Artist Interview: Lilly Gitlitz
Reporting by Casey Epstein-Gross & Maisie Wrubel
We’re standing on Cross Street on a cool Sunday afternoon in early April, and frankly, we’re not quite sure we’re in the right place – some blatantly incorrect directions from Google Maps had sent us on a bit of a wild goose chase, so we had to figure out the rest on our own. Just as we start to debate the merits of awkwardly ringing doorbells, the door to a nearby house flings open and out comes Lilly Gitlitz cradling a coffee mug, the wide legs of her pants fluttering in the light wind. She waves at us, looking every bit some sort of spring-time goddess or woodland nymph, all flowing pants, bare feet, and windblown curls. A senior at Wesleyan, Gitlitz welcomes us into her wood-frame with a warm smile, a joke or two, and an immediate “can I get you guys anything? Water, coffee, tea?” The living room is cozy and playful, clearly well-lived-in and well-loved: blankets on the couches, pictures of cats taped to the walls, a guitar balanced carefully against a chair, wind chimes softly tinkling in the breeze outside. It suits her. Gitlitz tells us to make ourselves at home, so we sit down on a surprisingly comfortable couch as she curls up on a neighboring loveseat, grinning widely. “I’ve never done an interview before,” she says, somewhat nervously, as she makes herself comfortable, “but I’m so, so excited for this!” We tell her that this will, then, be her first of many – we’re not betting people, but just listen to Gitlitz’s most recent single “Molasses” (which came out on Friday, April 7), and you’ll understand our confidence. Her knack for setting people at ease holds true for her music as well, which is somehow the musical equivalent of both blanket-laden couches and tinkling wind chimes – comforting and light all at once. To put it plainly, Gitlitz’s music, like everything else about her, feels like home.
The danger of interviewing someone so affable, so adept at making others feel comfortable, is that once the conversation begins, it might flow so naturally that it becomes hard to stop – which is, all things considered, a pretty good problem to have. Before we knew it, we had been chatting for over an hour, on topics ranging from the expected (Gitlitz’s musical process, influences, background, experience) to the unexpected (the untapped musical market of Jewish Floridians, the importance of finger-length for newborns, venues that don’t exist, and computers that can’t tell trombones and electric guitars apart) to shocking bombshell confessions (Gitlitz goes on the record once and for all with her true feelings about artificial intelligence, only in this exclusive interview!)
All in all, if you’re someone who likes to brag about knowing things before they were popular, this interview is a must-read – get in on the ground floor of the Lilly Gitlitz hype while you still can! From indie to pop, singing to songwriting, piano to guitar, performing to producing, film scoring to poem writing, you name it – Gitlitz does it all.
Due to the length of the conversation and the breadth of topics covered, the interview has been split into various thematic sections for ease of reading.
“Molasses” and Growing Up in Florida
CASEY: So, first things first, you have an upcoming single coming out on the 7th – “Molasses” – which is obviously very, very exciting! I saw something on your Instagram about how the song relates to your experience with your home state of Florida, which I, as a Florida girl myself, absolutely love. There are not many of us Florida girlies here at Wesleyan!
LILLY: No, there are not! I grew up in very south Florida, a city called Hollywood between Miami and Ft. Lauderdale. It’s very tropical. I grew up walking distance from the beach and that was a big part of my childhood.
C: That’s so nice, ugh. I am not from that part of Florida.
L: You’re from north-north Florida, aren’t you? It’s like two different states. Cannot equate experiences at all. I had never seen a season before coming to Wesleyan! I had visited cousins in Chicago in the winter once, but it was such a novelty to me. Ecologically, it was such an interesting transition because I had never felt any cycle of renewal in my life. Everything had always been so stagnant … and I feel like that’s kinda the LA vibe too.
MAISIE: Yeah, I’m from LA, so I understand!
L: Like, ‘paradise all the time!’ But at the same time when there’s no change, it kinda feels like there’s no change within. Home is a very sacred place for me … I feel so connected to the ecosystem there, but if I’m there for a little too long it’ll start to pull me down because it is so unmoving. That kind of connects to what “Molasses” is about. I wrote it in my sophomore year, thinking about what it would be like to come home again after a crazy Covid year. My family had moved houses in the interim, from my childhood home to somewhere new. I was envisioning coming back and readjusting to a new place, thinking about how home was going to manifest in new physical bounds. And was pondering feeling really just tugged down by that ecosystem and by the vibes of our home state sometimes. One of the lyrics in “Molasses” is:
I’ll cover my eyes with dark glasses
Lift up my feet, but they’re stuck in molasses
The sweetness of Florida, the stickiness, the warmth, is also what makes it really heavy sometimes, because there’s no reprieve from that.
