Following a common trajectory (ie. veering off course), this interviewee strayed from her instrument when she was in high school. It’s a pattern we witness at NCMC: teens are subject to many transformative opportunities and influences, and high school can make or break a musician. Thankfully for all of us, Lily navigated her way back to musicianship in college when she attended FreshGrass and found her fiddle once more! At that time, circa 2013, the FreshGrass festival offered workshops with their performing artists, and it seems Lily didn’t need much more persuasion; ten years later, with various “survival jobs” along the way, Lily is playing and teaching full-time! When she’s not leading a lesson, she leads her band across cities and hilltowns. I would say she’s “chasing stars,” but her professional pursuit deserves more credit than romantic phrases. She pulled into my office to give us a window into her life on the road.

Over the past decade, Lily Sexton has traversed the treacherous music industry as the frontwoman of Mamma’s Marmalade (now Splendid Torch), as a solo artist, and in ensembles of varying scales and lifetimes. “It’s a little scary to perform without someone to catch you,” she says. Mamma’s Marmalade currently consists of four musicians, and together they keep each other afloat. They’ve just wrapped their fourth studio album (as of yet untitled), so Lily’s work as the band’s booking manager has only begun. Tour is dictated by “anchors,” AKA “big money gigs”. Once they’ve dropped anchor, the band paddles out to smaller gigs in the vicinity – Lily credits bassist Josh Ballard for his “routing” skill. In this manner, Mamma’s Marmalade spreads over North America, or as far as their music can carry them.

While Lily’s success is clear to me, she laments that, like society at large, there is no middle class in the music industry: you’re either scraping the bucket, or obscenely wealthy. It’s a deeply predatory, exploitative system. To navigate this field, you need moral devices as trusty as your crew; Lily’s sextant is a precise instrument, fine-tuned to the blinking stars and sharp horizon. Two of the four songs she wrote for the upcoming Mama’s Marmalade album are critiques of the industry’s attempts to strip artists of their integrity. The other two songs are about love! Ah, songwriters.

Lily finds her inspiration clearest in the night, “all my good melodic ideas come when I’m about to fall asleep… [when I’m] uninhibited. You’re not judging yourself when you’re half-asleep.” However, she stresses that you don’t have to wait for inspiration to strike; you can just reach out and pluck it. When her composition students at Hartsbrook high school struggled to conjure ideas, she would offer them this image:

Imagine you’re in an orchard. (Apples, peaches, dragonfruit, mangoes, lemons, or whatever floats your boat.) Whatever the fruit, the branches are heavy with them. They’re ripe, and ample. You look down an aisle of these fruit trees, and begin walking. Then put out a hand and pick one. That’s your melody.

With this image, Lily found that she was able to take the labor of invention out of those first stages of composition. “Your ideas already exist, you just have to pick them.” Guiding her 4th/5th grade ensemble was not so simple, but Lily glowed with pride as she recounted the moments over the last couple years when the kids would synchronize into harmonious song. Their ears would immediately recognize the beautiful sound, and frustration would flutter into excitement!

I was curious who/what shaped Lily’s own musical sound as a kid. “When you’ve been seeped in music all your life, it’s hard to pull at the threads,” she explained. Since she and her brother had been part of the Suzuki program, and born into a musical family, they were exposed to a dense tapestry of influences. Looking back, Lily is really grateful for that variety, as opposed to having parents who thought, “you have to listen to Paul Simon to be great… or Mozart!” So to any parents reading, just play your kids plenty of music, and let them chart their own course ;)