Five years since her debut album Delivery, Mikaela Davis has moved away from her hometown of Rochester, shared the stage with the likes of Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Christian McBride, Bon Iver, Lake Street Dive and Circles Around the Sun and entered a new decade. But it’s the ever-evolving relationships between her closest friends and bandmates that has propelled the Hudson Valley-based artist onto her new album And Southern Star––a truly collaborative effort that ruminates on the choices we make, and the people we always come back to.

Davis earned her degree in harp performance at the Crane School of Music, and has molded her classical music training to create an original and genre-bending catalog that weaves together 60s pop-soaked melodies, psychedelia and driving folk rock. She met her bandmates at pivotal moments in her life––drummer Alex Coté in childhood, guitarist Cian McCarthy and bassist Shane McCarthy in college, and steel guitarist Kurt Johnson in her early twenties. It’s the band’s collective step into adulthood that has informed much of And Southern Star’s thematic landscape.

Navigating the periphery of past selves, the coexistence of isolation and excitement in a new environment and the tension of growing away from what we thought we wanted is tackled with a luscious, kaleidoscopic grace. And Southern Star picks apart the reflection we used to recognise, while trying to build a new one. “I finally feel like this album is more me than anything else that’s been released,” Davis says, adding that producing the album along with her four bandmates allowed them to carve out their own ideas, rather than someone else’s. Despite playing together for over a decade, it’s the first time the five-piece have appeared on a full length album together.

The bones of And Southern Star was recorded at Old Soul Studios with Kenny Siegal, a person who was an integral part of Davis’ move to the area. The rest was recorded by Cian McCarthy at Horehound Mansion, adding to

the album’s intimate nature. The album was mixed by Mike Fridmann at Tarbox Road Studios, who is lovingly nicknamed as the ‘silent sixth member of the band.’

Davis describes the band’s bond as “meditative and telepathic,” adding that although many of the songs were written individually across the past few years, something instantly clicked once they were together. Opener “Cinderella,” written by Coté and Davis, begins with Davis’ distinctive harp plucks and ethereal vocals. It’s a sonic choice that directly points to Davis’ solo beginnings, before blossoming into the textural patchwork of the band’s contributions. The fairytale wanderings of the song peel back in the album’s dream-like canopy, where tracks offer an otherworldly escape from the constraints of reality.

The album, however, doesn’t shy away from the very real, lingering fog of solitude and uncertainty that comes with entering new chapters. “Far From You,” written by brothers Cian and Shane McCarthy, introduces a stark spotlight, with ghostly vocals and gentle piano accompanying the weight of loss. “Oh but if I was to meet you in the moonlight,” Davis laments before the song offers a tentative optimism through a stirring, psychedelic instrumental outro, written by Davis, that’s full of bright percussion and driving harp and guitar. This optimism lingers on “Home in the Country,” also written by Cian McCarthy, where rousing harmonies and honky-tonk frills encourage us to seek out the blue skies beyond the heavy clouds.

“Promise” was crafted by Davis and Coté years ago as she was illustrating the pains of a close friend, but soon found herself relating it to her own life. Like the evolutionary tint of the album’s scenery, And Southern Star reckons with the changes that creep into a hairpin bend. “The Pearl” is there to anchor these dizzying shifts, as steel guitar and glittering harp creates a frame around the core-memories that shaped us. “You will always feel like that inner child,” Davis explains. “Sometimes you’ll forget about them but then it hits you.”

And Southern Star is an album that toes the liminal space of growing into ourselves, while tugging at parts of the past that we’re desperate to keep. Moving forward, and accepting change, is one of the most painful parts of renewal and we can often find ourselves stuck in the difficulty of it all. Davis, along with her band, understands that while these bumps may hurt at first, they’re not forever and just like the message of album track “Saturday Morning”: sometimes “the illusion of darkness breaks its spell.”

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Since 2023, Vermont songwriter Lily Seabird’s life has been in perpetual motion, spending nearly half of that time on the road performing her own music and as a touring bassist with Greg Freeman, Lutalo, and Liz Cooper. While she thrives in transit, back home she is anchored by “Trash Mountain,” a pink house surrounded by other artists and creatives situated on a decommissioned landfill site at the back of Burlington’s Old North End. Here, Seabird has found belonging, friendship, and inspiration. It’s a place that hosts artists, puts on shows, and has been passed along in her friend group for the better part of the decade. It’s a symbol of transition and stability: something always evolving and growing but never losing its soul. It's only fitting that Seabird named her new album Trash Mountain, as it also contains its namesake's qualities. Over nine delicate but sturdy tracks of intimate folk rock, she pares her songwriting down to its most resonant essentials. It’s an album of unwelcome exits and uncertain futures, but there’s resiliency and hope at its core. It is Seabird’s most confident and immediate effort to date.

