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Mess Countdown Podcast

by Heather Aubrey Lloyd

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1.
Podcast text: Hey, this is Heather Aubrey Lloyd. 11 days remain in 2017, the year that I put out my solo CD, "A Message in the Mess," happens to have 11 songs on it. So every day I'm going to count down the songs one by one, giving you a little bit of backstory on each of them. Today, it's Track 11, "Clear." Man tries, and God laughs, my favorite Yiddish adage. Plans are dangerous since they require so many uncontrollable factors to align for what we want. I never planned that someone I loved would break my heart – who does? Before I let him do that, I’d actually planned to never see this man ever again. I’d planned a song (or at least a verse) to that very effect: “Let me be clear: I never want to see your face again…” That was about as far as I’d written when we got back together. I enjoyed telling him about the unfinished song. “Pity I had to abandon my work and be wrong and in love,” I teased. “You should finish it,” he said. “Finish the song that begins how I never want to see your face again?” I asked. “Finish it with the truth. Tell the rest of the story.” That story became “Clear,” the penultimate track on “A Message in the Mess.” Penultimate is one of my favorite words: Second to last. In the final verse of the song, I threw caution to the wind and wrote about our future: The sky is clear Sunday morning waking slowly Making coffee, making plans Making light of forever ‘cause now we can. Forever. Man tried and god laughs. Forever … no. Penultimate … yes. Foolish … no. Great plans and great love need reckless belief to stand any chance at all. What allowed me to record* and continue singing a potentially embarrassing song (about how I was going to live happily ever after with a man who did nothing short of dismantle my heart and hide tiny pieces of it where I will never find them again) is the loophole I didn’t realize I’d left in the plan ... in the last verse … in the future. I never stipulated in what WAY we would each “make light of forever” on some distant Sunday morning, or with WHO we would be “waking slowly.” That last verse prophesies that we end up happy, not that we end up together. The song’s exploration of the various meanings of “clear” included opportunities to be clear of the past and clear of each other. Making light of forever can be done with happily ever after, but also with closure. (*The recording, too, required an unanticipated second try before it could be put to bed. A sinus infection worked its way into the many “CL” sounds, and every glottal stop was a little too noticeable. I flew back one last time – Christmas last year – to clear them up.)
2.
Podcast text: Hey, this is Heather Aubrey Lloyd. 11 days remain in 2017, the year that I put out my solo CD, "A Message in the Mess," happens to have 11 songs on it. So every day I'm going to count down the songs one by one, giving you a little bit of backstory on each of them. Today, it's Track 6, "Even Now." I was barely 14 when I read the poem, “Eve Speaks” by Louis Untermeyer.in freshman English. I was in awe: Here was Eve talking back to God while she’s being kicked out of the Garden. I think wanna-be-rebel-teenage-me liked that bit. The balls on her! Like the legend it retells, this piece was an apple that awakened me to things that felt incredibly subversive. Whether it was the sensual description of Adam through a female gaze or her defiance …. It’s seed took many years to mature in me. As a grown woman, it was the poem’s second half that spoke to me: “God, thou did'st make a creature out of dust, But I created Man. . . . I was to him A breast, soft shoulders, an impelling brain; I was his spur, his shield, his stirrup-cup; I was his child, his strumpet, and his wife. A world of women have I been to him, To him and all the myriad sons of Adam. And all that they remember is my shame! All times by all men have I been betrayed-- They have belittled and disgraced my deed That made them seek until they found themselves.” A fairly staggering work of feminism to have been written and published by a man in 1916. That idea – Eve as the disgraced promethean teacher, denounced by the very men she granted their godhood – became a thorn in the back of my collegiate mind. Don’t we like what she gave us? Would we really want to be different? Dumber? These were the simple questions pricked forth by my early readings of the blurred purple printed Xerox copy I still have at 37. Flash forward to my late 20s/early 30s. I am struggling with my relationships. They love me, but they do not love my depression. They wish the fount of it coming from my mouth could become more of a trickle. Frankly, I do, too. “All my soft heart never came to any good/ and I can’t find a blue-eyed boy to love me like he should.” “Is my heart keeping you awake?/ You prefer my lips a dam and not a garden gate.” I began to experience the other thing Eve was getting at, the knowledge I had to ripen into: That men who loved me also kind of hated me. They hated that I could drive them crazy. That I could make them feel less powerful when they could not help me shut down my fears. They broke their love for me against the rock of my despair, and they were insulted. “God, please make me a stone/ I don’t want to feel anything anymore” It was some time after when I realized how much men who didn’t love me, who didn’t even know me, could hate me. Because I didn’t want to bear children … Because I had hair where they didn’t think it should be, or too short where they thought it should be longer - Called a dyke over a parking space … Because I pounded out my passion with my bare hands on an African drum - “You play that drum really angry,” he said. “When was the last time you got laid?” … Called a whore – meanwhile persistently reminded “but it’s the thirddate.” Why do we hate women so much ... still? God wanted us to eat from the tree, or knew nothing of the very human beings he made. Eve brought us closer to God in many ways, and we hate her for it. Maybe it’s because when we are self aware, we see our weaknesses. And that sucks. Her punishment was a legacy of pain ... but it did not take from her the power expressed in that pain. And so it is with all women, frightening, inscrutable creators we are … even when we choose NOT to create. In those ways, so like God. The bridge of a song is often the ah-ha moment. In my songs, they are typically a place where the narrator makes a choice, sees the “strings” leading to the hands at work and takes ownership. I was not ashamed of Eve’s legacy. I was not ashamed of my choices. So when we recorded the bridge of “Even Now,” I was inspired by some of the more rockin’ Patty Griffin recordings, particularly the feminist anthem, “Change.” “A woman drove you from the garden/ that’s how a woman made you great What would you be if not for me/ the very woman that you hate? And I have born my punishment/ and I have earned a better fate...” My songs are almost always aspirational. By that … I mean I write them before I completely believe them. Before I think I’m quite up to their task. I hope to embody Untermeyer’s opening line and my closing line, meeting God “unafraid.” See, I repeat the line, sung a little differently. Because I don’t bet for one second that Eve – sure as she spoke – wasn’t afraid. Defiant, perhaps, but still afraid. As women are even now.
