Organically Grown: Lylak’s Gideon Maki and Elizabeth Varnado

By David T. Miller
Contributing Writer

Over the past seven years, Lexington-based quartet Lylak has built a steady following, based on its thoughtful lyrics, close harmonies and crystalline guitar work, adding atmospheric violin, synthesizers and lap steel along the way.

Pre-pandemic, the band toured extensively, from Texas and Louisiana to North Carolina and numerous regional shows in Ohio, West Virginia and Louisville. More recently, it’s built a following regionally and in hometown shows at The Burl, Green Lantern and Manchester Music Hall. They’ve also been spotlighted on Red Barn Radio and were a featured act at Tahlsound. 

Lylak produced several singles and EPs before their breakout album, Inconvenient Truce, in 2022. They continue to release new music regularly, including a new single this month. 

The current lineup of the band (Gideon Maki on guitar and vocal, Elizabeth Varnado on violin and vocals, with Emily Woxihara on drums and vocals, Tim Lancaster on pedal steel and Chase Graham on bass) recently returned to The Burl on April 13. And when the full band isn’t available, Maki and Varnado play more intimate duo shows. 

UnderMain contributing writer David T. Miller caught up with Maki and Varnado to talk about their songwriting process, their new single and more. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

David: Let me start at the present and work my way back. You have a new single out.

Gideon: Yes, our new single is called “HRU,” as in “How Are You?” It came out on April 4 on all the streaming platforms and it'll be on the Hound 96.1 radio station here in town. We're really excited about it. It's a fun song. It's got an upbeat groove, a really moving synth line, and I love singing it with Elizabeth. I'm proud of our harmonies on it. I'm excited for folks to hear it.

Elizabeth: The singing came easy in the studio with that one. I'm pretty sure we got this in one or two takes. 

Gideon: For the last several years, we've worked with Tom Hnatow and Duane Lundy here in town. Duane’s done a lot of mixing, but when we track with Tom, we've started tracking the vocals together at the same time, and that's provided a fun dynamic, a bit more organic. Of course, we have a sound barrier separating us. But if one of us messes up, we have to do it again, so it creates a fun tension. I enjoy doing it that way.

Elizabeth: I think it helps it feel more like how we perform live, because when you're just by yourself in a room singing to a recorded track it can feel cut off from where the song typically lives. Singing live, with barriers, I have to listen to what Gideon is doing to get it right. There's that nonverbal communication that you just can't do if you're singing to a track. 

David: Was it an immediate vocal blend for you when you started singing together? 

Gideon: It was. I don't know if I'm getting too far ahead here, but I asked Elizabeth to come and record on one of our first EPs, and she sang that vocal line for “Someone Who Cares,” and I was just blown away. She added some violin and then started playing live with us, and from the get-go it was, “Oh, something about this makes sense.”

Elizabeth: I felt the same way. I had played and jammed with various people over the years, and I had done enough to know that sometimes it feels like it's working.  

David: Since you brought it up, let’s talk about “Someone Who Cares,” both the single and the video. 

Gideon: The song was one of those that come to you in a couple of moments. I wrote that very quickly and had the concept, the guitar line and that first verse. It's fun when that happens, because you just don't question it. That's the melody, that's the chorus, and that's all it needs to be, except for Elizabeth's vocals and all the stuff that happens when we're together in the studio.

David: Tell me about the video.

Gideon: The “Someone Who Cares” video was a wild time. We packed the most amount of action that you could for a creative project into five days, shot on multiple locations. Isaac Blade, who directed it, came up with the storyline and he had a team of Asbury Media alumni who donated their time, five people who showed up with gaffer’s tape and walkie-talkies and all the camera equipment. We had a Steadicam and were shooting it on one of the hottest days of that summer. The opening scene, where [the dinosaur] walks out of the door and throws the skateboard down on the road, we had to shoot that I don't know how many different times, and I was about to pass out in that suit. (laughs) It had a little fan, but the hot sun hitting that suit when you can't breathe — and I don't like claustrophobic spaces. It was almost a recipe for disaster. But I think it was worth it. We had a lot of fun. 

David: I understand that you took turns being the dinosaur in the video?

Elizabeth: Not me. I wasn’t in it, but I did sew up the inside. We inflated it, and Isaac, the director, was at my house and I was inside the dinosaur costume with a needle and thread. He was manipulating the costume, and I was sewing it to sort of anthropomorphize the dinosaur a little bit, to have a more neutral expression. 

David: The first time I saw the video, I thought, okay, here they are in the standard soundstage with the standard white background. I didn't realize it was going to turn into a short story. The sense of camaraderie really came through.

Elizabeth: Yeah, I think that's our brand: processing our emotions and things that we're working out in our own lives into the songs. I think that’s something special to our band. I think that's why we credit all the members with songwriting. We'll come in with chords and lyrics and then each person writes their own part. We might have an idea — “Oh, I want the drums to do this attitude,” or whatever, but mostly everybody writes their own part and puts their own stuff into it. Playing with other people is really how I write out the songs.

David: Lylak songs have a distinctive guitar tone. How do you get that sound?

Gideon: For years I've used a Lotus-brand Stratocaster-type guitar. My worship pastor growing up gave me this red and black guitar he found in a dumpster. He had fixed it up a bit, and I stripped the paint off because I always loved the natural look. So that's been my main guitar for years. Lotus was a Japanese manufacturer in the ‘80s and ‘90s. I was telling our drummer at the time, Jesse, that I'd always wanted a Telecaster-style guitar in the same shape, and he found an ‘80s Lotus brand Telecaster that looked identical to my Strat. He gave it to me on his own birthday, because he's a very selfless person. I also have a Gretsch that I used on “Beggar.”  When we go into the studio, I love using different instruments and different amps, but I think a lot of my tone comes from those old Japanese pickups and a deluxe reverb turned up. 

David: Lylak’s music is hard to classify. That's not a bad thing. I've heard “indie dream pop Americana” … Maybe with a little postmodern thrown in. If somebody asks you, what do you tell them?

Elizabeth: When we write our bios, it’s hard to find a band that we really sound like. We want to sound different. I think it's built on what sounds we think are the best — we want clear vocals, harmonies, really lush, reverb-y, surfy guitar tone. The violin ranges from fiddling to totally abstract rock violin to more classic string arrangement stuff. We all have really different influences, so we just try to make what sounds good. And I think, as we've been working together over time, I feel it's meshed more and more. And we just follow what we love, and people seem to move along with us. Last year, we started covering “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles, that old ‘80s song? And I was like, “Y'all, if we were a band in the ‘80s, we would be New Wave, and nobody would question it. But we also really love classic rock, as might be obvious in some of the songs we're releasing this year, like “HRU” and “Avatar.” 

David: Your songs have a really laid-back, open feel, but then I listen to something like “It's Serious” from “Inconvenient Truce,” a song with a very driving chorus. 

Elizabeth: I listened to a lot of Tegan and Sarah as a teenager, which is another band that started as folk-punk duo. And now their music is very electro-pop something, but they have really interesting modal harmonies, not necessarily based on thirds, but harmonies that move in different directions. And I've tended to use a lot of that in our Lylak stuff, though not nearly as weird as on, say, “Guardrails.”

Gideon: I think they're intuitive harmonies, but Elizabeth has some really cool, high stuff that she does on that “Guardrails” sound, almost like Bon Iver, falsetto stuff that we really enjoy.