Laura Kerry
You never know exactly where you’ll find Lily Konigsberg. One moment, she’s playing frantic, deconstructed pop and punk music with her band Palberta, and another, she’s trading experimental jams with the jazz-inclined Horn Horse for a collaborative album. Now, Konigsberg has emerged from Upstate New York to join forces with Andrea Schiavelli on Good Time Now.
In two new tracks, “Good Time” and “New Old Age Home,” the two artists use very different voices to form a cohesive conversation. In the former track, Konigsberg presents a delicate chamber-pop song that is bright but has gloomy undertones. “I want to have a good time,” she repeats in an oft-used pop refrain, soon revealing the impetus behind this desire: “Now you’re gone ... I see faces of you all the time / And I begin to wonder / Why did you do that?” When it cuts out abruptly at the end, the question hangs.
In Schiavelli’s track—a sparse composition that manages to dwell at the intersection of Tears for Fears and Bruce Springsteen—the narrator also deals tangentially with loss. “No one wants to leave the party lonely / No one wants to leave the party early / Are you really gonna to leave without me?” the artist sings, a wistful series of observations and questions delivered in a flat but echoing tone. Like “Good Time,” “New Old Age Home” also ends on a piercing question: “Are you really gonna live forever?”
We don’t know what’s to come on the album or where she’ll end up next, but for now, find Konigsberg in a sad and pretty dialogue alongside Schiavelli on Good Time Now.