Born and based in Baltimore, where she was a reporter, Panic Room With A View featuring multi-instrumentalist Joel Ackerson, is Lloyd’s fourth album (though two were limited editions) and while she’s been described as Janis meets Joni, her voice and songs are more evocative of Mary Chapin Carpenter and Beth Nielsen Chapman. The former echoes throughout the opening track, ‘Are You Lost?’, which, written at the start of lockdown, she calls a Back To The Future folk song. a fairy tale in which her future self returns to rescue her child self lost in the woods, essentially a reassurance that dark times will not last (“I’ve been this way before/So many roads, no one can be sure/But I found the way and I made it through to pass it down to you/And you will, too…And all the while you’re lost/sure as you are seeking, you are being sought”.)
A pulsing opener gives way to the drums and guitars of ‘Hometown Hero’ , another number rooted in pandemic experience, feeling sidelined as a musician, cut off from her passion and reduced to playing house, feeling her career had hit a brick wall (“Did I get my 15 minutes – was that fame?/Hard to tell what it is or isn’t, ‘cause it went as soon as it came./Did I blink and miss it?”) with the bitter lines “I hear they let anyone sing as much as we want at the kitchen sink” and “I sure look busy spinning and spinning on that wheel in my cage/Rockin’ in a chair, goin’ nowhere, diggin’ holes in the garden to bury my rage”.
Opening to the sound of strings mimicking air raid sirens and featuring violin, viola and upright bass, ‘To The Girl Who Shared the Siege’ was inspired by seeing a social media post of a spray-painted wall in the Syrian city of Aleppo which translated as: “To the girl who shared the siege with me: I love you“. Sung in the first person with cascading acoustic guitar chords, it tells the story of whoever those two people may have been, a tender mixing of devastation (“The city’s coming down around us now/I found the shell of that bakery/I used to love the pastry as a child, but now everything is empty/All these beloved places, now so sharp/Every turn as jagged as a war/When it started we did not believe/Now we have forgotten life before”) and the comfort of a moment of connection (“between the bombs she slipped her hand in mine/If we are to die here, what could be the harm/huddled crying in a stranger’s arms?/If they care nothing for the dead, what care we for the shame?”). The details and emotions in the lyric unfold with cinematic grace (“The ash it looks like snow on her hair/The final snow that I may ever see/I didn’t travel far or make my name/Never found a calling or a family”) ending with “I wonder if we will see the morning?/Is it closer now, or is it far?”. You’ll be pleased to hear the actual couple survived.
Featuring flutes and harp, the melodically circling ‘What The Wind Takes’ (complete with wind sample) was written as her response to a bland new agey homily, “Don’t be afraid to lose what was never meant to be”, and developed as a song about loss and embracing the fullness of grief rather than hurrying through its different stages, savouring memories of “the rush of a kiss, the flush of our skin/A moment of stillness at the core of a storm” when “ pressure and time have other things in mind, and weathervanes can’t turn away, no matter what they want”. There’s Janis here, but Ian not Joplin.
Coming mid-way, sung unaccompanied save for an underling drone, pauses between the lines ‘The Stove’ is perhaps the most striking and one of the finest songs of the year. It’s rooted in the fairytale of ‘The Goose Girl’ in which a princess is usurped by her lady in waiting and made to tend the geese. However, suspecting something’s amiss, the king invites her to climb inside his iron stove, listening at the stovepipe as she unburdens her sorrows. In Lloyd’s hands it addresses matters of faith and feeling the need to talk to a higher power, even it doesn’t exist (“If there’s a God, I may be damned, but I like talking to God/And he may not like the way I am, but I won’t know before I’m done/Sometimes I hope there is no god though it means I cry to just the air….It helps to tell something the pain…and maybe God’s an empty stove – a metal belly full of me – and I’m the fire lit inside when I tell him all my suffering?”
Featuring mandolin, accordion and The Novelists and Big Amygdala providing the choir, the warblingly strumalong ‘The Valley Is Ours’ is her drinking song for the end of the world, dedicated to her hometown of Ellicott City, twice wiped out by flooding, and the strength it takes to live your life when “fortunes rise and fall with the shoreline” and refuse to go under (“My daddy saw the streets washed away, and the earth broke open like the end of days/His granddaddy, too, lost the family estate, but no one said nothin’ ‘bout moving away …my mama saw her brother swept under, home from the funeral to mud in the cupboards and drawers/And the neighborhood mourning/That it all came clean with enough scrubbing”). It may not be an anthem in musical terms, but you can almost hear arms being linked as she sings “still we live, and still we build right here in the lap of the gods…the valley is ours”.
The song came about from a workshop where participants were prompted to use the word monkey. Lloyd’s goes: “Please don’t tell Jesus, but I had a dream/We snuck on the ark. Noah didn’t see us/Said we were monkeys, and they just believed us/‘Cause everyone there was way too busy watching the news about Ellicott City”.
Stripped to just fingerpicked acoustic guitars and a vocal duet with Ackerson, an old song that came back to the surface in the pandemic (when she couldn’t sing it at a wedding, the bride had the lyric tattooed), ‘Hum’ is beguiling love song about not having the words to express your feelings (“‘Cause you make me feel like singing, but sometimes the notes just won’t come/But even when my love goes unsung, I can still can hum”). Absolutely lovely.
Again featuring Ackerson’s band The Novelists on harmonies and sharing vocals with Eric Henry Andersen, ‘Mary Golden Going Gray’ is a punningly titled (and lyrically riddled) soulful doo wop shuffle imaging the marigolds in her garden singing as the blooms fade (“Fall’s comin’ on/The lawn’s full of hay, and all that can leave is going away”), becoming a song about ageing and feeling stuck (“a weed is just a seed in the wrong place/So I stay here in my bed wasting away”).
It ends with her New Year’s Eve song, albeit titled ‘December 32, 2020’ (“the ball will fall on an empty Times Square”), a one take guitar and vocal recording built on minor chords and the notion of the scars that remain in your memory because “we’re not through yet/A child racing through the darkness from all the ghosts they’ve seen/’Cause you can’t un-know times like these once they go you still won’t be able to un-know what it was”. The ending is an achingly beautiful hymn to faith and fortitude as she sings: “And we will take a cup of kindness yet, I know/And we will move a little closer to the light/But tonight feels like a song, forgotten words (we hum along), like a prayer we only half believe/But we still pray, still hum if we can’t sing/And each will find their way to just get through this thing/And we’ll make our plans, and dream of years we’ll follow through ’cause that’s all we know to do”.
The album comes with a download card for two tracks from her 2019-2020 Sessions, the first is the organ backed, spiritual styled ‘My Demons’, a song about depression written as a tribute to Chris Cornell the day after his death (“When I am gone, maybe too young/And when you mourn all you might’ve done/Sipping your whiskey, singing my songs/And cursing my demons, got me after all”). The other is the wry ‘If We Come Too Late’, written after not making Maryland’s Bernard/Ebb Songwriting Awards but really a carpe diem number about growing older disgracefully (“do the ribbons in my hair look far too girlish for the gray?/Do we put our hearts away – Who says it’s time?/I’d rather not look foolish … Maybe I’m too old to do this/But we don’t get to choose our prime – And yours might not be mine”) and seizing opportunities at whatever point they come “for as long as we can, if not for as long as we want.”
In the novel the title alludes to, Forster wrote “The world’, she thought, ‘is certainly full of beautiful things, if only I could come across them’.” Make sure you come across this.
Mike Davies
Artist’s website: www.heatheraubreylloyd.com
‘The Valley Is Ours’ – officially live:
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