For those unaware, Lily Vakili is aa lifelong observer, chronicler, and creative force, who has spent decades gathering fragments of the world – memories, landscapes, voices, losses, joys – and transforming them into urgent, electric songs.

It was on her most recent solo tour, while driving through the continental US with one of her brothers (a former submariner) as roadie, that Vakili found the inspiration for what would ultimately become a new album and a new era for her artistry, signaled by a return to using her own name, Lily Vakili (rather than Vakili Band), for her musical explorations.

On her new album , Vakili offers her most intimate, collaborative, and expansive work yet: A collection shaped by lived experience, artistic risk, and restless curiosity. It’s music born not of image or pretense, but of will – a record that embraces improvisation, vulnerability, and the raw pleasure of creation.

The album’s title is both literal and metaphorical – a nod to the prehistoric inland sea that once covered the Great Plains, and to Vakili’s own understanding of life as layered, shifting, and filled with fossils of memory.

An overnight stop on tour led Vakili to the Sternberg Museum of Natural History in Hays, Kansas. Standing before the spectacular remnants of that ancient ocean, Vakili felt the weight and wonder of time collapse: “I understood something,” she reflects. “that I am the archivist, the archaeologist, of my own life.”

The album draws on that revelation, honoring what’s been unearthed, what’s been lost, and what’s still surfacing. As Vakili puts it, “Everything is fleeting, everything is here.”

1. Okoboji
2. Hold On They Say
3. I’ve Been Hiding
4. Maybe It’s All Over
5. Photograph
6. One Human Being
7. April Fools
8. Rocket
9. Tannersville
10. I’ve Been Hiding (Radio Edit)

On what is a brilliant cultivated, seamlessly crafted new recording, Lily opens on the rhythmically melodic Okoboji and then we get the easy going, summers breeze of Hold On They Say, the gentler, bluesy grit of I’ve Been Hiding, the veritably translucent Maybe It’s All Over and then we get brought forth the low slung, Americana-hued Photograph.
Along next are the all-embracing rhythms that flow within One Human Being which is itself backed by the atmospherically airy April Fools, the gorgeously Americana-Folk imbibed Rocket, the set rounding out on the guitar-fed rocker Tannersville, closing on a radio edit of I’ve Been Hiding.

Okoboji (Official Audio Video)

Lily Vakili @ Facebook