“Lily, painting the everyday with a voice transparently heartfelt and moving”

It took a while to click with where Lily’s song was taking me. There’s a timelessness about ‘Tomorrow’, as there is with many a love song. That’s part of the deal: the singer inhabits the lyric and breathes into it their own history of bliss and break-up so it works for them, and the listener, in a way distinct from any other performer who’d approach the same words.

‘Tomorrow’ is also a song about music, and musicians, or the particular kind of music that those we love bring to our lives. “… come tomorrow you’ll be here, I can feel you getting near …” At first listen it’s not one of writer Billie Reid’s strongest outings, until you appreciate the ways he’s weaving more or less universal experiences to swathe the listener in emotions that Lily delivers with wistful conviction.

And that click? It’s there in the musical arrangement and production from Rob Agostini and Chris Murphy. The song is swathed in the kind of textures that made Angelo Badalamenti’s groundbreaking score for ‘Twin Peaks’ a thing of eerie synthesised beauty, nodding to upright basses and orchestral sweep. The knowing ambience allows Lily’s song to fall into place with a kind of rightness.

Maybe a chirpier reference point would be ‘Pleasantville’, a classic movie from a few years back with a contemporary brother and sister magicked into a black and white sitcom from another age. The sister brings colour to the world they’re dropped into, allowing locals to experience music and art and love in ways that enliven them. And that right there is Lily. Painting the everyday with a voice transparently heartfelt and moving, never more so than in a sequence towards the end of the song when the instrumentation drops out and her multi-tracked vocals hang in the air, there and then gone like the last day of summer.

Charlie Reynolds