An Interview with Lillies of David

by Reagan O’Brien

Getting to Know Lilies of David

Lilies of David, an alt-pop band from New Jersey, is taking a confident step forward with the release of their debut album later this month. The band, known for blending genres and narrative lyrics, invites listeners in for an experience that won’t disappoint. I sat down with the band’s vocalist and producer, Jeremy Rotolo, to profile what this release really means.

Tell me a little bit about the journey so far.

Dierdra and I – the other lead singer and songwriter in this project – started writing and making music together at the tail end of COVID. Before I get there, I should preface and start with a little bit of my background. I’m from the musical theater world, I’ve been acting for 10+ years. I was in New York City doing all of that, and I’ve always played guitar and I’ve always had a deep deep love for music.

I remember when I was like five, six years old listening to music and being in the back of my parents’ cars. I specifically remember listening to the song Cat’s in the Cradle [by Harry Chapin], I was crying in the backseat as a young kid because I understood the lyrics. It really moved me as a young person. I’ve always been really, really emotionally entangled with music and it’s always meant a lot, especially when going through a hard time in my life. So I’ve always played, and I didn’t really write music too much. I would mess around and my brother always told me when I was young, ‘You should take music seriously!’ and I was like, ‘Oh, I’m not good enough,’ because I really didn’t let myself even explore that option. I was always like, ‘I’m a better actor,’ so I didn’t take it seriously.

Then, Dierdra and I started hanging out and we found our love for songwriting together. I remember she showed me a cover of a song she sang, and I didn’t even know she liked music or anything. I told her, “Oh my gosh, you could sing.” And she was like, “Really? You think?” And I’m like, “Definitely.”

Then we just started playing. She knew I played, so we just started naturally doing stuff during COVID and coming out of COVID. A lot of these songs that are coming out on this album now were songs that we wrote back in 2021. That shows you how much time goes into a project. Maybe we didn’t take it seriously and finish it until, like, 2022 or 2023, I don’t know. These songs, the birth and start of these songs were in that COVID era. They’re all the same theme, very much relationships or introspection and all of that stuff. We started as a pop duo thing, and then Derek, our drummer, got involved, and then our bassist, Matt, who I actually met in a show that I was doing called Rock of Ages. He was playing bass in the band, and the band leaders told us that we should jam together. And so he came over, and he told me he also wrote music. I showed him some stuff [I wrote] and he was like “Woah, these are like, good!” And then we added our guitar player, Mike, who was good friends and in a band with Derek. So it all happened very organically.

Do you identify with the other musicians in New Jersey? Do you think a part of your work comes from east coast Jersey tradition?

It’s hard to say. I’m a fan of some of the musicians here, and I really appreciate some of the production stuff that they do on these albums, but I do feel a bit separated in a sense that there’s not really – at least in the Asbury, LBI, or Atlantic City scene – [anyone] doing the alternative pop kinda sound. There’s a big punk scene in Atlantic City, and Asbury has some punk, but it’s more artsy; lots of indie pop. LBI has a lot of surf rock, obviously. So we’re kinda doing our own thing, and I think that inspiration for us is just our love for music in the sense that, growing up, we listened to all types of genres.

From the Beatles – everyone says the Beatles, but it’s so true – and Fleetwood Mac; we’ve kinda got the Fleetwood Mac thing going on, but we just love their songs. Lindsay Buckham, Stevie Nicks, all these classic musicians, but also new musicians too. We really love Billie Eilish and Lana del Rey; and you can hear those elements in our production. Olivia Rodrigo, too, Sombr. We love all these. I’m somebody that’s always asking who’s on the cutting edge of the sound. I want to be a part of that somehow, in our small place, but bring that to a large scale. In a way, we’ve just started in 2025 releasing music, but our aspirations are large.

Your music fits into a couple of different niches. How would you describe the world that your new record is building?

Just to touch on that, I really struggle to put us in a genre. Sometimes it’s hard, especially with marketing, because Skin and Bones is kind of pop-rockish kinda song. Very Paramore, but also has Olivia Rodrigo elements, a bit of Sabrina Carpenter like in her song Taste, but that’s pop. And then you have 119, which is our new single, which is very Billie Eilish, very Lana del Rey, very alternative pop. Then you have my songs, you have something like Nightlight, which is straight Jonas Brothers pop. That’s a pop song. So I’ve always struggled to put us in a genre because we like to play all these different genres. I mean, we have a bossa nova track on the album. 

But the album does, as a whole, have a theme. You can tell they’re all Lilies songs. I think the album coming out is all relatable experiences. I start with melody and I always like things to be catchy, almost lullaby-like. I take that influence from the Beatles and Nirvana type thing. But the lyrics, I also like to put that meaningful stuff in there. A lot of it has to do with interpersonal relationships and introspection on where we are as humans in this society. Skin and Bones, for example, is almost making fun of dating culture. It’s also a kind of female empowerment anthem. If you listen to the lyrics, it’s kind of poking fun at like, ‘sold my soul just to be with somebody new.’ It’s really about how our dating culture is really messed up.

Were there any unexpected creative influences as you were putting the record together?

There’s always something unexpected when writing, and to be honest, the whole process is unexpected. It’s very much [combining] pieces of a puzzle you get influenced [by]. All of a sudden I hear a lyric, and then I hear some production stuff, and it comes to me in pieces. It’s all very unexpected, and that’s why I love it too. I never know where it’s going to go, and that keeps me interested in the process. But there are some songs like Tangled Up that I knew exactly how they were going to sound.

