Lily Lyons on Her New EP: Writing Songs on the Move
London-based singer-songwriter Lily Lyons sat down with Far Out Magazine for an interview — not in a studio or a café, but on a footpath leading into a gorge in Bristol, England. The premise came from a tip passed along by the head of local label Breakfast Records: supposedly wild goats can be spotted in the gorge near a suspension bridge. Lyons traveled from London for the walk, talking about her upcoming EP along the way. In the end, neither of them saw any goats. The EP's title and release date have not been announced.
"I love being in transit"
Movement is the throughline of the interview. Lyons says, "I love being in transit," adding that this was a big part of her childhood — being in motion, soundtracking a journey, mapping music onto place.
She also connects that restlessness to how she builds relationships. Asked whether traveling solo runs counter to the intimacy in her music, she points out that everyone who has joined her team, or joined her musical journey, she met in different places, in live-show settings.
Four years between her first single and her first album
Lyons' trajectory has followed a fairly traditional path: write, gig, release, repeat, in the order most musicians follow. Her debut album Re-Open The World arrived four years after her first single, with a steady string of releases in between — no rush to lock in an image, just a core audience built gradually over years of touring.
She has also deliberately cultivated physical performance spaces. The clearest example is St Mathias Church, where she recorded a live album, working with new collaborators in the process to keep a tangible sense of place in the recordings.
On being called "the next Nick Drake"
Far Out notes that the laziest tag in this corner of the genre is calling any soft-voiced newcomer with an acoustic guitar "the next Nick Drake." The piece argues that comparison misses what actually made Drake distinctive — his fidelity to writing songs that were entirely his own. That, the article suggests, is the part of Drake's legacy Lyons is actually drawing on.