3.
Podcast text: Hey, this is Heather Aubrey Lloyd. 11 days remain in 2017, the year that I put out my solo CD, "A Message in the Mess," happens to have 11 songs on it. So every day I'm going to count down the songs one by one, giving you a little bit of backstory on each of them. Today, it's Track 4, "Lunatic Yell." There are two things that can make a songwriter’s life difficult: A happy relationship and writer’s block. I found myself on the road, completely unable to write, for months. And to a person for whom blank paper and a micron drafting pen is almost all the seduction needed to get a song up … I felt completely lost without a story to tell. I’d always been obsessed with stories. As a nervous, curious kid, I consumed them as a lot of people do: to show me what I didn’t want to embarrass myself asking someone about. I was a fairy-tale enthusiast who became a journalist, desperate for answers: What could I mine from the experience of others that would help me understand being alive? When I took up songwriting, the hardest part was shedding journalism’s golden rule: Don’t fill in the gaps with what you don’t know. If you didn’t see it, you can’t make it up. It took me a long time to reacquaint myself with poetic license. I started by keeping a notebook, collecting the best eavesdropped or unconsciously brilliant lines I overheard in public, saving them for later. Possibly the best line came from a homeless man in Washington, D.C. on Halloween night. He was wrapped head to toe in caution tape, a bizarre, highlighter-yellow urban mummy. Our group, standing outside the club we were playing, commented on his “costume.” “This is no costume,” he said. “I am seriously fucked up.” I “bought” that line from Marcel there on the street for $10, and promised him I would put him in a song. It took me two years. ***(verse 1) Why did it take so long? I knew that line had something more to it than just being funny. It said something bigger about people. I just wasn’t sure what. It took meeting a second character in Oregon during the height of my writer’s block to figure it out. Allison, who introduced herself as “Jasmine (this month),” had dreadlocked hair that fell well past the ass of her patchwork skirt. She was very drunk, and her valley-girl voice seemed incongruous with the rest of her. Every sentence ended in upspeak. “I would completely take you to spain with me, if you want to go ……I have a present for you …” She held out her closed fist, ready to deliver its contents into the open palm I was supposed to present. I did the quick mental math on all the small unpleasantness one could house in a fist: tacks, spiders, something sticky … and decided I had to know. I offered my cupped palm. She deposited something unrecognizable: small, hard, white. I asked what it was. “Oh, that’s a piece of my tooth … it broke. And I don’t need it anymore … but maybe it will bring you luck…..” My first thought was not disgust. My first thought was: “I need a pen.” **verse 2 My second thought was: I will remember this girl for the rest of my life. In that moment, I remembered Marcel the same way, larger than life and crystal clear. Taken together, I realized something about life: Isn’t it insane that THAT’s what it takes to be memorable? It became the thesis/chorus of my song, “Lunatic Yell,” written 5 minutes later. **chorus 2** “Lunatic Yell” is what I call the “three-vignette folk song.” Each verse highlights a different side of your central thesis/chorus, which takes separate, seemingly unconnected observations from outside of you – from the lives of others – links them thematically by the chorus, and then applies them to you as a truth about human experience in the final verse, the “what does it all mean?” section of the song. We’re ALL as “fucked up” and dubiously costumed as Marcel. We’re all falling apart a little like Allison. I translated them into a story about everyone. My producer, Joel Ackerson, translated them into an intentionally stumbling mandolin line, beautifully meandering through the song just like my off-kilter characters. *** third verse*** What it all means is that it takes a lot to be memorable, and we all want to be memorable to at least someone. To be seen. To be part of someone’s story. And the crazy stories seem to keep a little longer, spread a little further. Marcel and Oregon Allison are such incredible characters, they could have come from a fairy tale. They could have been the ghosts of my composing past, guiding my way out of writer’s block. But they were also as real as you and me, and because I could see them … now you can, too. Oh, yeah, everyone always asks if I still have the tooth. Absolutely. I mean, it might be magic.
4.
