Coming of age: we all do it. But a very select few of us do it with as much grace, self-awareness and poetry as Lily Talmers. The Birmingham, Michigan native and recent University of Michigan grad combines her stunning mastery of the English language with her unorthodox classical music training to create a viscerally raw and beautiful debut record, Remember Me as Holy.
For someone who never really set out to be a songwriter to begin with, Talmers’ poetic lyrics and intrinsic sense of melody make her a very, very good one. “It’s kind of a weak thing to do,” Talmers says of songwriting. “At least in my mind, I think I wanted to be an engineer or a doctor, something so hard and objective… objective is the best word to describe what I wanted to be.”
Sure, performing open-heart surgery or aiding in developing the COVID-19 vaccine can be seen as more “objectively” utilitarian than writing a song. But, as we all know, music has a unique healing ability that can’t be found in any medication or surgery – especially, at this moment in time, songs which pull on the tender strings of a desperate nation teetering between change and stagnancy.
In “Miss America,” Talmers meets us at a moment of reckoning and rebuilding, begging her country to see through the smokescreen it’s been looking at for years. “I’ve been staring at you darling/Sitting back and wonderin’, what the hell you’re gonna do,” Talmers sings to the millions of undecided voters. “‘Cause it all comes back to you who eat your dinner with the T.V. on/And who smile thinking everybody else is wrong/Yes, you who drink your coffee with the curtains drawn/Yes, still it’s you that we’re all counting on.” It’s a simple and poignant way to describe the MAGA masses that stayed loyal to 45 throughout his hack job of a presidency without dismissing them completely. And she does all this in a voice as soothing as the ocean – even when she’s talking about a nation’s proverbial nose-dive.
Though Talmers is a multi-instrumentalist (piano, guitar, banjo and cello), she explains that the most important part about songwriting, to her, is the language she uses. “My compulsion and obsession with songwriting is definitely lyricism, and the spirit of a song, what it’s trying to say,” says Talmers. This focus on words is befitting for the musician who studied literature and English, although that wasn’t always the initial plan. For her first few years at university, Talmers was a neuroscience major with the goal of eventually becoming a doctor. Even with the rigorous coursework, she was still moonlighting as a musician. “I was finishing my homework so I could feed my obsession with writing songs,” Talmers remembers.
An awakening came when Talmers was in Copenhagen for a neuroscience internship in the summer of 2018 that made her question the path she was on. But the artist found solace in her songwriting. “[The internship] was so bad and tortuous that that was what compelled me to go to my first open-mic in Portugal,” Talmers remembers; she was gracious enough to share a Facebook video of the performance.
The song she played there ended up being an important one for her for the validation it would provide. “I wrote it in a fit the night before and and then the next day I found this open mic in a random bar in the middle of Lisbon,” she says, crediting the bar “full of old men” (and other encouraging voices) for the inspiration she needed her to pursue music – even though the vulnerability of it makes her uneasy at times. “Even to this day it feels sort of vulnerable to perform – I never feel good,” Talmers says. “It’s not like I’m bad or anything. I just think it’s not that glamorous if your soul is on the line.”
Talmers’ summer in Europe also held another musically formative moment; sitting in a hostel in Copenhagen, she heard Adrianne Lenker’s voice for the first time. “I heard ‘Masterpiece’ playing ambiently,” Talmers says. “And then I became obsessed.” She describes how Lenker’s songwriting style, both solo and with Big Thief, inspired her to take a more experimental approach with songwriting and trust that the listener will catch on. “She just digresses so much from normal songwriting rhetoric,” says Talmers. “The way that she writes is so sonic, the words that she chooses, I feel like she has really given me permission to express myself in an incoherent way almost, trusting that it makes sense.”
In addition to Lenker’s palpable influence, Talmers cites other folk legends like Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen and Simon & Garfunkel as shepherds of her path. In fact, she says hearing “Scarborough Fair” opened her up to listening to pop music, which she didn’t have much time or patience for at the time. As a student of the piano from a young age, Talmers revered classical music and wasn’t interested in much else. “I had this old Russian piano teacher named Yuri who was also my dad’s piano teacher growing up,” Talmers explains. “He forced me to do scales the first two or three years and nothing else… then suddenly instead of giving me, like, ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,’ he just started giving me like insane classical pieces and expecting me to memorize them.”
She would watch Yuri play phrases and use her melodic sensibility to repeat them back. Eventually, she memorized entire classical pieces like Chopin’s “Waltz in C# minor” this way. Though she didn’t realize it at first, this intense ear training undoubtedly plays a role in her complex and clever songwriting style.
That’s how a lot of Talmers’ songwriting feels: effortless, accidental, and primal. Remember Me as Holy serves as a roadmap of Talmers’ deepest thoughts, feelings and desires. It echoes the cries of a nation and the cries of a regular old broken heart. At the bottom of her Bandcamp, Talmers writes, “I do forgive you, after all,” a message to anyone who can see themselves in one of her lyrics. “I wrote that in recognition that it’s all good. I don’t believe that you write songs about people, I think you write about tons of different relationships in your life,” explains Talmers. I think the record could be perceived as like a burn and it’s simply not that – it’s sort of like self-reconciliation.”
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