C: I really love that. It’s this kind of sense of, like, without having the cold and the seasons and whatever, you can’t really appreciate the actual warmth – like, it doesn’t feel special or ‘like paradise’ or anything, it’s just kind of all there is.
First Musical Experiences, The Blessing of Long Fingers, and Holiday Albums for Florida Jews
C: At what point in your life did you get into music? What’s your music origin story, so to speak?
L: Well, it started many many moons ago in 2001. When I was six months old, a distant relative — my great aunt’s second husband’s sister … her name was Pearl Fisk — was terminally ill. She looked at me as a baby and was like, Oh my god, she has really long fingers. I have a feeling she’ll be a pianist. I’m gonna leave my piano to her in my will.
M: Oh my god!
L: Obviously she had much closer relatives in her life. It was absurd to think that she’d leave it to a little baby—
C: Because the baby had long fingers!
M: That’s, like, something out of a fairytale.
C: Seriously.
L: It was the biggest blessing and biggest gift that I’ve ever received. I don’t know if we would’ve had [a piano] otherwise. There are photos of me, really little, reaching up to the keys before I could actually play. Then I started taking formal lessons when I was five or six and did that up until thirteen. I didn’t love reading music or, y’know, playing other peoples’ pieces—
M: As someone who took piano lessons and quit, I think that’s the universal experience.
C: As a third person who has taken piano lessons and quit, I can confirm.
L: Yeah, I was always more interested in making stuff up. For Chanukah, when I was eight, my parents bought me a mic and I connected it to Garageband on my home computer, so there are songs then like:
Rosh Hashanah
It is sooooo much fun-ah
C: You gotta do a holiday album one time.
L: The world deserves more Jewish holiday songs!
M: A whole Jewish holiday album would be incredible.
C: We need an album for Florida Jews.
L: I like to think that the music I make is for the Florida Jews, in this life.
C: I feel represented by it.
L: I hope! But yeah! Those are the true origins. I think I wrote my first formal song when I was like ten. Tried to record a really bad album in high school that I did not release on streaming platforms but made a Google Drive folder of and sent people the link. It’s actually so crazy bad.
C: What makes it bad? Like, looking back at it?
L: Uh… it’s endearing! When I listen to it, I think, oh my god, this is what I was thinking about when I was like fifteen. I had no idea how to use recording technology or produce, but I really tried, so everything sounds plasticky and out-of-time. But it’s sweet to have a record of.
C: Would you ever re-record any of them? Like, are there any songs on there you would still want to do something with in the future?
L: Oh, that’s a sweet question. I don’t know. I’m happy to have those songs be… a moment in time, to be quite honest.
Coming to Wesleyan, Academics, the Music Scene, Film Scoring, and More
C: So, moving past that ‘moment in time,’ next came college, Wesleyan, and everything; how did you come to Wesleyan from Florida, anyways?
L: They do not do a lot of marketing of liberal arts schools back home.
C: No, they do not!
L: I had an uncle who went to Wes. He grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. Being from Florida is a very “UF FSU rah-rah!” culture, and I couldn’t really see myself in that place.
C: I was the same way – I didn’t even apply to, like, a single school in the south. But why Wes in particular for you?
L: I knew that I wanted music to be a part of my life, but I didn’t want to go to a conservatory because that is often isolated from other forms of academia. I knew that I also wanted to be an English major … or keep a robust curriculum in my life. I love that these things don’t feel inherently separate. In my studies at Wes, music and everything-else have always felt intertwined. Coming to Wes was such a dream because I stepped foot on campus and, you know, you go to an open mic and everyone is cheering you on and all of a sudden you have like 15 new friends. Such a freshman year experience for me was coming to school and feeling like the whole campus was my new best friend. I went to this open mic called Acoustic Bedroom which was run by a senior named Clara Babbott-Ward (‘20) who I still keep in touch with. They hosted these events pretty regularly, and the community would gather and share poetry and silly jingles and original songs. I got really sick of lugging my keyboard places, so I decided to teach myself guitar because it was portable, and guitar is still a pretty early journey for me.