Podcast text: Hey, this is Heather Aubrey Lloyd. 11 days remain in 2017, the year that I put out my solo CD, "A Message in the Mess," happens to have 11 songs on it. So every day I'm going to count down the songs one by one, giving you a little bit of backstory on each of them. Today, it's Track 3, "Cast Off." I love useful things that happen to be beautiful … almost as an afterthought. Among my collection: A metal rosary, the crucifix smoothed like a tumbled stone by a constant tide of a stranger’s prayers. An old general electric fan. A goose-neck desk lamp from the 20s. A huge desk with 1976 Farm Income tax returns accidentally glued to the insides of its drawers like makeshift shelf liners. I find used things are less precious and more satisfying … like the Velveteen Rabbit all in the process of becoming real. Little kids love the things they love hard. And they can become infatuated with mundane objects. Every stick a magic wand. Every Styrofoam kernel-filled package a snow day. Every seashell, a treasure. And aren’t they? – I mean: a free object you found, get to keep, get to do play with how you want, and won’t get in trouble if you break? There are adults who would LOVE to be able to find that kind of joy again. That kind of power. But we grow up and we lose it … except with one thing: bubble wrap. There was actually a published study conducted in the 90s about why we love bubble wrap so much. Psychology professor Kathleen M. Dillon provided historic supports for the anti-stress properties of futzing with stuff. In ancient Greece and modern Asia, folks carried smooth stones, called “fingering pieces” or “worry beads,” for their calming effects. That well-loved rosary is another such device. Test subjects who got to pop two sheets of Bubble Wrap felt instant gratification, and reported higher levels of calmness and alertness than the group denied this addictive, small-scale destruction. A compulsive physical pleasure. A release not unlike sex. Because science. ***verse 2 ** I think my ideal kind of love is one with the innocence of childhood and the pleasure of adulthood. I want to do it in pillow forts. I want to remember how to be as excited about the toy as the cardboard box that it came in. I want to see with the wonder of childhood all the quirky beauty and possibility in another person – and be myself seen – as the spaceship/treehouse/time machine that plain cardboard box me was truly meant to be. **verse 1** But the world grows up, and misuses us. People stop being able to see us, lose interest in their old toys and throw us away. I’d written plenty of break-up songs, but very few love songs, and I wanted to try my hand at one where I thought I could say something unique about a pretty overworked subject. “Cast Off” is my 3-vignette folk song again, just like “Lunatic Yell” in the last podcast episode. Those first two verses came quickly: cardboard boxes and bubble wrap. Each gave me an opportunity to link childhood and adulthood. I needed a third verse, and more examples of reclaimed things. I looked around my apartment: my old Return of the Jedi sleeping bag I cut up around the slumber party soda stains and up-cycled into a new pillowcase. Little woodworking projects. I thought of the tractor tire playground where I used to go to summer camp and the soup cans turned lanterns I buy every year from a vendor at the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival. Soup cans! That’s it. The way kids play telephone! What better third verse linking childhood, adulthood, love and relationships than one about communication. **verse 3** We had fun with this one in the studio. Almost every object I listed got its second life as an instrument: Soup cans. Wood pallets. Cardboard. And yes, bubble wrap. Producer Joel Ackerson tried to talk to me into a hidden track of nothing but bubble wrap percussion just to prove he had actually popped the stuff. In rhythm! Talk about committing to the song! **last chorus** “Cast Off” wasn’t about anyone in particular (sorry to burst your bubble wrap), but I was aspiring to the song, like with a lot of the songs I wrote for “A Message in the Mess.” I hadn’t found that love, yet, but I was figuring out what I wanted. Finding a way to be playful about love again. Not long after the first beloved blanky goes missing or the second or third major heartbreak, we get more protective about our stuff and we take fewer chances on anything that seems a little scratch-and-dent. But we are all scratch-and-dent, and someone should find us and bring us back to life repurposed as something imaginative and fun. This song is all about rediscovering play. Playing with the meaning of words, like what it means to “cast off” … maybe you’re discarded, or maybe you’re setting out on some incredible new journey, with the right crew.
5.
Podcast text: Hey, this is Heather Aubrey Lloyd. 11 days remain in 2017, the year that I put out my solo CD, "A Message in the Mess," happens to have 11 songs on it. So every day I'm going to count down the songs one by one, giving you a little bit of backstory on each of them. Today, it's Track 9, "Pollock." I’ve always had incredibly vivid nightmares. As an artist, I learned early on not to take them for granted: inspiration is content and stories – even nightmares – are useful. Even the ones where I lose my voice. What if I could never sing again? ... I mean. We sing before we can write. We sing before we know how to care if we’re bad at it. Children’s vocal cords are designed to let them wail for hours and never lose their voice. But my voice started flickering like a ghost, fading between life and death. And I was wide awake. The doctor discovered a cumulative problem: an infection, acid reflux and overuse. I was mandated vocal rest. True terror is not knowing if THIS NOW is the new normal. But it’s in moments like these when you realize how quickly we adapt. It was hard to stop talking ... then it was easy. I could smile without laughing. I could order my coffee EXACTLY as I liked it without anyone even noticing I did it in complete silence. “The usual?” nod yes. “Whip cream on that?” nod no. “That’ll be...” and I hand them money. Obviously it works best somewhere they know you. Still, it taught me two things: your relationship with your barista is sacred, and communication is not lost just because you lose your preferred method. *if I cannot sing ....” Observing my vow of silence, of course I thought incessantly about communication, and the incredible burden now put on my first sound. What would it be? That’s a lot of pressure, choosing a first word. Makes you kind of grateful we didn’t have to choose it the first time around, our eager parents staring at us, cam-cording, assigning meaning to our every mumble when we just needed to burp. A word was way too much pressure. I started by humming,” THE WAY kids first sing to themselves. ***La dee da da da”*** The sound of my own voice startled me. And the analyzing started: do I sound the same? Does what’s in my head now come out differently or wrong? Is it muscle memory any more, or now – in this second life – would I overthink it all to death? **bridge** Unwelcomed or misunderstood, artistic expression seems worthless. Is it bird crap on the hood of your car, or a Jackson Pollock painting? It could depend almost entirely on the audience and the expectation. What if birds being scatological is actually underappreciated visual scat singing? **verse 2** Once I seize on an idea like that while songwriting, I do research. Sure enough, Jackson Pollock died in a car crash, driving under the influence. That’s a rough story. But maybe it inspires another story where he was reincarnated as a flock of birds, drawn inexplicably to cars … and still trying to create his art, using whatever voice he had, whatever way he could. ***but there’s a message in the mess..”