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Whether she’s engaging in the daily three hour practices to continue honing her violin and vocal skills, pouring her passion into scoring independent films, preparing those provocative TED talks or composing and relentlessly expressing herself via her own albums, Lili Haydn greets each situation with the same self-reflective questions: How is this a gift? Where is the gift in this? With the release of More Love, her first solo collection in six years, the Grammy winning artist draws whimsy and purpose from her palette of cinematic alternative music, gracing us with a thematically and sonically compelling way forward out of the dark challenges of 2020. Yet the mission of this groundbreaking recording goes far beyond that. As a survivor of COVID-19 herself and grateful to be alive, she is, more than ever before, celebrating the miracle of life itself.  

Fully engaging the mystical power of both of her transcendent voice and violin, Lili sets her hopeful intention for the project and all of our lives moving forward on the ethereal, cinematic title track, which builds from an inviting laid-back groove to an emotional crescendo. She sings: “Take me as I am tonight/Grateful just to be alive/Life is a miracle/Can you see? More love, more light/Darkness don’t stand a chance against us.”  

“The great Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh says the first step of mindfulness is breathing in, breathing out, having awareness of your breath – and we extrapolate from there, choosing to be more present, more mindful and happier,” Lili says. “We’ve all experienced this shift back to the root of this awareness, realizing that our lives and issues are connected. I titled the project More Love because there’s no problem or issue on the planet for which more love is not the solution. 

“Fear and aggression activate the amygdala, which then hijacks the energy from the rest of the brain, effectively limiting our capacity for empathy and nuance and even generosity and love,” she adds. “More confrontation and anger and punishment only compound and perpetuate the worst in us. The only way to solve any problem is with more love. I speak about this a bit in one of the last TED presentations I did: I AM A MAN, which is the combination of 10 years of soul-searching.”

Since the release of her last solo album LiliLand in 2014, the former child prodigy and long-active member of the Alliance of Women Film Composers has scored 7 films, including Academy Award winner Freida Mock’s ANITA, The House That Jack Built and Sundance Selects’ Driver X; contributed additional score for seasons 2 & 3 of the Emmy winning series Transparent; done four high-impact TED presentations; and got married. 

In 2018, Lili joined forces with musicians Hamid Saeidi, MB Gordy and Itai Disraeli to create Opium Moon, an indie ensemble whose spacious, improvisational music one reviewer called “world music from another world.” The quartet’s self-titled debut won a Grammy Award for Best New Age album. “Opium Moon allows me to be on a different kind of musical tightrope,” she says, “where I have to be at my very best virtuosically on the violin, but with no lyrics to hide behind. I am always listening and responding and have to be on top of my game because I don’t always know what I’m going to play next as I improvise around the theme.”

Building on that momentum, 2021 is shaping up to be a watershed year for Lili as both a composer and recording artist, starting with the release of Sayonara just before the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and continuing with a flurry of film and TV projects featuring her dynamic scores. The films include the feature documentary Strip Down, Rise Up by Oscar nominated director Michele Ohayon, set for a February 5 release on Netflix; and Oscar winner Freida Mock’s latest feature doc RUTH: Justice Ginsberg in Her Own Words, debuting March 15 on Starz. In addition, Lili co-composed the music for Ginny & Georgia, a 10-episode drama series dropping on Netflix February 24. 

Not surprisingly, with all their soul stirring dynamics and emotional twists and turns, the eight tracks on More Love beautifully reflect the stylistic freedom and spaciousness of her growing body of film and TV scores. Two of the collection’s tracks, “Is This Love, Is This Life” (which begins with Lili’s surreal breathy vocals before her violin kicks in and the piece becomes more tense and dramatic) and the hypnotic, electronica driven vocal track “The Devil You Know,” are from the soundtrack of Strip Down Rise Up, a film about women who heal their traumas and shame through pole dancing and embark on a journey to reclaim themselves. As a sexual trauma survivor herself, Lili related to its hard-hitting theme. Another track from More Love, “Circle of My Heart,” a haunting vocal-piano-violin ballad which she wrote with David Poe (whom she originally met attending Sundance Labs), was also originally written for the same film.

