Words by Jason Lee
Seeing as most NYC’ers (the ‘C’ stands for crystallized droplets of frozen precipitation) spent the past day barricaded indoors thanks to 18 inches of the white, fluffy stuff blanketing the city like a shroud of Turin with it’s outlines only faintly visible underneath, ample time was provided for pondering the new single by violinist, vocalist, and avant-garde composer Lily Desmond that’s called ”Regular Cassanova and came out this past Friday…
…a song born out of another episode of weather-induced forced self-confinement (see two paragraphs down) and a song that like a real-life Casanova draws you in slowly, but expertly, with L. Desmond stripping away the more overtly indie rock, shoegaze, and synthpop elements of her other recorded work (or, conversely, adding layers to her w/violin, loop pedal, and voice) like chamber-pop minus its pop trappings thus resulting in more straight-up raw & unpasteurized chamber music which some claim is great for gut health esp. when fortified by theatrical scoring and art rock influences like brightly colored marshmallows floating in musical milk…
…with the roots of chamber music stretching back to 17th- & 18th-century Italian musica da camera, musiccreated for small, intimate spaces like chambers tucked away in palace interiors and aristocratic manors (rough living!) where you had to know what’s what to even be in attendance with today’s equivalent perhaps being music played in grotty basement grottos hidden beneath some of NYC’s more distinguished and/or disreputable, hip-but-largely-hipster-free dive bars like Bar Freda, in Ridgewood, Queens, which while easy to get to on the L train or the B38 bus is a bit off the beaten path which made it the ideal place for Lily & Co. to debut “Regular Cassanova” on Valentine’s Day night in an impassioned performance (and reception) whose engine is the interplay between her and her musicians (and the audience) in a dynamic feedback loop as Lily whoops, gesticulates, and even engages in a “shriek off” with the head violinist starting a little after 3:15…
…with one essential thing about chamber music being how each instrument plays its own unique part but where the parts only make sense thru their interplay which makes chamber music feel highly conversational and intensely dynamic in its melodic and rhythmic interplay like a good blues or rock ‘n’ roll band except for the powdered wig set with orchestral instruments, with Lily’s self-assembled ensemble consisting of violin, viola, cello, flute, trumpet, trombone, bass, drums, and “subtle synth textures” so in other words music that’s perfect for huddling up to yr radiator or space heater whilst confined indoors by Snowpocolypse ’26 or just sinking deep into your own mind as you give it a listen and as yr doing so, here’s Lily on the song’s origins:
“I was trapped in my dorm building in my freshman year of college during Hurricane Sandy on the East Coast. Someone had written most of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl along the walls of the 6 story stairwell out of boredom. Inspiration struck and I went to sit at the top of the steps by the entrance to the roof to get some space from my roommates. I started writing about a guy I knew who I had a crush on, and the reason I had a crush on him was because I wanted to fix him. I recognized that nurturing tendency in myself while also feeling uncomfortable about the fact that people often fall for the kind of person who would hurt them. There’s a dark magnetism that shows itself in some dangerous characters, a double-edged charisma that looks nice on a swashbuckler or a noir detective in a movie but can be destructive in a real person, regardless of their sex”…
…with the lyrics and delivery sharing an “unfurling parade of fleeting, impressionistic imagery” quality that likewise feels of a deeply personal nature with Howl, like its strung-together rush of words are being read off the wall of a college dorm stairwell which after an austere string intro declares: “you’re…a…Regular Cassanova, shoulders and back of braille from bullet wounds, from ‘too soons,’ a life led on the rail, smile says, ‘come on over’, hands hold blood from the nights in the city in the dark where sleep brings only fright and the razor’s a glass and the edge is a spotlight on a bottle of something that stings”…
…with the entirety of the first verse set against pinprick pizzicato strings as the arrangement builds with the addition of swooping glissandos, brass and woodwinds, rumbling bass, and thudding drums—all based around variations on the main gavotte-like melodic figure (the gavotteis a slow and stately mid-tempo French aristocratic dance, which may strike some as vain with its dancers strutting and posing like showy peacocks with one eye on the mirror tho’ in our humble opinion “Regular Cassanova” brings the style back to its peasant roots, earthier and formally less rigid with a full-on smooch to the kisser at its conclusion (well ok that part didn’t happen but instead some pretty rapturous applause after a pregnant pause which is kinda the same)…
…which highlights the paganism underlying the chamber music tradition much to our delight esp. in the bridge we feel where the trombone takes over the main melody, bolstered by shuddering strings and airy flutes that bring to mind nothing so much as the folk-horror soundtrack to 1973’s The Wicker Man (1973) in all its Maypole-dancing glory even as one senses how badly it’s going to end with the rake’s progress of its titular character mirrored in its sonic contours as the dynamics build, crest, ebb and builds again which is galvanizing in its effects if not outright intoxicating…
…but at the same time feels like the walls closing in (“cannot turn to face the skulls […] who’s life is really the one that’s full of lies?”) as the music mutates and undulates until it burns itself down to cinders, ending not with a bang but with a lone scraped note and a whisper which if so-inclined evokes a sense of claustrophobia and brings us back again to the theme of confinement, one aspect of which being the confining nature of gender itself (“big boy can I hold your hand? would I ever understand?”) in all its brute, hegemonic power with one example being “the dark magnetism…the seductive pull of the ‘bad boy’ archetype…and the damage from mistaking danger for romance” in the composer’s own words and here’s another good quote:
I wanted this song to touch on the antagonist in all of us. The one that looks too much like your favorite dark hero from your favorite stories—or the one who got away. It wound up being an exploration of how romanticizing the power of that social archetype can bring out more toxic traits in everyone. That’s why I put an extra ‘s’ in Cassanova. In this song, he’s not a good guy. I thought a lot about the system wielding this gender role in the patriarchy too…
…particularly the historical evolution of the ‘desirable masculine’ in western culture, starting at Giacomo Casanova himself (I was definitely unconsciously pulling from Fellini’s Casanova as well as the one starring Heath Ledger from 2005). I wanted to express my interactions with this archetype of the reckless, dark masculine/bad boy and how it manifests in reality, versus how it is projected onto men by their partners, their institutions, and themselves. I’m currently working on a music video with director Niccolò Walsh that also delves into this, hopefully in a way that’s more light hearted and fun instead of a heavy indictment of a whole gender.
