Interview With True Lilith

Amidst the eclectic surf–punk decor of Pinky’s West Side Grill (where fans will be interested to know the cherubs featured on the Graveyard of Stars album cover reside), I sat down with True Lilith, a whimsical, gritty, alternative-rock band based in Charlotte. Over margaritas and waffle fries, I learned more about the band’s beginnings, inspirations, and just how much the group truly appreciates each other- both as musicians and fellow bandmates.

The self-described “psychedelic-dance- punk” band consists of vocalist and guitarist Chloe James, bassist Clay Case, keyboardist Anna Spurrier, and drummer Jared Stone. Despite being officially founded five years ago, True Lilith went through many different iterations before reaching its current embodiment of charming members.

“The band started in 2017, when I really wanted to just try to and start a band. I tried to write a couple of rifts and turn them into songs. In late 2018, we had our first little small show. Since then, the line-up has changed a lot.”, Chloe James, the lead vocalist and founder of True Lilith tells me.

Anna nods, “We’ve gone through a lot of different band members.”

Jared agrees: “The only member of that original group that’s still here is actually Chloe herself.”

“Chloe started the band, then those members left, and that cycle pretty much just kept on repeating.”, Anna informs me.

True Lilith in its current capacity, would come to be formed after many band members came and went. Jared Stone, the group’s drummer, would come to join the band in August of 2022, although he had actually met Chloe in 2019:

“I joined last August, but I’d been listening to (True Lilith) before I even joined the band. It’s actually a funny story- I created an AI bot account for Tinder because I was bored, and I met Chloe through Tinder. So, I asked her ‘How may I help you?’, and she responded with something like ‘Fix my life’ ”, Jarred recalls, as he and Chloe share a laugh across the table. “I got the link to her band’s page from her profile, and that’s how I found True Lilith. I saw them at the tail end of 2019, I think it was at the Skylark or Milestone. Then, I saw on their Instagram one day, they said ‘We need a drummer’. So, I text them. Then, a week later I'm in practice. I’m in the band.”, Jared recollects, grinning.

A bit later, Anna Spurrier, the band’s keyboardist, would come to join Chloe and Jared in True Lilith. “We were a three-piece, but we knew we wanted a synthesizer in the band.”, Chloe says.

“I joined in September 2022. Chloe and I went to high school together, I was a freshman when she was a senior. I played piano since I was five…It’s very different, I grew up playing solos, but now that I’m in a band, I have to play a part for a song, not the entire song. My dad’s been a musician my entire life, his full-time job is playing in a band. I never thought it would be me.”, says Spurrier.

Anna says of the current line-up of True Lilith’s members:“ So, it’s kind of a death of that first iteration (of True Lilith), and then there was a sort of rebirth with all of us. Everyone is so unified… giving our own opinions, we can all talk about our music and ideas together, and it’s never a competition.”

Indeed, one of the things that quickly shines through in talking with True Lilith is just how much appreciation the band members have for one another, and their collaborative process in making music together. Chloe says about making music as a band: “It’s a shared experience. It’s like a bus with four tires, each tire has to keep going for it to work. A band is a group effort, everyone has to be doing their part.”

“I think it’s cool, we’re all starting to become our own person and grow at the same time. Any time we write our stuff, we all contribute our own styles together to create something really cool.”, Anna agrees.

Clay nods from across the table. “It’s a family. I don’t look at this band as just a group of friends, I look at it as a family. I care about these three people as much as I care about my dad, my sister. It’s a sense of that mesh, we’re connecting in a way that a lot of people aren’t going to. With music, playing it and hearing it are two completely different things.”, Clay adds thoughtfully.

“We always have a pep talk before a show, normally Clay starts it.”, Chloe says, “Normally we just say: ‘play for each other.’ Either people get it, or they don’t.”

“That really helped me get over my stage fright.”, adds Chloe. “If I’m kind of nervous, I know they got me.”

Speaking to a group of musicians who were so passionate about the craft, I had to know, just who were True Lilith’s musical inspirations, and when did the members first get introduced to music?(It turns out, Guitar Hero truly did awaken something in today’s generation of young musicians.)

“So, guitar was first introduced to me when I was seven.”, Chloe tells me. “I wanted a Wii really bad for Christmas in 2007, y’know, to play like those girly Barbie video games they had back then. And Santa bought a Wii, but it was Guitar Hero.”, she smiles. “First I hated it, but then I fell in love with it. My dad’s really into Alice in Chains, Nirvana, he likes a lot of that kind of music. One of my biggest musical influences is definitely The Cure. We all love The Cure. When I was 14, I got really into bands like Sisters of Mercy, Bauhaus, Joy Division, and The Cure. Their music is all very heavily ingrained in me. That was the first kind of scene I really identified with.”, she says.