M: You kind of touched on this, but how has, like, your time at Wesleyan kind of facilitated or impacted, influenced, the music that you’ve made, whether that’s through opportunities or just the general experience of being here?
L: Before Wes, I wasn’t playing music in bands or group settings. When I got to college, I really itched for that, and everyone around me was so exquisitely talented. I performed my songs alone until around junior year when I got a bunch of friends together and was like, hey wanna play these gigs with me? And that changed everything, honestly. The ability to parse out new melodic ideas with a group and hear that represented on so many different instruments was so cool. But also just being in a community and being surrounded by friends who are so supportive of my art and actively, like, want to be a part of it—I’m astounded every day. I’ve been in rehearsals for my music capstone performance right now with my band, and I just kind of have an existentially beautiful moment every time. I’m like oh my god, these people are in here playing songs that I wrote, and they care about it and that is so phenomenal, and I’m so happy to hear this in your voice, and I’m so happy to hear what you think this should sound like on bass – it’s just been sick. Some of my closest friends have come out of playing music. And it’s definitely changed my songwriting too. Before playing music with other instrumentalists, I would try to have a song be complete between me and the piano. Now I think a bit more expansively … What could this trombone part sound like? Or, y’know, what could this hand percussion be, with, like, tambourines, shakers? What would it sound like with four part harmonies? That just feels very possible.
C: Continuing down this Wesleyan thread, you’re a Music and English Major, right? Are there any classes, music or otherwise, that have been impactful in your music education or songwriting or musical experience? Has there been anything in the Wesleyan education that you feel like has been really formative?
L: Absolutely. The Music major is very anthropological—conversations about ethnography and how music is tied to place and read through lenses of ethnicity and race and gender. We talk a lot about music—we also make music, but so much of the Wesleyan Music major is highly conceptual. The program is fragmented into 3 required parts. There are theory credits, but Wesleyan really tries to decenter Western or European musical narratives, so instead of just a theory credit meaning 18th century classical theory, it can be the theory of jazz improvisation. I’ve taken South Indian voice, and Javanese Gamelan, and African Popular Music, and I am really grateful to be a learner of so many different musical traditions.
C: Yeah – most piano teachers do not teach, like, African Pop music, sadly.
L: Totally. I took this class last semester about alternate forms of music notation. It really centered experimental composers like John Cage and Pauline Oliveros, these thinkers who intertwine visual art and performance art and philosophy and embodiment and music. They think of music as a lived, constant practice, and composition as collaborative between the composer and the audience. I think that shaped a lot of the way that I think too. And I’m also so grateful for Professor Jay Hoggard who—I had one class with him—but he’s been a mentor to me since sophomore year, and he’s now my capstone advisor. We zoom every other Wednesday. It’s also a really tiny major. The English major is huge. The music major is teeny – there are like 16 or 18 majors in my year, so I joke that everyone who’s a music major in my year is either bandmates, housemates, dating, or best friends, which is actually, genuinely pretty true.
C: It’s like a little community.
L: Yeah, we’re very involved in each other’s lives and creative lives. The major’s definitely created a lot of community. In my freshman year, a lot of seniors were incredibly generous to me in a musical way. There’s such a difference between being a freshman and a senior, and, I don’t know, I didn’t expect to come to school and have all these people who were deeply entrenched in the Wesleyan community to be like, do you want to do this thing? The world is open to you. And I’m very grateful for those upperclassmen who did that for me. My freshman year, I went to the club fair, went up to Cardinal Pictures, and this senior was running the booth. And I was like Hey, I’m Lilly. I, like, write songs and stuff, and I would love to score a film. Where do I put my name down? She’s like, do you want to score my senior thesis? And I was like, whoa, yes, are you kidding me?! She put full faith in me. She wrote this beautiful queer love story and asked for a jazzy piano score.
C: You did not go to the club fair expecting that.
L: Not at all. I just wanted to jot my name down if anybody ever needed it! But, yeah, that’s been a big part of my musical experience at Wesleyan too – I’ve scored films since freshman year. I’ve been able to do one every year, and this year I scored my pal Lalith’s film. It was a campy, eerie, horror-comedy about someone who goes to a purgatorial hotel where they get to choose what animal they get to be reincarnated into.
