[From Rivers, Kings and Curses (2008)].

Robin Williamson plays harp on  this Jacobite tearjerker. 

Back in the 90s, I used to sing it this way for the students of the one-room school house my daughter attended in California's Southern Sierra. They knew nothing of Bonnie Prince Charlie or of Scotland. However, they all knew somebody who would never come back again. 

Will Ye No Come Back Again (with Robin Williamson)

[From Rivers, Kings and Curses [2008]

In my rewrite of "Riddles Wisely Expounded," a desert rat invites three sisters to sample the wonders of the Deep Dark Well with him. Only one can go, he insists. Which will be the lucky sister? They are not so eager to decide, however. 

That's the extraordinary Jeff Basile Pekarek on the bull fiddle.

The Three Sisters And The King Of The Deep Dark Well [Child Ballad no. 1]/ The Just Desert

[from: Star Thistle: Twelve New Songs (scheduled for 2016)]

This is a rough mix of a recording in progress. The music was written in 1972, the lyrics sometime in the 1990s. It is from a larger work entitled Nobody of Venus: a Meta-SciFi Op Rockeretta in Song and Verse. An audio version of the entire rockeretta is also in preparation. The non-electric instrument is a vihuela sin trastes, a fretless vihuela.

Venus Descending [Work in Progress]

[From: Death in Los Fumos: songs, poems, skits and found sound (1994)] 

My alter ego Dirk Penderghast sings his way out of the City of Smokes in this longish mostly improvised piece. His wife Tex and daughter Texina, of course, escape with him to safety in the San Bernadino Mountains. 

Similarly, my wife and daughter escaped with me to a tiny community in the Southern Sierra. That's them singing so sweetly with me.

On The Couch / Blue Blue Day / Dramatis Arcana

[from: Dark Ages (1984) (re-released on Yoga Records in 2008)] 

A true tale of teen angst taken to its existential conclusion, a love song, in fact. 

With Bob Watts of Bruce Joyner and the Plantations on piano and Pat Meehan of Bump Cars on drums. (NB: This is just the way I write songs. I have been told it is in the acid folk style because the people who influenced me were doing a lot of acid even though I wasn't.)

1969: The Gladiator's Confession

[From: Music for Shakespeare’s Plan 12 From Outer Space (1996)] 

I reset the music for Feste the Clown’s songs for this magnificently strange feature film version of Twelfth Night, "The movie that laughs at you not with you." Among the oddball cast were Kay Lenz, Billie Hayes, Buck Henry and . . . me. 

Cara Tower and Dave Soyars on bg vocals. David Vaught of the Association played bass. The evil laugh comes from  Spike Stewart, the film's director. Of course.

The Rain It Raineth Every Day

[from: How Like Ghosts Are We (1998)] 

While learning the old English broadside, “The Deserter,” I realized I was singing it to the tune of “The Cuckoo.” So far so good — thought I. Then I had this poem about Prince Albert, Christmas trees and firing squads. That should fit in nicely —I thought further. 

Dave "Ashley Planxty" Beltanovich III ("An even bigger name in folk music") plays bass.

The Deserter's Brief Poem

[From: Rivers, Kings and Curses (2008)] 

It is not his Greenery (extraordinary musicianship, in this case)but the man who is wretched in this true tale. The title is a pun on the wretched man's name. 

Brenda Hunter and Jill Egland of Banshee in the Kitchen play the hammered dulcimer and fiddle, and accordion. Patrick Meehan of Bump Cars on drums.

The Wretched Greene Man

Forty years in the making, this is DNL's  1974 setting of Blake's poem from "Song's of Experience" [1794]. The recording is from the upcoming WatThe? album entitled Hell. The electric guitar and drums were recorded in 1976. WatThe? is DNL [guitars, lead vocals]; Patrick Meehan [drums] and Richard d'Andrea [bass, bg. vocals].  Everything else was added in August of 2017: that's Rusty Miller intoning and singing BG vocals.

Hell [exit mixes]

London / Proverbs of Hell

Driving through the Mojave Desert, you never knew what you would hear on Art Bell's Coast to Coast broadcast out of Pahrump, Nevada. This is a rough so-far mix of a Western version of the medieval Scotts supernatural ballad, Tam Lynn.

