SPOTLIGHT: “All Risk, All Reward.” Olivia Ellen Lloyd is Ready to ‘Do It Myself’

Editor’s Note: Olivia Ellen Lloyd is No Depression’s Spotlight Artist for March 2025. Learn more about her life and upcoming album, Do It Myself, to be released March 21, in this feature, and keep an eye out for more all month long.

Olivia Ellen Lloyd’s debut and sophomore albums have a few things in common. Both albums are self-released, and while making each she was living through the demise of a romantic relationship. For her first album, it was the end of a marriage; during the second, the dissolution of the long-term partnership that followed. But, although in both cases, great, independent art came from devastating heartbreak, the Lloyd who released 2021’s Loose Cannon and this month’s Do It Myself (releasing March 21st) could not be further apart.

By all accounts, Lloyd’s self-released debut, Loose Cannon was a big success. It garnered wide critical acclaim, a million streams, and most importantly, people came to the shows. It should have set her up for a record deal, even with a small, independent label. But when it came time to shop Do It Myself around, she couldn’t get anyone to listen to it. 

“I got kind of sick of waiting,” Lloyd says. “I was three years from my last record. I felt like I watched a lot of people throwing money at projects that were, at best, underdeveloped, and at worst, kind of cynical approximations of the work I was trying to do. And I was just like, ‘Fuck it, I’m gonna put this really great music out and not worry so much about institutional support.’” 

Lloyd’s toughness and self-determination didn’t happen overnight. They was hard-won on the heels of a lot of rejection, losing herself in codependent romantic relationships, and not always trusting her talent. This version though has come such a long way from the West Virginian-born girl with the larger-than-life presence.

The Lloyd who recorded Loose Cannon was terrified of her natural vocal prowess. She’d spent her whole life being told she was too loud a singer. “I have this giant voice and I’ve learned a lot about her. She kind of exists as a separate thing for me. I spent a lot of time shying away from her bigness… I was Ethel Merman in a previous life for sure. 100% I think that’s who I was,” she says. Make no mistake, Lloyd has command over her instrument on Loose Cannon. Her voice is clean and bright, cracking in all the right places. But on Do It Myself, it sounds more broken-in, with even more character. She treads less carefully, takes more chances, dips into her lower register, but that same sheer force is ever-present.

“I think in the last three years I’ve learned how to really dial into the power of softness, the power of loudness, the power of those dynamics,” she says. ”None of those things have to compromise the colors of your voice and the strength and the accent that comes out, and all of these things that I was maybe, on the first record, in my head about.” 

Through a bit of grassroots fundraising, Lloyd decided to finance the recording and release of Do It Myself, an aptly named album in retrospect. “I’ve spent a lot of my life waiting for permission or waiting for it to feel okay. And this record, it very much felt like, ‘Nope, I’m just gonna do this and y’all can catch up with me later,’” she says. “I think I’m coming out of the last few years with just a lot more clarity on my mission and purpose as a writer. It’s part of what made putting this out independently feel okay… All risk, all reward.” 

For the recording of Do It Myself—which she made with her same Loose Cannon producer  and close friend Mike Robinson and a slew of friends—she fought off those early career anxieties and got more comfortable with her wide vocal range, running toward instead of away from it. This newfound confidence suits a set of songs about letting go of baggage and celebrating all the different parts of herself that contradict and compliment each other, each as worthy as all the rest.

As its title suggests, Lloyd is exploring autonomy, in her own story and in the stories she’s collected along the way. Across 10 twangy stunners studded with pedal steel, mandolin, and fiddle, she reflects on relationships that didn’t work, ones that almost did, ones she has only imagined, and crucially, the one she has with herself. She takes a good, hard look at some of her less flattering personality traits and habits on what she calls the “journey to self-ownership.”

On the somber ballad “Live With It,” Lloyd reflects back on her 20s, a time of relentless, brutal loss—of a dear friend, a boyfriend, her father—that put her squarely in survival mode. Alongside a plucking banjo on “Puny Sorrows,” she sings sweetly about the impermanence of a rollercoaster love affair and her own part in perpetuating its cyclical dysfunction. And in “You,” one of her finest vocal performances on the record, she tries her best not to believe all the hurtful things spewed at her in a fight.

“This record kind of is about what happens after you get past the ‘I’m just going to make it through day to day, how do I build a life?’” she says. “I actually want to live alone. I want to be autonomous. I want to take a crack at a real music career with a legitimate business and see how far I can take it on my own. I am safe outside of a relationship. I am valuable outside of a relationship with men.”