C: So you get to do an eerie, campy, spooky kind of soundtrack?
L: It was so fun, yeah, he liked the band Goblin. Goblin does horror scores—tinny, organ-based, suspenseful instrumental songs, so I did a lot of that. I also put a lot of Gamelan in there, actually, because percussion is so suspenseful. It’s fun to put music to visual media, and it’s fun to collaborate with someone who is in a completely different art form. That’s been pretty hype. I’m really grateful for that at Wes, and I would totes do that in the future.
M: What does that process look like?
L: I do it in Logic, primarily. There are some film composers who write for a live orchestra and record the whole orchestra, which is exquisite, shout out to people who are doing that because that’s a crazy process. But I use a lot of MIDI instruments—pre-made electronic sounds. You can just drag a movie or a video in it and make music synced to that time, so I play keyboard with whatever sound I want along to a scene, and it’s all synced up.
C: But that’s such a cool way to get such an opposite experience with music, doing stuff that you so normally would not do. That’s sick. Oh, and how is being an English major? What’s that been like? How has that impacted your songwriting, I guess, in particular?
L: Yeah! Being an English major has also been super impactful. I’ve taken a ton of creative writing courses, which have definitely shaped my ideas of narrative and lyricism and story arc and framing. And those things are not separate from music at all. I’m in this amazing course right now, a queer fiction course, and we talked about how traditional story structure is centered around the male orgasm. And if we think of the climax as the peak [of a story], and then the come down [denouement], it’s centered around the penis-having body. And I feel like beyond the actual ‘gasming of it, narratives told by non-men, or about non-men, or queer narratives, particularly, tend to break traditional form. Traditional form feels so masculine sometimes. And I’ve been trying to challenge myself to not just stick to verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/chorus, and have written some songs that feel kind of formless or meandering and don’t necessarily hold true to what we’re told to do.
The Musical Process: Writing, Composing, Recording, Producing
C: In a lot of your music there’s all this brass and instrumentation, which is so cool. How does that expansive kind of instrumentation come about? How do you get there from just you and the piano, how do you envision and compose that?
L: Literally props to my friend Ari Westreich (‘22), one of my favorite people on this earth. They played trombone on “House to Myself” which I released last February, and also on “Molasses,” which is coming out. It’s literally all him. I would only tell them, like, Hey, can you mirror the riff that my voice is doing at this part, but I have so much trust in him and in his mind, that he would take it from there and just be like Alright, here it is! I'm like Perfect! every time. Working with other instrumentalists is so much of their musical imagination.
C: Backing up to when you’re actually writing the songs, like in their earliest stages – what’s your songwriting process? Do you, like, have to sit yourself down and make yourself write, or does it just kind of… come out when it comes out?
L: It’s different every time. My favorite moments are when it all pours out really quickly and I kind of look back like Oh my god, did I write that? And I feel like during that, the instrumentation, chords, melody line, lyrics—they all kind of come out in one burst. But there are also times when I have lyrical ideas or melodic ideas way before the other part comes. I feel like songwriting ideas always strike in the most trying of scenarios, whether I’m in the car and, like, can’t hit record while driving, or I’m in the middle of class and I have to sneak away to the bathroom with my phone to hum into my voice memos. It is pretty sporadic. I’ve always heard writers say something along the lines of you can’t wait for the muse, you have to sit down and enact that yourself, and that’s never fully worked for me. I need to get better at having a more disciplined songwriting process because it is really, like, when it hits me, it hits me, but if I sit down and try to force it, I’ll probably come up with something that feels a little contrived to me.
M: So going off that, what is it like to produce and arrange your own music, to release it – all the steps that come after songwriting?
L: It’s a blast, and it’s also kind of a new learning process too!
C: Oh, what do you use?
L: I use Logic and I have a mic that’s called the AKG P220. It’s honestly such a blast and it requires so much time. For each song that I’ve released at this point, it was probably a 3-6 month recording process—also because I’m busy and just can’t record all the time. But I also just get very, like, perfectionist, especially about harmonies. I’ll sit down and devote two hours to being like “aaaaahhh” [softly singing one note]. And it’s honestly some of my favorite times! It feels really sacred to be able to carve out such a large amount of time for such a small amount of melody. I’m grateful to technology for making [collaboration] pretty seamless. My friend Ari, who played trombone on “Molasses”, sent me tracks from Spain on a borrowed mic.
