About

Genre-transcendent singer/songwriter, Lily Vakili, has had a wild, freewheeling life.  Raised in a large multi-cultural family in Honduras, Florida, Thailand, Puerto Rico, and Iowa, Lily left home at sixteen to join a theater troupe in Minneapolis.  She’s since worked as a dancer, actress, summer theater stage director, choreographer, corn detasseler, human rights researcher, waitress and lawyer. She became a mother of three beautiful children, one with significant disabilities.  She witnessed her mother’s decline into Alzheimer’s. She made a documentary, My Wild Heart, with her father’s sculpture and abiding love for her mother, his muse, as its subject.

Whatever the age, the role, the place, the job, the predicament, she marked the journey by writing poems.

And some poems became songs: Taking her mother’s advice “What are you waiting for? No one else will do it for you”, Lily launched her recording career as a solo artist with Lake City/Next 3 Exits (Produced by Bruce Hanson) and Meadowlands (Produced by James Mastro), before forming the five-member Vakili Band, with whom she has released three studio albums, Oh Alright (produced by Ray Ketchem), Walking Sideways (produced by David Amlen), and Honey (produced by Vakili herself), while touring up and down the East Coast.

Lily Vakili’s music has been described as “upp[ing] the emotional and political ante with … punchy tunes, delivered from a strong female perspective” (Relix Mag) and “an electric blend of Rock, Soul & Psychedelia…” (Under The Radar); and her voice as “compelling the way the first Patti Smith music gripped a listener, the Swans’ Jarboe enthralled or even Nico startled” (Americana Highways).

Her most recent project is the solo EP Tannersville, co-produced with Reed Turchi at Second Take Sound in NYC.   Called a “casual, pensive, yet intensely luxuriant showcase” by Americana Highways, the songs from Tannersville accompanied her on her West Coast debut tour in the fall of 2024 (opening for John Douglas of Trashcan Sinatras), and the title track Photograph, landed Lily as featured artist on WFUV’s NY Slice.

“Life beats you down, no doubt.  But if you have something to say…” she pauses, then continues, “my songs speak to people who know – whether it’s about desire, love, loss or defiance – they’ve been there in their own uniquely profound, but universal way. That’s the mystery, and the hope.”