Do It Myself also brims with sly, dark humor and hope. The album’s title track is an earnest empowerment tune that manages to uplift without grandiosity. It’s about the adjustment to enjoying all of life’s simple pleasures and routines without the safety net of a companion. “Every Good Man” skillfully employs comedic timing and pacing as Lloyd says the quiet parts of a breakup out loud:

Behind every good man

There’s a woman who’s tired

Keeping the lights on

And putting out your fires

And if that is all you wanted now

If anyone would do

I hope you find someone as desperate as you

“Billy Pilgrim,” named (with a wink) for the Kurt Vonnegut character, was inspired by the feeling of being totally unseen by another person, but stifling yourself anyway because the fear of being alone outweighs everything. “I will rage, I will rage until the storm within me fades /Then crawl back home to sleep it off alone,” she sings. It was a particularly bad date that left her with this track, an experience of being man-splained to on a topic she was well-versed in. The song perfectly encapsulates that deflating sensation of suppressing your opinions in favor of seeming agreeable and easy—something Lloyd admits she did for far too long.

“The desire to be loved and understood can be in conflict sometimes,” Lloyd says. “I’m hoping that as time moves forward in general, I move further and further away from that impulse. I have a very strong personality, I just do. I always have. I have in the past and still to some degree try to temper that strength with a kind of ‘aw shucks’ mentality that I think women, especially, are encouraged to do to prove that we are not a threat. I am, for sure, a threat to people who wanna wreck my peace… I am abrasive, I am intense. I’m not saying those are good or bad things. It’s simply true and always has been,” she says. Going through back-to-back breakups while making these records offered her a ripe opportunity to reevaluate her role in a relationship and why she found herself staring down the same dynamics. “I am a threat” merch feels like a satisfying foregone conclusion, especially coming from the Lloyd who has thrown in the towel on apologizing for her very existence. (She does have “Honk if you love divorcees” merch.)

“I hope that this record displays my process of coming to terms with those parts of myself,” she says of Do It Myself, an album that ultimately gives voice to her flaws, but doesn’t punish her for them. It amplifies them and lets them breathe, making more space for Lloyd. “And I’m hopeful that the next 150 records I make further embrace that messiness because I don’t think there are a lot of examples of women doing that in full force.”

Lloyd has begun noticing a pattern among fellow women artists in their 30s of straying from the traditional timelines and album release structures that have kept them from thriving. For her, it all comes back to the heroes who came before, carving out their own atypical careers. “I think somehow we’ve all lost the plot in the Lucinda Williams, Mary Chapin Carpenter extended universe of women in their 30s and 40s hitting their stride and having something important to say… We exist in an industry that is still discarding women and ignoring them and acting like it’s not happening. Lucinda was like, 45 when [Car Wheels on a Gravel Road] came out. We are going to lose seminal important work if we don’t invest in female artists in Americana,” she says.

It’s not just limited to her musical peers, but also her New York City community, diverse in profession, genre, and talent, which keeps her grounded. She maintains that it wouldn’t have been such an uphill battle to get her records out there if she were a man, and like so many independent musicians, laments an industry that seems designed to work against the very people, like her, it hopes to profit off of in the future, an industry that insists she keep on proving herself even after she’s already done it ten times over.

“I do find it very curious that there are a bunch of women in their 30s making this really cool music right now. And it’s because we all watched Lucinda do it and watched Mary Chapin do it and watched Mary Gauthier, who didn’t even write a song until she was like 25,” she says. “The Americana industry at large has been just kind of shrugging their shoulders at Michaela Ann and Lizzie No and all of these incredible artists, as though there’s no space for them.”

Lloyd can already see the difference in artist friends seven to 10 years her junior who, she says, seem to know themselves so much better than she did in her early 20s. She speaks admirably about the ways they value themselves and their place in the musical ecosystem, and maybe most importantly, how they feel less pitted against each other and more connected than ever. “On bad days, I wish that I had arrived at this version of myself sooner,” she says.

But she won’t be deterred by the runaround from managers and agents. She’ll learn to book her own tours, put a band together and make something happen for herself when no one else will. With Do It Myself, as with Loose Cannon, she’ll have the last laugh. 

“Our human potential is only limited by our understanding of our capabilities,” she says. “And so if I can be over here like, ‘I’m a sassy, messed up, working class, autodidactic, literary dork,’ you can too.”