Lili sees the album’s mystical, easy grooving electronica-tinged opener “Overture” as the laying of a foundation for a new beginning as we move past a time of toxicity, fear and anxiety into a brighter future filled with fresh possibilities. It is bookended by the lush, sparsely arranged instrumental “Graduation,” whose sense of rebirth is fueled by Lili’s lilting lead violin melody, which invites us on a path towards a place of peaceful transcendence.  

The epic, nearly 11 minute ear, heart and mind bending “Sayonara” is the emotional centerpiece of the album, its first five minutes serving as a cry for peace, its second half an instrumental prayer for peace amidst a sense of cacophony created to simulate a war zone – a metaphor for an evolving humanity. Its lyrics convey a key message if we are ever going to realize the vision that more love is the answer to our problems. In impassioned yet tension filled tones, Lili sings: “Sayonara to the drama/I don’t want to play that game/Sayonara to the carnage/Nobody was born to hate/All I wanna do is love you/I’m laying down my arms today/Not another, not another in my name.”  

The quirkiness, creative brilliance and freewheeling whimsy that have defined Lili’s life and career trace to her roots as the daughter of iconic feminist comedienne Lotus Weinstock and video artist David Jove, who was one of the first people to mass-produce LSD alongside Owsley Stanley. She dreamed early on that she could play violin, but she and her mom were on welfare, so Lili started working as an actress in films and TV sitcoms (“Easy Money,” “It’s a Living,” “The New Gidget”) to pay for her violin and education. A graduate of Brown University with a degree in Political Science, Lili’s long tradition of playing benefits for good causes was inspired by her mom, “the benefit queen, who taught me the value of straight spirit being communicated to touch the people right in front of me.” 

Early on, Lili’s parents allowed her to choose her own first name, and her first choice was “helicopter.” The whimsical moniker proved remarkably prescient considering the future soaring solos on her NPR-favorite albums (including her 1997 Atlantic Records debut Lili and the 2003 follow up Light Blue Sun on BMG/Private Music) and legendary collaborations and work with Herbie Hancock, Roger Waters, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Josh Groban, Sting, Jimmy Page & Robert Plant, Tom Petty, No Doubt, the LA Philharmonic and George Clinton’s P-Funk All-Stars. Clinton once dubbed her “the Jimi Hendrix of the violin.” She has performed on “The Tonight Show” and “SNL” and at major international concert venues, including Carnegie Hall, Disney Hall and the Vienna Opera House.  

Having received a fellowship with the Sundance Institute, Lili’s film composing career started as a member of Hans Zimmer’s team and has blossomed into nearly 20 feature films, documentaries and TV shows to her credit. She believes that her film scoring benefits from her background in rock and makes the scores more melodic hooky and contemporary. “In film composing,” she says, “we get 10 seconds of a certain tempo before something else happens onscreen and it changes quickly. Learning how to create these changes has loosened up the boundaries for me and helped me honor my instincts and create more experimental music on my albums. 

“I have been adventurous like this on my albums before More Love,” Lili adds, “but didn’t have the space and simplicity of this album. This body of work has intention and space and mystery that I could not have achieved without having worked in film for the last 10 years. I didn’t trust that people would stay interested if I let space happen. In the past I would never attempt a passage like the final solo in ‘Sayonara’ because I would be concerned it didn’t have enough changes. But now I have more patience and trust that such elements are just the right thing to tell the story I need to – which in this case is to say that enough is enough. My film scores have taught me so much about making space in music and consciously navigating emotions. The new songs from More Love reflect this cinematic sensitivity, and are either from the literal films I’ve scored, or from the heartfelt quirky fantastic realism films I would like to score.”