Album Review – Olivia Ellen Lloyd’s “Do It Myself”

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photo: Aaron May

#570 (Americana) with some #510.1 (Classic Country) on the Country DDS.


Some albums you simply enjoy. Then other albums you listen to, and you feel like you’re living inside of them, and subsequently, they live inside of you. You carry their sentiment and melodies with you throughout the day. The stories impact you like they’re your own. You become emotionally invested in the moments, and the outcomes. They’re more than albums. They’re collections of emotional catalysts that you call upon because their potency is uncommon.

Olivia Ellen Lloyd’s Do It Myself is one of those albums. If you’re one of the souls it captures, it’s an album you’re destined to return to all year, and in subsequent years to come. It’s one of those albums that you measure all of the other albums against as the year unfolds. You could consider it a breakup record, but it’s a bit more textured and varied than that. It’s definitely a heartbreaker, but it’s not fair to characterize it as a downer. It’s leaves you too fulfilled for that.

Originally from West Virginia, but seasoned in many varied and faraway places such as New York City and Guatemala, Olivia Ellen Lloyd puts her travelogue of love to rhyme, making beautiful artistic expressions out of infernal and messy situations. Whether it’s falling in love with a fleeting acquaintance that haunts you in the aftermath, moving on from a do nothing man worth leaving behind, or conjuring inner-strength to overcome an exceptional heartbreak, Olivia Ellen Lloyd makes it all feel real and immediate.

Do It Myself is strongly an Americana singer/songwriter album, but with plenty of country inflections to keep a decidedly country fan listening intently, including regular appearances from steel guitar. The song “Every Good Man” is country as much as it’s anything else. And right after the album reaches its rock ‘n roll peak with the excellent “Knotty Wood,” Lloyd chases it with the sumptuous country shuffle “Bound To Lose.”



But this is one of those records where you don’t really harp on the style of the music as much as the songs themselves. Yes, the fiddle finds the sweetest accents of the melody of the song “Live With It,” making the listening experience extra moving. But it’s the heartbreaking little vignettes found in the verses that submerge you in a sweet, yet sorrow-filled mood over the existential crises the characters endure, and how they remind you of your own little catastrophes that can emerge on a daily basis.

“Billy Pilgrim” might be a conventional breakup song, but it captures the rage in a more honest and articulate manner than most, and really kills you in its details like the line, “Sometimes I wish that you could see it, her waiting patiently for you at the kitchen door” about the poor dog caught in the middle. “Knotty Wood” might go full on rock, but the passages it shares marking the passing of time and the painting over of our memories are as palpable and delicate as a poem’s.

Olivia Ellen Lloyd successfully captures her unbridled emotions here, losing little or nothing in the translation to lyrics, or synthesizing them into songs. Producer and instrumentalist Mike Robinson does such an excellent job caretaking these songs to your ears, brightening them and building them up only in the ways that compliment the sentiments, and center Olivia’s emotionally-laden voice.

Like many of the best albums of a given year, Olivia Ellen Lloyd’s Do It Myself is under threat of going under-appreciated. After all, it took a couple of months to get comments published about it here. Even if the entire work doesn’t resonate with you, at least a song or two probably will. And for others, the album will overtake you, and you will allow it to because it stirs the intoxicating emotions of life.

8.6/10

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