Last year, I started keeping a list of the fellow Lilys I met at parties, gigs, and grocery stores with the goal of one day hosting a Lily Party—a proud gathering for our shared name, inspired by the Ryan Meetup, the Naomi picnic, and the 178 Hirokazu Tamakas who linked up in Tokyo. To keep things intimate, I limited myself to Lilys I’d met in person, but now there’s one exception: songwriter Lily Konigsberg. I don’t know her, but her music makes me feel like I do.
Konigsberg first made waves for her off-kilter bedroom-pop solo albums and her work with experimental punk trio Palberta, but I first discovered her through My Idea, her duo with This Is Lorelei and Water From Your Eyes’ Nate Amos. My Idea’s first and only album, CRY MFER, was on heavy rotation during my final semester at college, a time I spent frequently drunk and/or in a haze of weed smoke—reportedly the same state in which Konigsberg and Amos made the record, right before they each got clean. Much of the press around Amos’ new solo album has detailed his journey to sobriety, but these accounts rarely mention CRY MFER—an alt-pop chronicle of Konigsberg and Amos’ mutual, codependent slide toward bottom—as the turning point the artists acknowledged it to be in a 2022 interview. Amos has been everywhere since then. What about Konigsberg?
“Let’s talk about it,” sings Konigsberg on the first line of “Free Byrd,” her first song released since CRY MFER, “I’ve been meaning to say/I know that you want me but I’m going away.” What hasn’t gone away in the four years Konigsberg last released new music is her sense of humor (“Play ‘Free Byrd’!” is a great bit already), tight harmonies, penchant for talky asides, and ear for catchy refrains—I’ve been humming the guitar-doubled melody she sings over the hook (“You’re my baby and I love you/But that couldn’t be me”) all week. What’s new is the sunshine. Konigsberg’s eclecticism has previously led her towards art-punk and Auto-Tune and a cappella arrangements, but “Free Byrd”—a peppy folk-rock song that sounds like Liz Phair’s take on Sheryl Crow—is the closest she’s come to an easygoing, windows-down hit. “I’m cautiously hopeful,” Konigsberg sings; she sounds earnest, too. “Free Byrd” is a bittersweet introduction to a new chapter—the sound of what it’s like to trade emotional car crashes for open roads.