“Chloe and I both got that Wii in 2007 that had Guitar Hero 3.”, Jared adds. “The Guitar Hero Metallica- that was the one.” he laughs.

When it comes to the band’s musical influences- it seems the member’s fathers all played a part in some shape or form: “My dad listened to everything: country, metal, punk, bluegrass, anything. He was an all-encompassing kind of listener. From there, I was like yeah, I’d like to learn an instrument, but I just didn’t know where to start. So, I started playing in a middle school band when I was 12, and that was when I learned the drums. Two years later, I would get a guitar and a video game called Rocksmith, which was like Guitar Hero, except you’d play along on a real guitar. I tried to learn every song I could, that’s where the love comes from. I try to listen to whatever I can, whether it be grunge or country, or pop punk, I’m like my father in that sense. I think the one thing I don’t like is boring music. You can definitely tell the difference between a song that is actually doing something interesting on a track, and one that isn’t- whether that be pop or experimental- and I try to take all of that influence.”, says Jared.

“My dad’s a Jazz musician. He definitely influenced my style, very jazzy, very soulful- that’s what I grew up listening to the most. ”, explains Anna. “I remember being really little, and always being in a studio somewhere with him, or going to his gigs. I grew up listening to a lot of Stevie Wonder, Miles Davis, Bootsy Collins, James Brown, Ella Fitzgerald. I grew up on a’lot of rock and metal stuff too, like Metallica. There was an ACDC cd my dad would always bring in his car, the one that has TNT on it.”

“Oh, the first one”, adds Jared. Anna nods. “I play bass a bit too, I remember when I was nine years old, my dad took me to see this band called Esperanza Spalding, there was this bassist who was a girl, and after that I remember thinking, I want to play bass and be exactly like her. A’lot of the people my dad played music with, too, I saw them as like my godparents.”, Anna recalls.

Similarly to the rest of the band, Clay’s father would also play a big role in introducing him to music: “My dad actually taught me guitar, y'know: he had learned 'cause it gave him something to do back when he lived in the middle of Texas. We learned a’lot of Korn and Seether. When I was born, that record, Karma and Effect, had just come out, so I was cranking Remedy at like four. He taught me how to play Smells Like Teen Spirit, I figured it out, and then I started learning anything I could get my hands on: Green Day, Nirvana, Metallica. Fast forward after playing guitar consistently, the first thing I tried to learn on bass was Pulling Teeth by Green Day. I was super into pop-punk, so Blink-182 and Mark Hoppus were a big influence on me. I look at my bass like my guitar.”

After speaking to the band about their early inspirations, Chloe filled me in on the story behind the name True Lilith, the band’s first two albums, and their EP, Graveyard of Stars.

“I was looking for a cool name that wasn’t taken. At the time, I remember I was researching astrology terms, and there was this term- True Lilith, which is your subconscious psychology, like the dark aspects of yourself that you don’t want to acknowledge, so Lilith’s was Adam’s before Eve. It kind of embodies dark feminine power.”, says Chloe. “As for the first album, Wilt, it was the bare bones for me, I wrote it when I was 16. It was my first time writing songs.” The album, released in 2019, consists of four songs, Wilt, Melancholia, Velveteen Daydream, and Slow Burn. Chloe’s songwriting and musicality in the titular album definitely features the goth-synth, grunge sound associated with the band, being an enjoyable album and an impressive feat to undertake alone as a 16-year-old musician. The lead vocalist says of their inspiration for writing the album: “I was really depressed at the time, just trying to live up to people’s expectations, not being able to at the time. Feeling flat for it. There’s this judgment people receive when they’re dealing with depression and other mental health issues, and a lack of empathy. You should just embrace it when you’re dealing with it, not feel like you have to hide it and fit into society.”

True Lilith’s second album, Celestopia, released in 2022, features the songs The Tower, Dim The Lights, Calypso, Trash, and, my personal favorite off the album, Graveyard of Stars, a catchy, gothy track accompanied by haunting lines like “You attach yourself to me, You attach your soul to me”.

“That song is actually about a dead ghost girl, trying to steal the body of a living girl. If you look at the lyrics, you can sort of tell. It’s about someone who’s passed, who is sort of stuck in-between, and they haven’t moved on to whatever comes after. They’re desperately just wanting to crawl into someone’s body and relive all that they missed out on.”, Chloe says of the story behind the song.