** My song, “Pollock,” was the first written in my reborn voice, full of tangled references to verbal and visual and symbolic communication, as a human being-turned-bird might try to interpret flashes remembered from a past life. Ellipses. Telephone poles. Musical staffs. Paintings. Poetry. Morse Code. Slant rhymes. Songs. **verse 1** When we arranged and recorded the song, we added yet another layer of communication, turning the birds into a string quartet, pizacattoing the most beautiful poop and led in flight by Zach Teran’s ambling, floating, bow-drawn bass line. **instr** Obviously the line, “A Message In the Mess,” became central to this recording project and the CD’s title. To me, it encapsulates all the songs on the album. Each hoping they connect. Each an adjustment, a reaction where I processed some new normal. It’s what we are all spending our lives doing: Trying to sort through a pile of noise and experiences we’re not sure are good or bad or useful. I like to hope there’s something useful in all of it, and that I’ll always find some way to tell you about it.
6.
Podcast text: Hey, this is Heather Aubrey Lloyd. 11 days remain in 2017, the year that I put out my solo CD, "A Message in the Mess," happens to have 11 songs on it. So every day I'm going to count down the songs one by one, giving you a little bit of backstory on each of them. Today, it's Track 7, "The Animal Crackers Song." I’m going to tell you the truth. The worst IS going to happen. Eventually … I’m going to run out of ideas. What I will not run out of, however, are the 500 tiny slips of paper bearing random words and phrases in a dozen handwritings, collected over the two-and-half years I asked audiences to tell me what to write about. 13 of those songs became my first solo CD, “Samples,” inspired by suggestions as short as the word “kazoo” and as bizarre as “the owls see everything.” I love working from prompts. It’s the songwriting equivalent of finding animals in the shapes of clouds … on a deadline. I knew I had arrived when I was asked to participate in an annual, by-invitation-only songwriting challenge. A lot of songwriters I respect were already regular contributors: David Glaser, ellen cherry, Brad Yoder, Victoria Vox. Here’s how it works: During the month of August, you are assigned a topic, five words you have to get into the song … and every year, no matter what the prompt is … it’s extra points if you can somehow get the word monkey into it. The topic this time around: your favorite childhood snack food. Funny songs are like great parties: The fun requires much harder planning and preparation than you’d ever think. I did more research for this monkey song about snack food than I did for any other song I’ve ever written. I wrote out pages of snack-food-related words (a bank I often employ at the beginning of the songwriting process). And, proving that your real life does not always make the best art … my favorite childhood snack was cheerios … how was I ever getting a monkey into a song about cheerios? The deadline ticked it’s reminder. Better to pick animal crackers instead. **verse 1** Picking animal crackers narrowed my research questions: What are all the animals that have ever been animal crackers? Do they change? How do they get chosen? Are animals that would be difficult to simplify into a cookie cutter knocked out of the running? Has a monkey ever been one? It’s a pretty select group, and in the last contest held to add a hundredth-anniversary cracker to the pantheon, voters chose a koala (which beat out walrus, cobra and penguin). So … maybe Nabisco could be petitioned? And the idea came: what if animal crackers were the equivalent of the Hollywood walk of fame? Animals would be vying for the recognition, but what if you were kind of a lesser-known animal? Cool, but really weird looking? What if your likeness wouldn’t transfer well to a cookie? Does that mean you shouldn’t get to be represented? And, it seems both a gorilla AND a monkey have been so immortalized. Their cookies don’t even look that different! That wouldn’t sit well with me if I was an animal, appealing for broader diversity. Yes, you have to think this way when you write songs: what’s my motivation as a pissed-off, underappreciated wanna-be animal cracker with a dream? But Isn’t this guy kind of a champion for us all? ** Because I was writing a sort of children’s song, I decided to elevate a lot of the vocabulary to keep it from being too cute, including complex alliteration to sort of show off a bit. I mean, my cracker candidate with his letter campaign wasn’t the only one competing here. I had a song contest to win, against people like Brad Yoder, who once wrote a song about a lite brite that would make you weep. ** Getting to the end of the song here … so … Who is writing this letter? That’s gotta be the punchline. The weirder the better (I’d hate to render my song someday obsolete by not predicting what sorts of animals might become crackers in the future). My google search filled up with questions like: “Are there any aquatic animal crackers?” I settle on the rules of my universe: Goldfish crackers and knock-off brands don’t count … this guy wants the big time. And if my lyrics are smart … well, he should be, too. **end of song** I spent at least two weeks researching, one-and-half weeks false starting, three days giving up … and exactly one hour writing the song. The 11th hour, literally. Never underestimate the power of a deadline. What I wound up with was third place in the contest, along with a smart, ridiculous and utterly original song that inspired a similarly ridiculous utterly original arrangement. A kazoo orchestra (I imagine the singing slugs from the animated movie, “Flushed Away” by the way), and a tuba elephant. We couldn’t help but laugh, even as we made it. Sometimes you just need a crazy idea … to get you out of your shell.