C: Oh, wow. And I’m sure finding times and places to record must be kind of hard even when it’s just you – you are on a college campus living in a house with friends, after all. So do you record in the music rooms, is it just something you do in your house? How do you carve out that space for yourself on a busy campus?
L: It’s totally just in my room, no sound-proofing or anything like that, so I just have to be conscious of what’s happening around me. Sometimes I’ll talk to my very loving housemates and be like, okay, I’m gonna be recording for the next hour, can we try to keep the noise down? And I’ll do that with my parents at home too in Florida, they’re very respectful and supportive. I think there’s just so much safety and comfort making music like two feet from my bed and in a space that I’ve decorated.
C: Yeah, like it’s a personal process, so it feels right to do it in a personal space,
L: Yeah, exactly! There are entire genres named after that, after all—bedroom pop! …Well, that’s the main one, but—
C: There are probably others. There are some real strange genres out there with, like, hyper-specific names.
L: Oh, yeah, very specific names. I’m learning about Klezmer Punk.
Musical Influences, Inspirations, and Connections
C: Are there any female musicians in particular you want to shout out – any artists who’ve just really inspired you and pushed you forwards into making music of your own?
L: Hmmm… I need to call from my Spotify, honestly! [pulls out her phone and scrolls through Spotify] Oh, Joni Mitchell, always. I love her. And Carole King too – the true classic baddies. I also love pure pop. Lady Gaga. I love dance music, I love any music I can move to. Let’s see, let’s see… Corinne Bailey Rae, Remi Wolf, Amy Winehouse, PinkPantheress, Sammy Rae and the Friends, No Doubt… Oh! Regina Spektor is a huge one—
C: *gasps* Oh my god, I love her so much. I’ve been obsessively listening to Soviet Kitsch over and over again this past month, I don’t even know why, she just has that holding power over you.
L: Ugh, I love her. The things that she can do just between her and a piano… it’s insane. Have you seen her Tiny Desk Concert?
C: No, I haven’t!
L: It’s just her with a beautiful upright piano and she’s just, like, whispering at times then absolutely belting at times, and it’s so raw.
C: Well, whether it’s Regina Spektor or your own music, is there anything that draws you to particular songs – is it the lyrics, is it a feeling, rawness? What is it in music for you that you kind of look for, either in other songs or to create in your own?
L: I feel like… the moment when you’re listening to something and you have, like, a gut feeling because of a harmony or a chord. It’s a somatic experience.
C: Like, visceral.
L: Yeah! I feel like the two vibes of songs I find myself listening to are music I can really really move to, or music that will absolutely emotionally devastate me.
C: So… music that you can move to and music that moves you?
L: Woah!
C: I was proud of that one.
L: But yeah, that gut sensation is the common thread. It’ll hit me somewhere and scratch this emotional or physical itch. I listen to a lot of Jewish music—I’m a proud member of the Wesleyan Mazel Tones, I grew up in temple, and nigunim (Jewish wordless melodies) and sweeping harmonies are so powerful to me. It’s something I try to incorporate into my music even if there aren’t direct influences from Jewish melody.
C: So, obviously there’s been like cultural influence from like Judaism and Florida and all of that in your music. What else kind of like – I don’t know – do you feel like has also kind of wormed its way in there? ‘Cause that’s always how art works, I guess; you always find parts of yourself that end up inside of it that even you might not expect.
L: It feels very therapeutic for me. Sometimes I’ll write a song and I’ll be like Oh my god, that was what I was feeling? I’m really glad I got that out. And that’s crazy that I said that. I also tend to exaggerate a lot in my lyrics. I have a lyric in one of my songs, “Better Things,” that’s like I’ll sever you from me as if you aren’t an extension. I’m like, I’ve never felt that in my life. Was I feeling that? What’s happening right now?
C: Obviously music plays such a huge role in your life, but how does it play a role in your relationships? Not just romantic – although your boyfriend is also a musician too, right? – but really any relationships, anything. Does that love for music bring you together with people?
