In 2019, British musician Holly Lerski embarked on a solo rail trip across America, from Chicago to San Francisco to heal a broken heart. From there, she planned to drive through California’s national parks alone. She took a miniature guitar and a suitcase, and called it her “road less traveled.”
As she traveled through seven states in 20 days, Lerski wrote the first seven songs for what would become her stirring fifth studio album, Sweet Decline. Two months later, she returned to wander the southern California desert and coast, where she penned three more songs. Lerski wrote the album’s final song, “Girl in a High Castle,” in a shepherd’s hut in Dorset just before she left England.
Recorded in Nashville with producer Matt “Truck” Roley and featuring the Milwaukee-raised sibling duo SistaStrings (Brandi Carlile, Joni Mitchell), the “glorious and gorgeous” (Amplify Music Magazine) Sweet Decline “fuses the raw authenticity of folk storytelling with an astute pop sensibility” (The Strange Brew), offering both a fierce reckoning with self-doubt and a map of healing heartbreak. “I went off to try to get happy again, and found myself in a landscape I’d only ever seen in the movies: mountains, deserts, redwood forests, the wild Pacific Ocean. It was life changing,” Lerski says.
“At the same time, I met all these amazing people and experienced random acts of kindness constantly. I set myself a little test – to approach everyone I met with love. The more I did it, the more lucky breaks and synchronicities happened,” adds Lerski, who posted daily updates on social media as she traveled. It was as if a valve inside her had broken open and life came pouring back in: Instead of feeling lonely in a foreign country, Lerski started finding magic everywhere — “and, with it, all these songs came.”
Lerski’s new three-song 2025 EP, Greek Trilogy (due out September 19th via Laundry Label), continues the story. Returning to the United States in 2022, Lerski found herself in Nashville, swept up in a whirlwind romance that led her to recording the album Sweet Decline, and left her with quite a different story to tell.
“This EP is a very personal one — as all my music has been these last few years — but I’m just trying to be as honest and vulnerable as possible because that’s the kind of music that moves me,” Lerski says. “Love and heartbreak is universal. We’ve all experienced it. But making something good from the bad, makes it feel worthwhile. I just want to make people feel better.”
Today, Glide is offering an exclusive premiere of Lerski’s new single “Weeds” along with its accompanying video. With beautiful bucolic visuals provided by the filming, cinematography, and editing of Sue Tansley, Lerski gives us a work of sweeping, gorgeous folk-pop. With vocals that feel bright and harmonic, the song is an infectious ode to long distance relationships and working through challenges that come with falling in love. With little more than her acoustic guitar as backing and layered vocals, Lerski delivers a shimmering and heartfelt song that showcases her ability as a singer-songwriter to connect on a deep emotional level.
Watch the video and read our conversation with Holly Lerski below…
What is this song about and what inspired it? Why is it important to you and what about the song really speaks to you?
When I was recording Sweet Decline in Nashville, I met and fell in love with someone there. It got serious very quickly, she sold her house, and we were planning a future together in either America or England. We never contemplated it would be impossible if you came from different countries. Love conquers all, right? Not so, it turns out. She came to England for a few months. I then followed her back to America and was stopped by Border Police at Charlotte Airport for unknowingly overstaying my ESTA a couple of weeks when I’d made the album. They held me in detention for a few hours, took my fingerprints, swabbed for DNA then sent me back on the next plane. It was all a bit crazy. I wasn’t allowed back in until I had the proper visa, which I eventually got the year after, by which time it was over. Long distance relationships are hard. So it’s about all of that, really. Seemed like the only way to be together was to be like weeds, nomadically growing in between international borders.
What was the writing process like for the song?
It started in the detention room at Charlotte Airport, watching the guards outside in their bullet-proof vests, not knowing what was going to happen to me. At that point, I didn’t know if I was heading for a custodial sentence. Once I stopped crying, I was just in this weird, calm place of acceptance and disbelief over the mess I’d got myself into. I felt stupid for not realizing I’d overstayed. And then, this melody started in my head, and a silly line about having a bad day at Border Control. I finished it a couple days later at home in England.