7.
Podcast text: Hey, this is Heather Aubrey Lloyd. 11 days remain in 2017, the year that I put out my solo CD, "A Message in the Mess," happens to have 11 songs on it. So every day I'm going to count down the songs one by one, giving you a little bit of backstory on each of them. Today, it's Track 5, "I Don't Know What I Want." Sometimes you just have to get something out, even though you don’t want to do it, even though you’ll feel better afterward. Writing autobiographical songs that tap into fresh pain is a lot like throwing up. And if you make a living from your songs, it’s a lot like hanging your vomit in a gallery and hoping the critics appreciate the color composition of the carrots and corn. A fan once told me that sad songs appeal to everyone because, though there are happy people, even the happiest person among us has been sad. And for some, it feels like sadness is all we know. That weepy playlist is actually a soundtrack to our necessary mourning periods and an answer to our pain-drenched need: Tell me I am not alone. As listeners, they are our first map out of despair. As writers, they are a way to acknowledge and distribute the pain onto a community of shoulders, who ease the burden and witness our trauma. Until, one day, it’s just a song. It finally came up and out because of a toothbrush. It took months for me to unceremoniously dump his in the trash. Then, still months later, I walked into my bathroom to find a guest’s toothbrush sitting on the sink. I completely broke down. Such a simple symbol of company and intimacy. It had been so long, and I was so lonely. **I wanted somebody’s toothbrush** My friend was singing in the shower, and his voice was the first in the apartment that had not been my own in longer than I could remember. I actually wrote a verse to that effect, as well, but it wasn’t as unique or as powerful as a toothbrush. It hit the cutting room floor of the studio a year later. Because that’s the other thing break-up songs do: That visceral gut reaction can be honed, edited, processed once it’s out of you and onto paper, at a more objective distance. I handwrite all my lyrics, and when I finally think they’re done-ish, I type them and treat them from there on out as an editor. In journalism they taught us: it’s easier to kill your babies when they are not staring back at you with your own hand. This is when it begins to become “the song” and not “the pain.” Once the flood gate had opened, the pragmatic journalist in me started with the facts. With direct quotes. He was a stunning writer, and I borrowed from him regularly for a decade. I wanted a first line to be as visceral and plain as my numbness, so I just threw it up: My shallow desire to be loved while I was still pretty. His impossible promise to love me while I went gray. My ring he secretly traced, keeping the drawn circle in his wallet. It was February when he left. **verse 1 into chorus** He left me in complete emotional dark, with a feeling I could not put into words … until I put exactly THAT feeling into words. Simple. Universal: What do I do now? I Don’t know what I want. I let that confession hang in air of the song a long time to try to make the listener feel my fear, my emptiness, my stalling out, my broken compass. Don’t we always want … something? It’s kind of terrifying. I recorded take after take, trying to capture a vulnerability I don’t always get out of my famously big voice. I prevented the mixing engineer from pitch correcting two blue notes. Nope. I want everything layed out here bare. **last chorus** Of course your heartbreak playlist works its way into your heartbreak song. What was my playlist? A LOT of Anthony da Costa. I nodded to that using suspended, unresolved chords that referenced his work. And the Leslie on the electric guitar? Straight-up reminded me of Roxette’s “It Must Have Been Love.” I wanted this thing to sound like the last dance at the prom. The end of the movie soundtrack. This was our finale. **opening** And whether I could believe it or not at the time, I wrote myself a way out of what I felt. What did I want? Someone to love me like they couldn’t help it. **but I wanted, involuntary** The song ends on borrowed line from the Evesdropping Notebook I mentioned in a previous podcast. Our artist friend, Amy Law, actually said it about her cat, falling off a table. Can I hate a man who’s misuse of me gave me no less than a dozen objectively good songs? When we were together, he once expressed disappointment that I hadn’t written my best break-up songs for HIM. Huh. Well … I spent almost a year throwing up our definitive breakup song, and I swore it would be the last I ever wrote for him. And really, it’s mostly about myself. Honestly, pieces of him find their way into a lot of what I write. But once you can stop judging an experience or a person as bad … it’s all just good material.
8.