L: Oh my god, so much. The people I make music with are some of my best friends. My bestie, Audrey Mills (‘23), and I will be at any large party on a Saturday night and be, like, harmonizing in each other’s ears as a joke. It’s this unparalleled form of communication and connection. And my boyfriend, Hudson, is also a pianist. It's so special to share playing an instrument and have a piano four-hands moment. I’ve also been lucky enough to sing and learn a lot of friends’ original songs while being here, especially Audrey and my friend Max Murgio (‘23). They’re a duo called Noisebaby, and I've gotten to sing and play with them. And, again, it’s like learning the inner-workings of someone’s brain. You know their art, you know the way that they think. It’s just a whole other level of knowing them.
Playing Shows: from Opening for Sammy Rae to the Bowery Electric
C: You’ve had a lot of really cool experiences working with other musicians, both at Wes and beyond – I remember you opened for Sammy Rae when her band played here last year! You killed it, seriously. I didn’t know Sammy Rae prior to her show on campus but you definitely did, right?
L: Oh, yes, yes, yes.
C: So what was that experience like, getting to do that sort of performance, especially given you were opening for an artist so important to you?
L: That was such a crazy full-circle moment. Halfway through my freshman year, I was having a real sad day, and my friend was like hey, I just discovered this song called “The Feeling” by Sammy Rae. I probably played that song 500 times that year. I was so inspired by her, so in awe of her. She really marked a lot of high points in my college experience. There was this saga, because she was going to come to campus my freshman year in April, but the pandemic happened. So we had a Zoom call with her, organized by a lot of Wesleyan Jews. All the Wesleyan Jews wanted to hang out with her. On the day the concert was supposed to happen, we were all, you know, in our separate homes in our separate states, because the school year had been shut down, so we were like ‘okay, let’s all Zoom and have a Sammy Rae dance party.’ And someone contacted her and was like ‘can you come on this Zoom right now?’ And she popped up and totally surprised us. People were crying. It was crazy.
C: Oh my god! That’s so sweet.
L: Then two years later, some friends asked her to come again and it finally happened. I’d heard that another friend was opening for her, and I was in a rehearsal with some of the people who were arranging things, and I was like, ...any chance there’s another spot to open? And they were like, yeah! It honestly felt so easy—sometimes all you have to do is ask for an opportunity and then it’ll come.. But yeah, that day was a movie. I think I blacked out for all of it.
C: Fugue state.
L: Yeah, literally. And it felt formative for a lot of my friendships and relationships. Such a whirlwind day! There were so many emotions. We were in the presence of someone so inspiring, like, how do we even act?!
C: Did you get to talk to her?
L: I actually did, yeah! And I got to talk to the bassist of the band, who is also from South Florida, and he was like wait I heard your song about South Florida and I really connected with it and that made me extra happy.
C: That’s so cool. Like, having him say that he connected to your song? That’s insane. And you’ve also performed off-campus too, right? I think I saw that you and Annabel Asher did a show at The Bowery Electric in New York City this past fall – what was it like, performing in a venue like that?
L: It ended up just being me in a room with like 12 of my close Wesleyan friends and performing with some of the same people that I would perform with at Wesleyan, which was special. But I’m excited to understand what it would feel like to perform in an entirely new place or space if that’s something that happens in my life.
C: I’m sure it will.
L: It was pretty crazy. I also had heard of the Bowery Electric, so it was a pretty trippy experience to play there.
C: That's like an actual place. It’s not like… I don’t know… I don’t actually know an example of a place that isn’t an actual place.
L: Joe Schmo's Club.
C: Yeah, it’s not Joe Schmo’s Club, it’s the Bowery Electric!
“Genre,” Being a Woman in the Music Scene, and Hatred of A.I.
C: Alright, I have to ask the most hated question ever: how would you classify your music? Or does that question just make you want to, like, die?
L: Eeeueeghh! I’ve never known how to answer that.
C: Oh, I know, it’s a terrible question.
L: No, I mean, I actually do have thoughts – because I’ve always turned to the label singer-songwriter but that’s more of an action than a genre. I do sing and I do songwrite, but singer-songwriter is one of the most gendered terms. I mean, you would never call Bob Dylan a singer-songwriter, you’d call him a folk or Americana artist. Meanwhile, you’d call Joni Mitchell or Carole King—who are doing the same thing in the same era—singer-songwriters.
