Lillie Syracuse defies the stereotype. The singer-songwriter from Pumpkintown, SC, didn’t come to Nashville with the dream of becoming the next Nashville country star. In fact, when she moved to Nashville with her family, she was on a path to pursue a career in retail and sales.
“I actually did not come here to do music,” she says, “but when I started meeting musicians and people who started asking me to sing, I said, ‘I don’t know if I can sing but I’ll try, and fell into making country music. I had not really listened to country music until I moved to Nashville,” she says, “and I fell in love with it.”
Before long, she had a manager and was playing around town. Syracuse spent time learning music as a performer for the first time from other country music singers and performing all over Nashville, playing festivals, and bar gigs. “I worked with a lot of amazing people, all under the country music umbrella.”
In her first years, she worked in the realm of classic country. She met singer-songwriter Red Lane and was able to apprentice under him. Lane worked with Merle Haggard—toured with him, wrote songs with him and for him for years.
She found herself in the world of well-structured, perfect country music songs, classic style. Then, she says, she had a change of heart.
“When I sat down to write music, it didn’t come out country. I thought, ‘Oh no! Do I not fit in my own genre? Am I not a country music maker?’ It just wasn’t connecting.”
She remembers thinking, “This is really interesting. I want to write. I can write. It’s part of who I am. But the genre that I’ve been frolicking around in for a couple of years does not have anything to do with what’s coming out of me naturally. It turned out what’s really inside of me was more of this pop sparkly little bit of funk.”
At that point, she decided to take a hiatus and deconstruct everything that she had built as a country music singer.
“That meant rethinking my image, which was oriented toward country music. That meant how I approached being a performer in general, where I took my gigs and opportunities, who I played with. Everything changed. That took a little bit of time.”
That time rethinking her career paid off, and for the past three or more years, Lillie Syracuse has been drawing inspiration from the music she listened to growing up. While her genre might defy categorizing, it has been described as retro pop“with a mix of 70s soft rock, pop, and glittery bell-bottomed rock’n’soul.”
Syracuse says her influences growing up include Fleetwood Mac, Elton John, Marvin Gaye, the Allman Brothers and Aretha Franklin. “My dad raised me on Pink Floyd,” she adds. “Dolly Parton came into my life a little later. I didn’t really recognize her as country music. I just recognized her as Dolly.”
“My dad was very hell bent on my being some kind of musician,” Lillie says, and she always felt music was naturally inside her. Growing up, she fell in love with playing the piano. At fifteen or sixteen, she convinced her parents to let her stop taking lessons.
“In secret I would play my own stuff and let music come out of me. It felt so great to get out of the structure of having something to play in a certain way. I started realizing then that I had a knack for melodies—or maybe they had a knack for me. Maybe they found me.”
She also loved poetry, but says, “I don’t know if I really recognized it as song writing. I had poetry that I would marry with the melody, and obviously that’s what songwriting is. It wasn’t until I moved to Nashville that I sat down then with idea, ‘I’m going to write a song.’”
Syracuse first started out songwriting alone, which she has found herself doing again during the quarantine. She wanted to co-write, but was limited for a while because of a contractual relationship. Once she was free to collaborate, she says she was “like a wild woman,” eager to collaborate.
One answer to that question of what’s next for Lillie Syracuse is her upcoming album Coming Up Diamonds, her first studio record, produced by Mike Marsh, drummer for the Avett Brothers. Her guitarist and co-writer Larry O’Brien encouraged her to record, telling her he wanted to take songs she was writing and songs they were writing together to the studio. He made the introduction, inviting Marsh to hear their Fleetwood Mac tribute show at the Lipstick Lounge.
“My relationship with Mike Marsh started that night,” says Syracuse. “He was interested in my voice and wanted to hear my actual music and not just Fleetwood Mac covers.”
She had previously resisted encouragement from friends to consider a Kickstarter project, not yet sure she had material she was ready to ask others to support. However, she says, from her first conversation with Marsh, she knew she had something of value. “I felt I could plug my heart into that project and comfortably ask other people to do the same.“
Of the eight songs on the upcoming album, one was crafted by Marsh especially for this project. Syracuse had completed six of the other seven songs when they went to the studio. Another track on the album is a hybrid of two songs that Syracuse brought to the table that Marsh encouraged her to combine into one song.
Crediting Marsh’s talent, Syracuse said he brought every song to life with his arrangements, rhythmic experimentation, and production skills.
“Sugar Ride” was the first single from the project, followed by title release “Coming Up Diamonds,” which opens with a sound reminiscent of the Beatles’ period of influence by Ravi Shankar, moving quickly to strong percussion contributed by Marsh, who played the drums on every song on the album.
While Syracuse says she wasn’t too focused on a thematic development in this record, she felt the consistency comes from the sound itself. She says they were able to pull from different genres with instrumentation that gave the songs a congruent sound, which she calls “one of my favorite features of records.” She added, “There are two or three frilly love songs that have great rhythms and you can dance to them, but emotionally speaking, the other message of the record is self-discovery.” She also says the song she wrote for her wife “will make you cry because you can feel the love in that one.”
In addition to Marsh and O’Brien, she says she was joined on bass and backup vocals by Nicole Lea, and Maureen Murphy, along with John Davis on the sitar and Stephen Hanner on the harmonica.
For Lillie’s local shows, she’s also joined by vocalist Whitney Lane, who co-writes with Syracuse and O’Brien.
“We often do some shows together that are not focused around my music,” Lillie says. “We’ll do a conglomeration of music for the night. Larry, Nicole, Whitney and I all sing each other’s songs. It’s kind of like a writers’ round but with a full band.” She said one of their favorite shows together was an Aretha Franklin night; “I still am floating from that show. Whitney’s an ‘Aretha’ singer—she’s got pipes!”
Now with the recording of Coming Up Diamonds complete, Lillie Syracuse is not resting on her laurels. As a visit to her website shows, she surrounds herself with other “creatives.”
“Coming out of my hiatus,” she says, “I looked into myself to learn more about what was really in my heart. I was getting a lot of side jobs as a stylist and a model. I love to help people create images because images speak, in some cases almost as loudly and as purely as music does. That can be part of what I bring to the world. I didn’t want to leave anything out.”
Syracuse says she’s ready to get another project going, maybe a more thematic one this time. She still looks forward to promoting the tracks on the Coming Up Diamonds. She has some behind-the-scenes goals for this music in particular, but she is excited about getting back in the studio again.
For now she anticipates releasing perhaps one more single and then the album on September 25.
Once the quarantine ends, Lillie Syracuse says she looks forward to playing locally and with her friends in low-key settings, but right now, she says, “One of the most important things to share with people is just the connection that we’re all in this together and to share love and acceptance and grace during these times. I’m holding as much space as I can and sending out as much love as I can.”
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