Podcast text: Hey, this is Heather Aubrey Lloyd. 11 days remain in 2017, the year that I put out my solo CD, "A Message in the Mess," also happens to have 11 songs on it. So every day I'm going to count down the songs one by one, giving you a little bit of backstory on each of them. Today, it's Track 1, "Ask For Me." I was once asked: “What’s the most successful song you’ve ever written?” How do you measure a song’s success? In how many people download it? In how many heartfelt letters you get about it? Maybe how hard you had to work on it, or – my personal favorite – how many people did I make cry? My other favorite yardstick is: Does it hold up over time, evolving constantly to matter all over again? A love story that’s beautiful until it’s not, and then even that part is beautiful, too. specific enough and vague enough to work in almost any era, and to soundtrack almost any moment. If I have to pick from mine, that song is “Ask For Me.” I still wish I’d been able to perform it at one wedding in particular: The two told me they were brought together, drawn to my song playing at a party. It’s stories like that, people finding themselves in your song, that can keep it fresh for you … especially when the love song you once wrote asking someone to take a chance on you becomes just as appropriate later when love is slipping away. It’s the only song I’ve ever written like that: as true at the beginning of love as it was at its end. Maybe because “Ask for me” itself is such a timeless phrase, and means so many things. I chose it for exactly that reason. I love exploring the multiple meanings of language in songs. Asking after a person you’ve been told to come find. Asking someone for a favor on someone else’s behalf. Or what felt like a fresh, bold statement, especially for me: Hey, YOU … ask me for myself … and I just might give it to you. Ask because I can’t ask. We courted each other with wordplay. I couldn’t ask for him - He belonged to someone else. There was a spark, but nobody could act on it. It helped that he lived more than 9 hours away, and we only came through to play the bar in his town a couple times a year. **if you go down to the bar** The second he was single … I wrote the song, originally with the intent of playing it when he came to a show. Throwing down the gauntlet. Songwriters are so weird. We can’t just talk to people. We have to write them an opus to ask them on a date. It was bold, but it was timid. I’d been through a lot, and he was starting up a fire in me I thought was out. But mostly, he’s a red-head, and the fire line in the song came from that. And here’s a deep, dark secret: “finding the melody,” I got that line from “Interview With the Vampire.” I liked the idea of remembering the lost music of falling in love. **broken down, tired** The song … like our love … went through a major edit. For years, the bridge was a desperate, repeated statement I thought was super profound: “We only get what we ask for, not what we deserve.” But, my producer, Joel Ackerson, helped me see that the entire song was already screaming that … no need to beat people over the head with it. Instead, we took the reprise of the first verse and upped the vocal anty, giving the desperation to the performance. Showing you instead of telling you. Here’s another secret: the vocal take on the entire song is the scratch vocal we did in a Basement here in Baltimore on a hundred-dollar mic. It was so raw we knew we might never get it twice: **reprised verse 1** One of the other edits was the lead instrument. It went from my acoustic guitar to a sparse piano and textural electric guitar. Some of this was because of my changing relationship with the song. I wasn’t still asking for this guy 5 years later, but I was still singing the song every night to bars of people all over the country … asking them to listen to me. The clinking of plates in the beginning of the recording and those single notes of piano signified what was in my mind when I sang it now: Me in the corner of a noisy restaurant, nearly unaccompanied. Then a kind of dream sequence of a full band and full production. And it comes back to reality in the end, just me and my guitar. Joel arranges all of his songs in this cinematic way. And I loved having him sing with me, another voice interpreting my feelings all over again. He told me when he recorded it in his studio out near Reno, NV, he was nearly screaming: **second chorus**? And so the song survives … just like the red-head’s and my friendship … many years beyond our love, and changing in meaning to stay relevant. I can never thank him enough for the gift of this song. And especially today, on his birthday, it’s the gift I give to you.
9.
Podcast text: Hey, this is Heather Aubrey Lloyd. 11 days remain in 2017, the year that I put out my solo CD, "A Message in the Mess," also happens to have 11 songs on it. So every day I'm going to count down the songs one by one, giving you a little bit of backstory on each of them. Today, it's Track 8, "No Lantern." I’ve been songwriting seriously for about 16 years now. Of course, sometimes I get burned out on it. When that used to happen, I’d head downtown to take refuge in another rhythmic, lyrical art form: slam poetry. In my 20s, I’d vacation from music at poetry nights in Baltimore like Be Free Fridays (which is still running) and my beloved, departed Slamicide. It was held weekly in the basement of a Cosi bread company at Hopkins University that’s now a 7-11. Underneath cases now stocked with slurpees and beef jerky, I once heard national champions, people who appeared on tv for Def Poetry Jam, and local wordsmiths who’s originality and delivery gave me a creative jolt. I published a little chap book of my own before I ever had the guts to release a solo CD. At Slamicide, I developed a love of slant rhyme, alliteration, homonyms and idiomatic expressions. “No Lantern” is a slam poem that happens to be set to music. ** verse 1** There are two rhyme schemes trading off within the lines: the EEs of feed/deeper/leaving/feeling/evening/bring and the Ahs of starving/garden/laughter. The rhymes are slant … never resolving too easily. That’s a great way to create tension, but it’s also a great way to show off a little. Slant rhymes feel more personal, more specific because it’s all about similarities your ear and your pronunciation finds in words that aren’t that closely related. It’s a lot less likely anyone else would choose the same combinations. It almost forces originality. Meanwhile, the rhythm is basically a sonnet. Sing-songy. Da da da. It keeps it an earworm, another goal I had in keeping the chorus very simple: **chorus** The song is also an exploration of the homonym “light” (as illumination, as weight, as depth of meaning, as hope) and idiomatic expressions