C: That’s actually so interesting; I don’t think I’d really thought about that before, but that’s seriously so true.
L: I think that people somehow associate it with…a lack of seriousness or depth.
C: God, I mean, today too – people call Taylor Swift a singer-songwriter, but I’ve never seen that term used for, like, Harry Styles or whomever.
L: No, he’s a pop artist! So, yeah, part of me really wants to stray away and say, “I make…” agh. I don’t know! I could never label it! At the same time, I want to make it the most powerful label. Not that I have the power to do that, but I don’t know.
C: I think this topic of gender is so interesting and important when it comes to focusing on women in the music industry or even just women who make music at all, because it’s unfortunately just such a gendered culture. In your experience, as a female ‘singer-songwriter,’ have there been complications – or also, like, unexpected blessings too – from being a woman in the music scene, both at Wesleyan and in the world at large? Because, yeah, it definitely is a very particular environment, a very gendered environment, so from the song-writing or creating/producing process to performing or anything else, what has your experience been?
L: I’ve honestly been faced with so many assumptions that, on tracks I make, people are doing things for me. Like, men are playing all of the instruments for me, men are doing the recording for me. I mixed and mastered “Molasses” myself because I felt adamant about not relying on somebody else to do it, and honestly, I don’t know very many non-men in the audio-engineering world. I feared that if I wasn’t able to do it myself, I’d have to turn to a guy for it, and then someone would be like oh, Lilly wrote this song, but all the technical things were done by this guy. While it was a pretty awesome learning process to be able to do that myself, that kind of mindset and those assumptions have definitely been a challenge. But there have also been so many beauties! I mean, in a way some of the music I write does feel very feminine, in the sense that it’s ruminatory and emotive and narrative. And I can see Spotify stats of, like, the gender of people who listen to it. It is like 65-70% non-men, which makes me really happy. There’s just nothing more powerful than a female musician. No matter how delicate or not delicate, it’s the most beautiful thing.
C: Could not agree more, seriously.
L: And I think, back to your genre question, I guess if I was not defining myself as a singer-songwriter, it would be somewhere in between folk and pop and rock. But who even knows. Genre is BS.
C: Genre is BS.
L: And it doesn’t really matter to me. It matters to some people, but it doesn’t really matter to me.
C: Especially these days when there’s so many that they just lose all meaning. Like, what is “escape room?”
L: I don’t know, dude.
C: There’s so many genres that just don’t mean– we’re just so desperate to categorize things, which is so strange!
L: Literally! I’m so over it! Like everything is everything and nothing is nothing, everyone shut up. I read this article that told me to run my song through a new AI music analyzer that would tell me what genre it is.
C: That’s terrifying.
L: It will analyze melodic transients and give mood indicators too. Like, at minute 2:15 it said it was “chill,” but at minute 2:47 it was “sad.”
C: Wait, what is this?!
L: Ugh, I don’t remember the name. But I ran “Molasses” through it and it was just wrong, it was so wrong.
[all laughing]
This is actually me coming out as hating AI. On the record.
C: On the record, hating AI. Especially with music, like, that takes all the soul out of it.
L: It takes the soul out of it. They said Molasses was an electric guitar song…no. And they didn’t clock the brass! They called the main vibes chill and happy. And I was like this song is so sad, this song is literally so sad.
C: It’s so strange that that’s, like, a thing that exists.
L: I know, it was pretty nuts.
C: Well, it’s been so great to have talk to you, an upcoming artist who features electric guitar on her new–
L: And never any brass.
C: No brass.
M: And no vocals, either.
L: I don’t talk, even.
C: Yeah, it’s instrumental.
L: It’s instrumental, electric guitar music.
C: Thanks, AI.
L: Thanks, AI. Thank you so much for telling me who I am and what I do.
C: It’s like a terrible Myers-Briggs personality test for music.
L: For real. They’re like, you are a INFJ – instrumental, no-folk, Jewish person.
The Next Few Weeks: Single Release, Capstone Performance, and More
C: You obviously have “Molasses” coming out very soon, but is there anything else on your plate currently?
L: Oh, yeah! A recent grad, Jack Warnock (‘22), and I have been collaborating on a song called “Autumn Prayer.” We were just chatting about it recently, and it may come out in a few weeks!