If there’s something else True Lilith is passionate about in addition to writing and creating music, it’s playing that music live. Speaking with True Lilith, it’s more than apparent that being a part of the local music scene is very important to the band. Clay, the band’s bassist, recounts a crazy story about being pulled onstage at a Green Day concert to play for the crowd- and reconnects it back to the idea that, although it was a special experience, playing shows at local venues like The Milestone is irreplaceable, intimate, and special in ways large shows just aren’t:

“Green Day is my biggest inspiration for guitar- Mike Dirnt is a big name for bass, too. I was at a Green Day concert in Atlanta in 2021, and they were pulling people up on stage, I was the guy they pulled up. I played a solo, which I don’t even remember because the adrenaline hit, and Billy Joe was like ‘Do you know Basket Case?’, so I stayed on and played Basket Case with them, too.”, Clay recounts, “The thing though- the biggest thing I didn’t get from that- was a sense of community. Playing with True Lilith, it’s such a close-knit scene around here, and with Green Day, it was like: ‘Oh, there’s the first row’-and then just pitch black beyond that. There’s just not that intimacy. Like playing at The Milestone, that show where that dude in the mosh pushed off my bass- it was just crazy.”, Clay describes. “Milestone, I think that’s my favorite venue, maybe cause it’s the most bad-ass show I’ve ever played.”

“I think that’s mine too”, adds vocalist Chloe, “Just ‘cause it’s the heart of the punk scene in Charlotte. They’re very supportive of local bands, which is important because a lot of local bands are dying because many venues in Charlotte have a bad habit of booking mostly cover bands, often over local groups.”, she says.“As a band, it can be very tempting to replicate something that’s already been produced, or fit into this ‘cookie-cutter’ sound. But, as much as I’d like to sound like, say The Cure, that’s already been done before. The art is in adding and making something new, and that’s why its important to support local bands. These bands are out here working hard and writing their own music, and many times, they get pushed under these cover bands, which oftentimes, are just profiting off of nostalgia.”, postulates Chloe.

In addition to creating original music as a group and keeping the local scene alive, existing as a female-fronted band is another factor of importance for True Lilith.

“It means a lot to be a female-fronted band.”, says Chloe. “When we first played The Milestone in 2019, the scene was dead. And then after Covid, people realized they took it a bit for granted. We’ve got to play a’lot of festivals, like Fem Fest in Winston-Salem, which raises funds for domestic violence and sexual abuse victims. It definitely means a lot to me to be able to do something to help people, instead of just saying ‘we’re a fem-fronted band”, like to actually contribute.”

“I think it’s good that young women can see us play, they can see us, and be like, ‘Oh, I can do music too.”, adds Anna.

“I’ve experienced so much misogyny, being objectified by men in the scene. But I have to just say, ‘Fuck you, I’m gonna keep going.’“, says Chloe.

As I fire off some final questions to True Lilith in the now-emptying parking lot, I ask the group if they have any upcoming projects they’ve been working on, prompting an excited grin from Chloe: “We’re actually writing new stuff right now…I was actually gonna offer, do you want to hear the new track we’re working on?”

Do I want to hear the new track they’re working on? Hell Yes, I DO!

As I walk with the band through the chill breeze of the night to their car, Anna explains to me how excited she is about the band’s new song. “This song is really cool, because we all equally contributed. Like it's all equally our song. I pull up the synth part, and everyone adds their own piece.”

Chloe nods. ”It’s very different, because before, substantially, I was just coming up with the parts, and y’know, I wanted it to be more collaborative, and now, it finally is. Everyone writes down parts and suggestions.”

Chloe gets in her car, turning on the engine and opening the doors, “Here it is, we haven’t added vocals yet, but we recorded all of this today.” As she turns up the volume on the radio, I’m treated to an upbeat, creepy-cool track featuring a gothic synth and mysterious guitar riff in a minor key, reminiscent of a James Bond or Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge sort of sound. I love it, and I’m excited to hear how the song will hear once vocals are added to the mix. I excitedly thank True Lilith for giving me a sneak peek and letting me hear the track.

As we say our goodbyes in the parking lot, the band and I exchange hugs, and I thank True Lilith for their time and the interview, which I sincerely enjoyed. I tell the band I’m very much looking forward to their new EP, and whatever upcoming projects and shows they have next. We all smile as we part ways.

This is a band that is down-to-earth, talented, and passionate about creating and playing music. Each member brings something unique to the table, and in speaking with them, their appreciation and respect for each other as musicians clearly shines, as well as their creativity and eagerness to create art.

I highly recommend followers of the Charlotte alternative scene, as well as fans of the gothic, grunge, and riot-girl sound to check out Wilt and Celestopia, you won’t be disappointed (if you want to hear my favorites, check out Calypso, Graveyard of Stars, and Melancholia).

True Lilith will be playing this Sunday, March 19th at The Milestone. Be sure to go see the show to enjoy some great music, an energetic performance, and support a local Charlotte band. True Lilith’s new single, Urban Decay, drops April 21st, 2023.