For SoundCloud

Tim Lane [Child Ballad no. 39]

1979: John Bugbee and Pat Meehan were jamming on a tune of John's in the basement of BLaM House. Still abed two stories up, I liked what I heard and wrote some lyrics for it. In the aftermath of a divorce, I was thinking of all the women in my life who were kind to me, who decided I was perhaps worthy to be let in on the real Secrets of Life. There is a painting called "Angel's Flight" at LACMA. Our song "Angel's Flight" became BLaM's signature tune. Foremost among these ministering angels was John's girlfriend Dominique Grillo (now Kadison). With great sorrow, I learned today that Dominique died suddenly in February of 2018. She was one of my best friends back then.

Angel's Flight [music: John Bugbee. Words: DNL]

From my 2008 album, Rivers Kings and Curses, I am accompanied by two marvelous musicians: Jill Egland on accordion and Jeff ‘Basile’ Pekarek on bull fiddle. 

Never mind Cameron's the Artists’ Way, just listen carefully to “True Thomas.”

“True Thomas,” better known as “Thomas the Rhymer,” is both the finest and the most misunderstood of Scottish supernatural ballads. It has as an antecedent the 14th century tale of Ogier le Danois and Morgan le Fey. So, it dates from the middle ages, but all recorded versions known today are essentially modern. My version is no exception. That is how these old ballads work.

For clarity’s sake, I have replaced archaic Scots phrases with contemporary idioms. As for Elfinland, when I was a teaching artist in Southern California in the 2000s, most of the Hispanic 5th graders with whom I sang this song, thought that I was singing about Elephant Land. Hence the change to Fairyland. 

Many of my fellow folk singers sing it as if it was a supernatural nineteenth century romance best illustrated by some pre-Raphaelite. This is unfortunate because the context of romance has little if anything to do with the song’s early or current meaning. Though multi leveled in meaning even today, it is safe to say the earliest singers of this ballad were singing about how a liar became a prophet. Singing “True Thomas” with Hispanic 5th graders in Delano, California, I discovered it was about how a hack becomes an artist through the Wound of the World.

Rivers, Kings and Curses

True Thomas [Child ballad no. 37: Thomas Rymer]

When I worked at the Bodhi Tree Bookstore in West Hollywood in the 1990s, I found myself with one foot in the underworld of Dark Renewal and the other in the underworld of Eternal Punishment. I had to sing my way out.

Star Thistle

Jack & the Bodhi Tree

An iconoclastic loner of Acid Folk, David Nigel Lloyd, as the British magazine Folk Roots once wrote, “uses traditional tunes and themes where it suits his purposes."

Over more than three decades, his solitary career has bumped into several genre's, New Wave rock and Acid Folk, for example.  Always, he has pursued a certain kind of songwriting which, when finding his voice at age 18, he called journalism of the psyche. Some samples can be heard here. Except for bass, nearly all fretted instruments are played by DNL, by the way. More will be posted.

With his “spirited singing and full-bodied playing,” (Dirty Linen) “Lloyd is as much American influenced as British” (Steve Hochman, The LA Times). He accompanies himself on guitar and the 8-stringed octar. In performance, he often introduces his songs with an ornate joke, a true tale or —to keep things honest— an outrageous lie. As the LA Weekly once wrote, “Lloyd is some serious traditional fun.”

Sometimes he sings traditional songs as he finds them. Often, he overlays them with new but related lyrics. The olde British pantheon of demon knights, faerie queens and divine drunkards often find themselves wandering the deserts, mountains and boom towns of Southern California where DNL lived for 35 years. “A strongly individual musical and poetic mind is at work here.” (David Kidman, beGlad, UK)

His fifth CD, River Kings and Curses was featured on the “Best of 2008” episode of NPR’s Celtic Connections program. Among its guest musicians were hammered dulcimer champion, Brenda Hunter; blues legend Nat Dove and Incredible String Band co-founder Robin Williamson.

He was an Official Showcase Performer at the 2011 International Folk Alliance Conference in Memphis, Tennessee. DNL has performed throughout the US and in Canada, Ireland and England.

David Nigel Lloyd

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