C: Woah, oh my god! That’s exciting!
L: That was a super fun process, too. Jack sent me a beat of bass and hand percussion and was like, write whatever you want over this. I wrote a song over it and sent it back to him, and—he’s exquisitely talented—he added percussion and mirrored everything I did on the piano or on voice with guitar and ukulele. It’s cool to have that interplay. And then my capstone show is on April 15th.
C: Yes! What are you doing for the capstone show? Original songs?
L: Yeah, it’s a body of original songs. I set out to write a concept album around the themes of home and time and aging and memory. Then I realized that almost every song that I’ve ever written was already about those themes. I wrote a few more and a couple of instrumental pieces, and it’s all mashed up into this show of past and present, which will be kind of emotional. I’m performing some songs I wrote freshman year and songs that I wrote like 3 months ago.
C: It’s like a time capsule.
L: It is! There’s a song I wrote half-freshman year, and half-now.
M: Oh, that’s so incredible.
L: I’ve tentatively titled the show “Newcomer” because I wanted to release a full album in freshman year called “Newcomer” about coming to a situation with fresh eyes and feeling reborn in an environment, and I feel like that is cheesily how I felt coming to college. But, yeah, I never got to making that album. I decided to release singles instead. But now it feels very full circle to call it that.
C: Do you think it is an album, now that you’re officially performing it for your Capstone? Like, would you ever release it as one?
L: I can record it well enough I honestly would do it.
C: Also, Newcomer is just a good name for an album.
M: It’s a fantastic name.
L: It’s really sweet because my bestie, Audrey, released an album called “The Amateur” – plug! – and sometimes I think about how those album titles are similar thematically.
C: You should definitely release an album. I mean, obviously it would take a lot of work, but hey! The songs are already written.
L: Maybe, we’ll see! We’ll see how the recording comes out. It could be fun.
C: And so that’s April 15th?
L: Yeah. April 7th, “Molasses,” April 15th, capstone show.
C: Busy couple weeks ahead!
L: I know, I am freaking out!
C: It’s so exciting, though!
L: I’m involved in a bunch of other music majors’ capstones and theses, so it’s crazy crazy performance time. Everyone is so exquisitely talented, it’s mind blowing. But I’m really gearing up for running on adrenaline all the time.
Looking to the Future
C: Is there a particular direction that you’d like to go with your music, like not in terms of like [in a deep voice] ~success,~ but in terms of where you want the actual music to go?
L: Well it’s dissonant because I love to move to music, and I feel like sometimes I write songs that are…kinda chill. I really want to write more music that will make people dance around their houses and absolutely headbang.
C: It’s definitely hard to do when you’re more folk-y because it doesn’t feel like it’s in that same genre or that it should coexist, but it definitely can and does. Like I think Regina Spektor’s a really good example of someone who is not the traditional kind of–
L: Dance pop.
C: Yeah, but I totally dance around my room to her.
L: Totally, totally.
M: You’re a senior, so what are you hoping for next? Musically and life-wise, I guess.
C: Yeah, what are the next steps for Lilly Gitlitz?!
L: Oh my goodness, what a question.
M: Yeah, I would hate that question, so…
L: I purely and simply do not know yet. I’m in the job search for various types of jobs, some music related and some not—working for Jewish organizations, music-related jobs, jobs in editing or publishing. I’ve been thinking about what place music will hold in my life—if it is my 9-5 and if it’s not my 9-5—and both sound really lovely and really stressful in different ways. I think that if I worked a job that wasn’t musical, it would designate songwriting, releasing, and performing as a side hustle, which is okay but…music is so fully integrated into my life here that it would be a drastic shift.
C: Yeah, when something’s such a part of your identity it’s hard to feel like that isn’t then the primary thing you’d identify with.
L: Yeah. I do want to have a career in music in my life, and I also want to do many things. So I don’t know what the shape of that will look like. No matter what I do, though, I want to live a life surrounded by love and joy and collaboration. And have people that I love at not-too-far of a distance so we can create spontaneously. I want to continue to compose and release and perform actually indefinitely. I want to be an 85-year old who’s still croaking out songs so badly.
Listen to Lilly Gitlitz’s music on all streaming platforms.