…which brings us back to the realm of 18th-century Italy and could it be mere coincidence that the first world-famous rock-star-style bad boy musician was Niccolò Paganini and what’s more he was a violinist, known as the Devil’s Violinist, whose superhuman skill and flamboyance on the instrument (clearly “violin heroes” were the “guitar heroes” of their day) combined with a lust for gambling, alcohol, and womanizing led people to believe he must’ve made a Faustian pact cuz after all bad boyz don’t give a f*** and what’s more “not giving a f***” than selling your soul to the Devil and not worrying about the consequences (except the short-term good ones) with the continued power of this archetype traceable thru musical legends from Robert Johnson to Robert Plant and up to Ryan Coogler’s Sinners…
…with another key aspect of the Faustian myth being the role of creative destruction where the bad boy must destroy in order to create and if you wanna know more about this concept you can read Robert Caro’s 1200-page Pulitzer Prize–winning recounting the life and work of Robert Moses (showing even architects can be bad boys!) or listen to a podcast about it instead which again is a notion that’s clearly at play even in Paganini’s day when “a rumor spread that Paganini had murdered a woman, used her intestines as violin strings and imprisoned her soul within the instrument [so that the] women’s screams were said to be heard from his violin when he performed on stage” which is not only a gnarly story (Ohio Players got nothin’ on Paganini!) but also quite revealing in making the point clearly that bad boys (really bad boys) must destroy in order to create even if it means destroying themselves in the end…
…with the template having been set earlier in the century by none other than Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798), the king of all ladykillers who blazed a trail for roguish cads the world over tho’ now more of a metaphor or a mythical creature than a historical figure but one whose history is revealing nonetheless in how he merged developing notions of artistry, masculinity, and genius, whereas previous to the Enlightenment, musicians were considered mere craftsman and servants, even someone like J.S. Bach, who as an employee of the court and the church created music, however technically advanced and creative, for the exalting of these very institutions with the notion of the Great Artiste not coming into play until the Enlightenment who posited poets and musicians as cultural heroes living outside the bounds of conventional society or in other words rebels…
…so yeah in a way it’s true you can BLAME ART for the birth of the “bad boy” archetype (haha we love art and artists!) for better or worse, with Lily Desmond perfectly matching subject matter to musical setting what with chamber music and bad-boy idolatry taking shape in the same Petri dish centuries ago with the extra ‘S’ in “Regular Cassanova” added to capture Casanova’s ssssnakelike reptilian appeal which inherently is the appeal of being confined and controlled not to get too S&M-ish about it…
…with Casanova the historical fiture helping to crystallize these linkages and associations (“stitches sewn / are you alone?”) which’ve only grown stronger over time, a man who despite training as an ecclesiastical lawyer chose a life of dissipation, adventuring, and writing instead and became acclaimed as a violinist (obviously!), a gambler, a con man adept at swindling aristocratic patrons (when not already in prison for this very reason), the inventor of the national lottery and the list could go on who survived, whether hand-to-mouth or more comfortably at times, by his wits and via his deft way with words alone, a true Renaissance Man…
…which all culminated in Casanova’s multi-volume, French-language (the lingua franca of Europe at the time) magnum opus of an autobiography Histoire de Ma Viethat not only shared some hair-raising yarns but which also, depending on yr perspective, served as a sly exposé of bourgeois hypocrisy and morality (or lack thereof) or served as an ahead-of-its-time ode to women’s pleasure for others or as the story of a social-disease-ridden creep whose conquests of virgins, married women, friends’ mistresses, nuns, mother-daughter and sister-on-sister threeways, underage prostitutes (ick!) and his own illegitimate daughter (ick and ick again!) points to a pervasive misogyny…
…so clearly we’re takin’ a complex narrative here, open to an array of interpretations and resonances where Casanova himself can hardly be confined to one meaning, a fluidity captured in the ever-shifting textures and emotional hues of “Regular Cassanova” over its relatively short running time which in the end perfectly gets at the paradox of dealing with a character type who can be alluring-appalling in equal measure on a song confronting a dark subject matter in a manner that’s joyful and humanistic…
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“REGULAR CASANOVA”
released February 20, 2026
Michael Cohen on Drums
Lily Reszi-Rothman on Flute
Paul Brodhead on Trombone
Teagan Taylor on Trumpet
Zachary Baker on Bass
Sean Brennan on Cello
Lily Desmond on Violin, Viola and Vocals
Produced by Tyler Skoglund