Do you struggle to balance the vulnerability of writing about personal experiences and trying to keep them ambiguous so they can be more relatable? Is there one thing that kinds everything together so you can balance the two?

I’m very careful to say what songs are exactly about because it hits everybody differently. You might interpret the song totally differently, and that’s valid to you. Once I put the song out, it’s no longer mine. It really isn’t. Whoever the audience is, it’s theirs, and they connect with it however they connect with it. I would never take that experience from people. That’s a part of the beauty, you know?

I could think that by writing a song I’m saying something, but somebody else interprets it totally different, and that’s beautiful.

Tell me about the recording environment. What was it like to put together your first record?

It was amazing. It’s been a really cool high to feel, especially as we’re finishing it up. It feels great. We recorded a lot of it in my home studio, and then I’ll bring it to our studio audio engineer Rob – he works in Dim Studio in Freehold, New Jersey – and the demo and the bones of it will go to him, even the vocals that we cut here sometimes make it. In Binky Bossanova, I tracked all of it here and then we brought it [to Rob] and mixed it. It’s really important to surround yourself with people that believe in the vision and understand it too.

The recording process has been great. Obviously there’s always struggles in terms of artistic integrity in the sense that we can track something three different ways and it just doesn’t work. I changed the key, changed a bunch of production stuff, and it just doesn’t feel right. The recording process is always so rewarding but so challenging at the same time. It’s a lot of work. But it’s funny, because you can take the same experience, for instance making an album, and someone else might react with stress where I react with excitement. I love it. I live for it. I thrive on it. It’s good for my body.

We have long nights. We have studio sessions that can go 14 hours at times. We’re there all night, and then I’ll go home and I’m listening to it on the car ride home, which is 45 minutes. Then I get home and I’m still listening to it. It really envelops your whole life, and you’re always thinking about it. But I love it, so that’s why I do it. I want to create the best possible product I can make at this specific time and space. I’m happy with how the album is going to turn out.

What were you listening to while mixing this album?

Obviously we’re listening to a lot of ourselves, which is good because I still like the songs afterward. The amount of times I’ve listened to it, it hasn’t changed my feelings, so that’s good. But I really liked the last Sabrina Carpenter album – not the most recent one, but the last one. I was also listening to my friend’s band called Dream Phone. They’re in the alt-pop world. I listened to the Jonas Brothers, obviously, because they just had their new album. There’s a lot of modern influence: Olivia Rodrigo, Billie Eilish.

Do you think this is an album of its time? Where does this set the timeline for Lilies?

There’s a big grunge influence of the ‘90s in a song called Season of the Witch on the album. There’s some of my pop vocals on there, but the instrumentation itself is very grunge. I feel all the great albums are timeless, and I really wanted to create something like that for this album in the sense that it pulls from all different times with a very modern production style. The production is very contemporary.

Are there any non-musical influences that shaped the record’s atmosphere or storytelling?

I’m a big fan of musical theater and movies themselves and their storytelling. Songs like 119 and Float – which will be on the album – they’re very orchestrated. A song like Diamonds and Ruins is very Daisy Jones and the Six-esque. I definitely pull from movies and culture all the time.

Are there any specific ways you anticipate performing these live?

There’s definitely continuity from our album sound to our live shows. We’re doing different harmonies and there’s definitely a presence of it being different, and we’re at a show now rather than just listening to the album. People could just listen to the album, right? So the live experience has to be different, unique, where you’re maintaining that continuity but still having the experience of performing a set. We’re playing with different arrangements during the live sets and extending certain songs and adding transitions. 

I used to not like playing live, which is ironic because I come from the musical theater world. It used to make me so nervous, but now I love it. It’s just a great experience to have the audience energy back and forth. We put on a fun show, I will say. I take a lot of that influence from musical theater to make the show an experience rather than just, we’re playing music and you’re listening. It’s an interactive experience. I think a lot of great artists do that, bring the personal things into the live show.

How do you market your personalities beyond music in order to reach new audiences?

It’s hard to get everyone in the same space at one time unless we’re rehearsing. So you don’t get to see all of our personalities at one time. We want to do more personality-based content, which we’re definitely going to be doing. When you are the content you produce, being yourself, capturing it, it’s great.

Dierdra is over in Atlantic City, I’m here in LBI, but we spend the most time together either talking or recording stuff. When we all get together to rehearse, it has to be very focused, so I’ll try to shoot some content during our rehearsals and stuff. It has its own issues. But Dierdra and I are definitely the face of the band. I’d love to feature the whole band at all times, it’s just everybody’s schedule is crazy. We’re not doing this full time. If we could get to the point where we’re focusing on just this, I think the ceiling is so high for this band.

When I say ‘art is a social act,’ what does that mean to you?

I think that the most important thing, no matter what you do, is to be honest and to be vulnerable. Honesty and vulnerability go hand in hand, and to be a human experiencing this life and journey with everybody else and never to forget that. I can only imagine how these big artists conceptualize having these huge fan bases. The ones I mentioned before, Sabrina Carpenter, Taylor Swift, the Jonas Brothers, I can tell they all love their fans. Anybody that listens to us, I want everybody to know that we genuinely love them and want to have a relationship with them. You have to treat everyone with love and think about the other person. Keeping that human experience and just being as honest as you can in the moment is so important. Within the band’s context, I never want to lose that communication. We all disagree on stuff, Dierdra and I mainly. We trust each other, and that’s why we’re able to disagree – we have such a strong foundation. I think the most loving thing you can do is disagree with someone and keep that foundation. The communication, openness, and honesty with the band as well as with the fans means you can work with anybody.