Watch: Lily Lyons performs "Cover The Trails" live at Real World Studios
Taken from The Story of ISA documentary, singer-songwriter Lily Lyons performs the first single from her 2026 album live at Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios with the help of Focusrite ISA 828 MkII.
During the filming of The Story of ISA documentary, we recorded a live performance at Real World Studios that stayed with everyone who saw it. Songwriter Lily Lyons performed "Cover The Trails" in the control room. Guitar in hand, Lily recorded with guitarist Alex Haines accompanying and the engineer right in the same room. A singular performance in a singular space.
“I’d been learning a lot of John Martyn songs at the time that we wrote this song and Joel came to me with this melody that felt so in keeping with that world. The song fell out very easily from there. I had this image of a beautiful home, you’re inviting someone in but they keep hiding outside. In the pursuit of trying to find them/follow them, you yourself also end up walking the streets alone, looking for them. At its core, it’s about loving someone who won’t let you in.”
Signed to Fiction Records — label-mates with Billie Marten, The Big Moon and Courtney Barnett — Lily has built a reputation for folk songwriting of rare gentleness and depth. She released her debut EP in 2022 alongside supporting Paris Paloma, Willy Mason and Flyte on tour. She also performed alongside Grammy award-winning pianist Kevin Hays across the UK and US, and has appeared at Glastonbury Festival. "Cover The Trails" is the first track from her 2025 album Re-Open the World.
We hope you’ll enjoy the performance as much as we do.
If you haven't yet watched the ISA documentary in full, this is a good place to start. The film traces forty years of Focusrite ISA history, including the engineers, the consoles, and the studios that kept it alive. Lily's session at Real World is one of its defining moments.
Find out more about Lily on her website, or visit her on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.