For her third album, Lily DeTaeye didn’t want to just release a set of songs that had little to do with one another. For the Iowa-raised, Brooklyn-based artist, it was time to make a thematically consistent record in the vein of the performers she grew up admiring.
The third LP, “Even With My Eyes Closed,” will be released Oct. 23. A new single, “All The Way Down,” is out today, and she’s announced a tour that will hit Mercury Lounge, with The Women’s National Hockey League, on Nov. 2.
“The [previous] albums have been just collections of songs that I’ve written from random moments in my life and were kind of thrown together in a piecemeal sort of way that didn’t allow for any cohesion or unifying theme,” she says. “That was identified after the album was already recorded.”
For the new record, her first since “Hive Mind” in 2023, she told her co-producer, Bryan Vanderpool at Golden Bear Studios in Des Moines: “I want to make a dream pop-inspired record, and I want to approach it like the artists that I admire seem to approach theirs, as a cohesive project.
“So the through lines of this are sort of nostalgia. It’s writing the music that I liked to listen to in my late teens and early 20s growing up in the Midwest suburbs with all of the fun stuff, all of the exciting moments of that, but also all of the kind of hard bittersweetness of that as well.”
I recently chatted with DeTaeye while she was at home in Iowa rehearsing with he band. Here are some highlights of our conversation.
Where did “All The Way Down” come from?
So “All The Way Down” is positioned near the top of the record. And this was inspired by a book. That’s like my other life, I work for a book publisher, so literature is like a large part of my life. It was inspired by a book originally, but when we started building it out sonically, it felt very much like a song that I would have pumped through my car driving home from college or like over summer break with all my windows down. It’s very high energy and it feels like a belting song in the way that I’m trying to think of some examples, but the lyrics are bitter.
There’s a track on the album called “Love You, Bye Babe,” which is a recording of a voice mail. Who is speaking?
So that’s my aunt. We lost her last year, unfortunately. Her name is Sharon, she was one of my biggest supporters, like from the time that I started. So putting out the record, I mean, it was kind of a twinkle in my eye. She knew I kind of wanted to do something and she was at every show that she could have been at. It felt like a good fit to be able to memorialize her. I mean, truly, I had this voicemail that I didn’t know what to do with. It was kind of like my last part of her. I didn’t know how to save it so that I would always be able to listen to it. And so as we’re talking about nostalgia and revisiting earlier times in your life, she is a large part of that for me. so it felt like a good segue into some of the more bitter nostalgic moments near the end of the record. And then also selfishly, it’s like a way that I know I’ll always be able to listen.
The songs are very atmospheric and sonically rich. How do you start a song and how does it end up sounding the way it does when we hear it on the album?
They all start just with me and one instrument, whether that be acoustic guitar or piano. And then for the pre-production for this record, it was a lot of me sitting in GarageBand on my laptop building out the harmonies. I was a choir kid growing up, so I love to stack the harmonies and use that as sort of an instrument. And then Bryan just has this incredible ear for building atmosphere and harmony, so then a lot of that just comes from playing in the studio together as well. And my favorite figure to throw out about this, because it’s kind of incredible for us, is we recorded the bulk of the record over the course of two and a half weeks in late 2025, early 2026, and we ended up putting in like 100 hours over the course of, wow, three weeks. So it was truly just a lot of like fucking around in the studio, which is exactly what I wanted. I wanted it to feel pretty organic and everything recorded one after the other and cohesive. And I think we did that and I couldn’t have done that without Bryan. He’s amazing.
What were some challenges or adjustments you dealt with when you moved from Iowa to New York?
I mean, I was prepared, I had a lot of friends that lived there before, past or present. I was told the pace of the city is different, but I don’t think you can truly understand that until you’re going to work there and going out. And I remember the first few months living there, I would get home from work and then needing to stop at like a grocery store on my way home and just getting home and truly feeling exhausted, right? Just becaus everything takes longer, and the social energy of just being in the proximity of so many people, it cannot be stated how you need to build up your stamina for that, right? So yeah, that was very shocking to me. And so now I feel like I’m in shape, I can do it, amd I don’t feel like I have to collapse on the floor.
What are some Midwestern traits you have that will never change?
I’m actually in the Midwest right now for band practice and stuff, and I am going to the Iowa State Fair like three times this week. So I love the Midwestern urge to celebrate anything and everything. I think I have that. I think I can be a little passive aggressive. I won’t lie, I think that dies hard. But ultimately I just think that people are genuinely very accommodating. At least the people that I grew up around. There’s a sense of community and genuine goodwill that you have towards other people. And I hope that I embody that.
Photo by Hannah Rosalie Wright
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