ex-post-facto justification to gild the instincts & actions we'd rather not talk about in polite company with some dishonest sheen of nobility? A narrative device, an inconvenient contradiction, or something that actually exists outside of the Platonic realm of Ideas?

I'm sorry, I've got Adam Curtis's "HyperNormalisation" on the brain of late. Makes it difficult to have a sunny outlook on much of anything.

Lily Virginia

Wow @zenthik - what a beautiful and profound commentary. I am honored you took the time to write this out. This song is both optimistic and pessimistic. I'm glad you caught onto that. As someone who deeply believes in the importance of real love, this song is ultimately a rejection of "settling" or "just good enough" as well as a rejection of capitalist/consumerist values that can often lead us down a path of loneliness and isolation - especially in NYC as you so astutely recognized. However I sang the song through the voice of a character who finds themself in this situation - and as I sing through this lens I took on their pain of isolation and just wanting someone who is "not the best but not the worst." Because I've been there. And so while there is a rejection of these values, I also have empathy and tenderness for this person who has lost their way.

Let me know what you think of this explanation. It was nice to get a chance to finally write it out.

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