What was the studio session and recording process like for this song? Any great stories from the creation process?
It was phenomenally quick, back at Bunkernoise Nashville with Truck Roley, where I made Sweet Decline. He brought in Josh Hunt again on drums, but also a new player, John McNally, a multi-instrumentalist in a band called The Heavy Quitters with Guthrie Brown, a singer-songwriter in his own right, who came in the next day. They are all phenomenally good and just lovely people generally. So it was all intuitive playing. John and John set up in the big room. I wanted a live-sounding, Neil Young vibe for the EP, so I sang and played it to them twice, they charted it, then I went into my vocal booth, conducting them through the glass as I played. They nailed it. I think we did three takes and chose the second. When it came to overdubbing “Weeds” acoustics, Guthrie and I played live together next day. It was chemistry, all weekend.
Are there any lyric lines that you really love or that really are important to you? What do you feel makes them resonate?
Yes. “We’ll grow like weeds in between our countries. We’ll grow like weeds spreading love and liberty.” They seem incredibly relevant for what’s currently happening in the US right now. Borders and keeping people apart is the root of all misery and misunderstanding, in my opinion. My last album was written out of a need for connection as I was so lonely back in England, but I found deep connection traveling through America, meeting strangers. There was always something that would connect us. I made many great friends. I’ve found that a lot in all my travels and road-tripping around the world. In Greece, Iceland, Europe, Cuba, and a lot of America. Love should have no borders, and family, children and partners shouldn’t be kept apart by governments. It happens with any “difference.” People, sadly, fear of it. But there has to be a place for us weeds to flourish together.
If listeners can take away one thing from having heard this song, what do you hope that is?
That weeds always win in the end. They grow through cracks in the harshest places. Like Tupac Shakur’s poem, “The Rose That Grew From Concrete,” weeds have the strength to break concrete apart. They’re resilient, and you find them in places people usually don’t see or care much about. And they’re often beautiful, only they just haven’t been told they’re flowers. And herbs. And all important.
How does this song fit in among others on the EP? How is it similar or different?
I’ve called the EP Greek Trilogy because, once again, like my last album, it’s a story – a love story in three acts. “Weeds” begins the journey. Act 1 is me in the first flush of love, trying desperately to be with the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. It’s romantic and optimistic. The second song is when I’d got my visa, sold my house, and gone nomadic waiting to return to America. I was staying in Crete in a cave at the time and found out my American love had moved on. The last song is me chasing my wild goose back to Tennessee, hoping to reconcile. I hadn’t planned to write three songs about it. They just came like that. But since Crete and Greece was a huge part of that time, Aristotle’s storytelling model of beginning, middle, and end somehow echoed how it happened. Like the Greek Tragedy, although I decided to call it trilogy instead, as it was a beautiful love. And I learned a lot. It comes out on September 19th.
As you’ve continued to make new music, how has your songwriting process or inspiration changed?
I’ve been writing songs since I was a kid and releasing my own records since 1997, with my band Angelou, and these days under my name, so it has changed a lot. My inspiration always came from my life, but was perhaps never as open and honest. I was more guarded then. These days, I think from losing so much, I don’t cloak anything in metaphor. They come from real-life stories, and from my travels. This is what happened to me, and if it happened or happens to you, you’ll be okay, kind of thing.
What is coming up next for Holly Lerski?
My book, that was supposed to go with my album, Sweet Decline, about all the weird and crazy synchronicities that happened on the road in America. It’s still half-written because I’m doing all of this independently, and it’s hard to switch creative gears. But I’ve been writing a Substack for over a year now, called “Holly Lerski’s Cosmic Donuts,” and that gives people a flavor of what’s coming. Aside from that, I’m also planning a trip to South America next year to visit a friend, and I’m taking my miniature guitar with me. I call him the “The Littlest Hobo.” Whatever comes next is up to me, I’ve realized. We are the creators.