Where Seabird’s previous records—2024’s Alas, and 2021’s Beside Myself—were written over the course of a year, Trash Mountain practically poured out of Seabird: three months of songwriting in spring 2024, followed by four days of tracking with Kevin Copeland (Hannah Frances, Lightning Bug, Allegra Krieger) in his Southern Vermont studio in the summer. The condensed timeline allowed her to be present and process how differently her life looks now compared to a few years ago. She’s coped with transforming relationships and grief, as well as music’s awkward shift from a no-pressure, casual thing to do with friends to a career. Though working in environmental politics and community organizing brought her to Vermont from Pennsylvania, her disillusionment with systemic change led her to become a full-time musician. It’s a transition that requires deep self-reflection. “Songwriting is meditation for me, “she says. “It’s the way I work through things and make sense of the world. Being on tour so much I've been writing more just to understand what's happening around me."

Lead single "Trash Mountain (1pm)” came about the day Seabird returned to Burlington after a month on tour, which included 15 shows in a week at SXSW. “Coming home is not always easy for me,” she laughs. “Sometimes I feel like I am a way better version of myself when I'm in the chaos on the road. When I get home, I tend to spiral.” Written on a walk outside her house, she channeled being overwhelmed into a perceptive look at coming down. Over woozy slide guitar and harmonica, Seabird muses, “How are we supposed to remember things / When everything is coming and going?” She doesn’t let herself succumb to her anxieties, finding peace and gratitude for being “on the edge of town / where when I’m home I rest my head.”

While the grief that enveloped her last effort Alas,, which dealt with her best friend’s suicide, still lingers, it’s settled into healing and reflection on Trash Mountain. On “It was like you were

coming to wake us back up,” Seabird vividly paints a brief moment of seeing a person outside her house who bears an uncanny resemblance to her dearly deceased. Rather than mourning, she finds comfort and healing in the vision. “In the past, I used to come to songwriting when I was in crisis,” admits Seabird. “Only recently have I come to songwriting when I am feeling other things beyond emergency and disruption."

The album’s arrangements are markedly sparse and intentional, a shift from the layered Alas, and Beside Myself, allowing Seabird’s writing to soar and stand starkly centered. Only three songs feature her longtime touring band in guitarist Freeman, bassist Nina Cates (Robber Robber), and drummer Zack James (Dari Bay, Robber Robber). On the stunning “How far away,” she’s backed only by a piano played by Sam Atallah which makes for elegiac catharsis. “I've finally accepted that I'm a singer-songwriter,” she says with a shrug. “Not everything has to be some big rock song.” Seabird cites Elliott Smith, Neil Young, and Leonard Cohen as influences on Trash Mountain, and much like the latter, her evocative, emotionally potent lyrics find her looking for cracks in the darkness where light comes in, sometimes literally. Take the album’s other title track, “Trash Mountain (1am),” where she sings of a nocturnal stroll: “We walk these streets we’ve come to know / memories live on in them after the snow / is all melted and gone / garbage covers the ground / and you pull a flower from the weeds and you spin me around.” Sometimes all you need is a loved one to show you how to find beauty in the mess.

Trash Mountain boasts a profound grace and openness. On the buoyant “Sweepstake,” she cherishes memories with dear friends and optimistically looks towards the future, singing, “Where are we going is a question I save for halfway / Tonight the kingdom and tomorrow the milky way.” The song captures the carefree feelings of making art with your best friends, nostalgically mining the boundless creativity and possibility of her early music life in Vermont. Life can change in an instant, but Seabird knows that there’s power in grasping onto the purest moments of connection.

Seabird’s best friend would often joke that “the world is trash,” a welcome dose of dark humor as the sentiment rings more true with each passing year. It’s with this resilient spirit that Trash Mountain finds its optimistic, life-affirming center. It’s an album that understands and accepts that highs and lows are inescapable and that the only way through is with small acts of kindness and other people. It’s a tribute to home, chosen families, and taking life as it comes. “I don’t have hope for the oppressive systems that abandon us, but I do have hope in people,” says Seabird. “Sure, the world is really messed up, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make something beautiful out of the garbage. We might as well make something beautiful out of what we have got.”