for love like “carrying a torch” or “leaving a light on.” I was led to the expression “Keep Your Lantern Lit,” and its symbolic meanings through my friend, Kipyn Martin’s incredible song of the same title, about holding on to hope that two people will find each other at a train station. I didn’t want to find anybody. I was enjoying my single life on the road, knowing many/loving none as Gregg Allman would say. I had an oasis though, in the form of a particular friend. We could be madly in love for a week at a time, when we both had the time, meeting back up every year or so to do it all over again. We kept it light, and no one was carrying a torch. One such week, we road tripped half the country together during a terrible drought. One careless spark could have set the countryside ablaze – tell me God’s not a songwriter. My companion was both a songwriter and a chain smoker, and I found myself moved watching him shelter every cigarette butt from the wind, mindful of every ember. For someone who could be haphazard handling the emotions of others, (and I’m not just talking about him, here), it made me feel uncomfortably warm toward him and irrationally angry. I kept my thoughts to myself, and scribbled feverishly in my notebook. **verse 2, through I know me** Musically, “No Lantern” also tested my discomfort with partnership, becoming the most collaborative track on the CD. I’d written a guitar line very different from my usual fingerwork, intentionally copying the signature playing style of the very man it was about. But why settle, I thought, once I was recording the CD? I invited him to play on the album version. The only payment he asked was for me to fix a semantic error in one of the lyrics. Once we had that down, Zach Teran went to work with his fretless, crafting a Pastorious-level bass part so complicated we marveled at how it found every space it could without making the arrangement feel cluttered. And percussionist, J.K., helped us work out a very Paul Simon kind of rhythm section to create something I could have never achieved alone: a super dancy groove. **middle instrumental** That left just the final vocal take to record, and life starting to get in the way: my sinus infection delayed all the vocals a few days, and my producer, Joel, had to step out for a softball game with his local league. I got ready for bed, trying to relax. Maybe we weren’t gonna finish the album in time … At 11pm, Joel rolled in from the game and convinced me to take an 11th hour crack at the vocals. He cued it up and went to take a shower while I tried to figure out if I needed to put a bra back on … I mean … did I need it for breath support? I’d never really thought about it. I never sang in my pajamas before. Regardless, Braless, alone in the dark of Sparks, NV, I did 5 straight takes and hit save.
10.
Podcast text: Hey, this is Heather Aubrey Lloyd. 11 days remain in 2017, the year that I put out my solo CD, "A Message in the Mess," also happens to have 11 songs on it. So every day I'm going to count down the songs one by one, giving you a little bit of backstory on each of them. Today, it's Track 11, "Phantom." I’ve been a lot of things in my life: a journalist, a camp counselor, a side man for Dar Williams, a fitting room attendant at Target, and a teacher. A day job often supports your art in more ways than one. Songwriters shouldn’t know only about songwriting. You need new people, new stories and new experiences to keep you and your writing from becoming too mired in yourself, and losing touch with the real world. Nothing is more real than losing an arm at 17 years old, and I might never have learned about all the nuances of phantom pain if one of my students hadn’t decided to show me his scar. **first verse** One day, due to some testing, Robert was the only one in the English class I was subbing. “Miss Lloyd?” he said. “Do you want to see my scar?” I had been a journalist. All information had value to me. Of course, I wanted to see. And as a substitute who was developing a love of special education, I also knew this was an important moment for him: He was opening up, normalizing his situation. This is how you eradicate shame. He stretched the neck of his white t-shirt. Tomatoes split most often just as they're ripening. They grow faster than the outer skin is able to, but they also have the ability to sew themselves back together. In the end, they look unusual, but are still good. His shoulder looked exactly like that. He’d taken a turn too fast, rolled his car into a forest. He’d taken a tree through the chest. He showed me the picture: on the stretcher looking like it grew FROM him, massive and jagged. Holding the blood in. **verse 2** That day Robert taught his teacher something she didn’t know: that phantom “pain” was an umbrella term. For each amputee, it’s different. For him, it was phantom itching. God, that must be the worst, I thought. The ultimate itch that can’t be scratched, and no one can really see it but you. I had all my limbs, but Robert’s story gave me the words I’d lacked to explain heartache – a tired subject – in a new way. I, too, knew what it felt like to long for something long gone, severed when it was once a part of you, to feel the nerves of a thing invisible to everyone else, but maybe pain had never been the right word, exactly. In my case, it was also more of an involuntary donor transplant. His heart … my heart … had been given to someone new. **re-given I hear … ** It took me almost a decade to record the definitive version. I bumped it from an ilyAIMY CD at the last minute back in 2009, replacing it with another track I was connecting with more at the time, the original, acoustic version of “Ask For Me.” And then, remember that guy from Clear and I Don’t Know What I Want? Yeah … same guy. He came back and made the song true again, and finally I knew exactly how I wanted it to sound: as if Alice in Chains covered Jeffery Foucault’s “I Dream An Old Lover.” We threw a huge ghost delay on the banjo for obvious reasons. And we got that “Rooster”-esque grind and drag in the percussion: **instrumental section after first chorus** “Phantom” has stayed relevant and consistently one of the most popular songs in my catalog because I built what is yet another tired break up song on the foundation of someone else’s powerful story. The metaphor implies all kinds of devastating losses. Because Robert told me his story, “Phantom” gets to be bigger than he or I, a song about ALL loss and lingering sensation: the loss of limb, the departure of a partner, the death of a child. We can’t always grow back what we’ve lost, but we can share our stories, shed our shame, admit to all the things we still have to learn … and most importantly … listen to someone, something other than our one-track hearts.
11.
