Lily Vakili

Lily Vakili is an independent musician and an attorney who came back to songwriting in the middle of her life.

She came on the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast, for its Salty's Live Music series, to talk about Oceans of Kansas, which had landed on her doorstep in boxes the day before from a Minneapolis outfit called Copycats Media. The UPS driver carried them inside for her and the two of them ended up talking in Spanish, because he was born in the Dominican Republic. She was about to head out on an East Coast run that included Eddie's Attic in Atlanta.

The album came out of a stop her husband arranged. Driving from Denver into Kansas, she called to say they could not make Kansas City that night, and he told her to be in Hays before five o'clock and to go to the Sternberg Museum of Natural History. She and her brother had the place almost to themselves. The fossils there date from when Kansas was an ocean, 80 million years ago, and include flower like organisms called crinoids, which are also called lilies, and which had settled onto the sea floor together as families. She started writing about how layered a life is and how much of it people only find out late. Her daughter told her to put the title on the cover in her own handwriting. The lyrics are printed inside.

Music came back through her mother, who had Alzheimer's and is no longer living. Lily sat with her and said she was having a hard time and needed a creative life again. Her mother looked over and asked what she was waiting for, since nobody else would do it for her. Lily kept the day job anyway, because she has a house and kids and obligations. In 2024 she took a West Coast opening slot on her own, and her family worried about it enough that her eldest sister called to say so, so she asked one of her brothers, a former submariner, to come out as her roadie and merch guy. The margins were thin and they kept it close to the bone. On the East Coast run she was still working out whose couch she would be on.

She routes tours through places where she has family. That 2024 drive picked up cousins in Boise who had already called everyone over by the time she pulled in, and Charlotte on this run means seeing the nieces and nephews. Her band includes Drew, a bassist out of Decatur, along with Eric Burns and Joe on drums. She is the fifth of six children, and her musical education started with whatever her older brothers and sisters had on the shelf.