Podcast text: Hey, this is Heather Aubrey Lloyd. 11 days remain in 2017, the year that I put out my solo CD, "A Message in the Mess," also happens to have 11 songs on it. So every day I'm going to count down the songs one by one, giving you a little bit of backstory on each. Today, it's Track 2, "Good Heart." New Year’s Eve. And then there was one. No song defined 2017 for me more than “Good Heart.” This year, it brought me a 4th place finish at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival’s Troubadour competition. A Most-Wanted Artist selection at the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival in New York. An honorable mention from the Rocky Mountain Folks Fest in Colorado. And, as 2018 dawns, I am also a semi-finalist for the prestigious Bernard-Ebb Songwriting Award, awaiting the results next week. [NOTE: SHE WON!! $10,000!!] I’m not gonna lie - I knew I had something with this one. The ink was nearly wet when I played it live for the first time at ChurchKorner house concert in New York. The crowd went wild. I’d brought them Berger Cookies, true, but I really like to think it was mostly the song. “Good Heart” was a Frankenstein, pieced together during a terrible storm and a subsequent train ride, an amalgam of abandoned lyrics from a file in my apartment I call “The Lyric Orphanage.” In fact, most writers call such place a “morgue.” In a newspaper office, for example, it’s a collection of old cuttings, photographs, and information. While snowed in, I emptied the file all over the floor: napkins, torn loose leaf, post-it notes, articles - a carpet of unfinished ideas. Some never pursued, others abandoned in their nascent stages (hence “orphanage”), all housed for someday when they might grow up into a song of their own. I sorted out a handful that appealed to me, looking for connections in the disconnected. So, Okay, here’s an abandoned song that started getting too heavy handed on an Easter-egg metaphor, but had a couple good lines: **verse 2** A poetry professor once showed me an eye-opening exercise. Each student wrote one poetic line on a slip of paper. He mixed them in a bag, drew 10, and lined them up on the overhead. “Is it a poem?” he said. I could almost feel my brain forcing connections, building backstory, curating what I knew full well was nothing more than an accident, an unintentional collection. We can’t help ourselves. We’re hard-wired to do it. Might as well use it for good. A shred of paper with one phrase caught my eye: “the bud, bloomed once, now a monument.” Man, I’d completely forgotten that. An orchid bloomed five times for my ex, but refused to bloom even once for me. Its leaves stayed a spiteful green, a living tombstone. I didn’t have the song … then. I started building now around that line. My brain stitched the unrelated ideas together. Now, it’s not even about me anymore, and I’m storyboarding whatever makes it cohesive: **verse 1** The snowstorm wasn’t long enough to finish it, or to set it to music. I shoveled myself out and hopped a train to New York for a show. The hours on the train had me fidgeting, drumming on my knees. We have a tendency to use the human heart to excuse a lot. Even when someone says “bless your heart” or a person has a “good heart,” it’s an insult or a consolation prize. Like: “He killed his mama, but he has a good heart.” An involuntarily machine chugging forward in us when we’d rather die gets a pretty bad rap and a pretty huge, unappreciated responsibility. So, what’s a good heart? One that physically works, when it feels like nothing else does. One directive: beat. **bridge** Having overworked at least one of the song fragments before, I knew to quit while I was ahead this time around. It’s a modern take on a work song, an anthem with a catchy repeat. And having drummed it out on my knees the whole ride to New York, it never felt like it needed much more instrumentation than percussion. It was another kind of heartbeat. One of my ideas was to keep all the instrumentation percussion-based, with only a jazzy bass line to provide a complimenting melody to the vocals. Zach Teran had that in the bag. And for the percussion, Joel, my producer, knew just where to go – Dean Rossi’s house. Dean is an avid collector of world percussion, and with one phone call, The Novelists and I were soon in his living room, shaking and clanking every strange object, collecting up a grab bag of banging implements. Trash symbols, guiros, agogo bells, djembes. We went back to the studio and tried them all, even the sound of rhythmic exhaling, until we found the mixture: **instrumental section** The melody was inspired by the chances I was already taking in the studio, rediscovering similarly abandoned sections of my voice. I intentionally wrote lots of head/chest voice breaks to force myself to get more comfortable transitioning. Lastly, I tried out my other idea, a bizarre, scat-like backing vocal that sometimes veered into gibberish, other times into a stutter step of the main line, meant to emulate the heart murmur they found in me when I was a teenager. The one that turned out just to be an extra gurgle made by my heart, just doing its regular good job. **second chorus** Heading into 2018, my heart is healthy – and I’m happy to say its contentment hasn’t suffocated my songwriting. Since “A Message in the Mess” was released in February, I’ve managed to both get engaged AND write another album’s worth of material. When you make a living pouring your heart out … you can’t help but be incredibly grateful to have so many people, like you, filling it right back up again. Happy 2018.

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PAY WHAT YOU WANT! Even FREE, as a thank you for visiting the new bandcamp page. Heather celebrated the first birthday of "A Message in the Mess" with a year-end, countdown podcast intimately highlighting the making of each song. Part nostalgic review, part songwriting masterclass, as funny, sad and revealing as the album itself. (Full text of each episode can be found in the lyrics sections, and "A Message in the Mess" is available here on bandcamp).

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released December 31, 2017

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Heather Aubrey Lloyd Baltimore, Maryland

Recovering reporter turned songwriter, Heather Aubrey Lloyd also co-fronts Baltimore’s ilyAIMY. Her 2017 solo release, “A Message in the Mess,” spotlights Lloyd’s emotive alto and a polished departure from her band’s alt-folk grit. Awards from the likes of No Depression Magazine, Telluride Troubadour, National Women’s Music Fest, etc. soon followed. Lloyd will release new music in late 2020. ... more

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