Juliet Lloyd
Bio
There’s an unmistakable urgency you can feel when a song is written and performed from a place of complete honesty. That feeling permeates singer-songwriter Juliet Lloyd’s new album, Carnival.
“I’ve always been envious of writers who say they write songs because they have to, because they had these things they just had to get out of themselves,” Juliet says. “I had never really felt that way until this album. I’ve become someone who writes because they have to.”
The album is Juliet’s first full-length effort since 2007. Shortly after releasing her sophomore album that year, she walked away from music completely for more than 10 years, feeling burned out and unhappy with her career progression like so many other independent artists. After going through a divorce in 2019 and in the midst of a global pandemic, she found herself pulled back toward the siren call of songwriting and again making the leap to pursue it full time. Carnival is in many ways the culmination of those decisions, and the reintroduction of an artist who now has the wisdom of experience.
“These songs have helped me make sense of emotions and experiences that have happened both recently and those that I’ve buried for 20+ years, to confront truths about myself and about others that I’ve been afraid or unwilling to say out loud,” Juliet says. “I’ve never been a confrontational person. But this is definitely a confrontational album. And I love it.”
Recorded in an unhurried process over nearly 15 months and produced by Todd Wright (Lucy Woodward, Butch Walker, Toby Lightman), Carnival’s nine songs are a study in contrasts. Light and dark, devastating and self-deprecating, apologetic and angry, conversational and conceptual. They are genre-fluid, weaving elements of pop, folk, soul, and rock to create a vibrant and often unexpected platform for Juliet’s unflinching storytelling.
“When you give all your grace away to those who don't deserve it, there's no saving grace for yourself,” Lloyd sings on the album’s leadoff single, “Pretty.” It’s a line that takes aim in equal parts at both narrator and subject, a common device throughout Carnival’s lyrics.
The central theme of Carnival and that of its title track is not being too precious about any one experience or decision. Take them for what they are, live in the moment, and move on when they’re done. It acknowledges also that memory can be subjective, and ambiguous—was an experience ultimately a good thing or a bad thing? And whose memory can you rely on to determine the answer to that question?
These questions are on full display in one of the album’s standout tracks, “Sorry Now,” a raw and immediate interrogation of divorce. “Why does it feel like the choices of who gets the knife set, the mattress, the old picture frames are harder than choosing to leave in the first place?” Juliet sings over a sparse keyboard accompaniment before the track kicks in with a lush, R&B-inflected production.
“I had a really visceral memory of sorting through our shared stuff when I moved out, boring things like kitchen utensils and towels, and what felt so mechanical at the time now feels colored with sadness,” Juliet says. “I wanted to pose questions in the lyrics, to myself and to whoever needs to hear them, because I still don’t have everything figured out, and that’s okay.”
Throughout much of Carnival, Juliet puts these themes in the context of specific personal relationships—sometimes painful to recall. The aforementioned “Pretty” deals with the lingering shame and guilt of an abusive relationship from 25 years ago, and serves as a cautionary anthem for women who similarly find themselves wondering how they could have let themselves be in that situation. Interestingly, a later track, “Call Your Wife,” is a continuation of that story.
“Shortly after I released ‘Pretty’ this spring, I got a text message in the middle of the night from a number I didn’t recognize,” Juliet says. “The sender apparently didn’t think I was being fair to the guy in my song.” Her response is a defiant, slightly unhinged carnival pastiche—another standout song on the album, co-written with Wright—that begins as an innocent-sounding waltz with sweetly threatening lyrics (“you say I’m being unfair, there’s cracks in your ego too deep to repair”) and builds to a satisfying, vengeful final chorus.
Biting lyrics are also on display on the throwback, 70s soul-inspired “Search Your Soul,” which Juliet wrote about the same subject as her previous song “High Road,” a highlight from her 2022 EP by the same name. “In your funhouse mirror you see what you see / your history is doomed to always repeat / you send another woman into therapy / Did that make you happy?” Juliet taunts the real-life narcissist in question over a breezy, disco-string laden track.
Stylistically, Carnival draws on a range of influences from Laurel Canyon-era singer/songwriters, to Lilith Fair rockers, to confessional country/folk balladeers, to indie pop. Across her 20+ year career, she’s been admittedly stylistically non-monogamous. Her first full-length album, All Dressed Up, was released in 2005 and was heavily jazz-influenced, a label that she rejected at the time. “I am a piano player and a woman, so I was immediately compared to Norah Jones—and I bristled at that,” Juliet says. “Listening back now, I can totally see that it was true, and it of course wasn’t a bad thing.” Her follow-up release, Leave the Light On, came out two years later and featured a slick piano-pop production that led to five of its songs being placed on reality TV shows on MTV and VH1. Most recently, coming back after her 10-year break from writing and recording, Juliet released High Road, a collection of five Americana/soul-tinged songs produced by Jim Ebert (Meredith Brooks, Shai) that earned her widespread recognition and songwriting awards both in her home region of DC as well as nationally.
“Though I still primarily consider myself a piano player, I write and play more guitar now,” Juliet says. “That definitely influences the kinds of songs I write, because I’m so limited by the chords I can play right now. It’s forced me to be simple and to put more of an emphasis on lyrics than I may have in past projects.”
One of those songs, Carnival’s anthemic opener, “Wallflower,” draws directly on Juliet’s relatable experiences as an introvert in the music industry. In it, she reassures fellow introverts that it’s okay to “disappear in the spaces between, and hide all your brilliant color in cracks, they have to know where to look to be seen.” But like nearly every song on the album, it’s tinged with a bit of cynicism: “the dance ain’t as cool as it seems.” Another guitar-driven track, the tongue-in-cheek, upbeat album closer “Motorcycle & Tattoo Sleeve” is the closest Juliet says she’s come to writing a “three chords and the truth”-style song in her career. In it, she pokes fun at the unexpected hobbies we all take on when we’re in new relationships, while reassuring us “maybe we’re all just doing the best that we can do.”
Carnival doesn’t just deal with the complexities of ending relationships—it also deals with all the feelings that come with moving on. “When Love Comes Round Again” is a deceptively simple ballad with a traditional song structure borrowed from jazz and musical theatre, but the lyrics elegantly reveal the struggle that comes with giving yourself permission to celebrate finding love again. And “The Spring,” another co-write with Wright, paints a striking, darkly dreamy picture of what it feels like to not want to move on, even as everything else around you is.
Taken together, Carnival’s nine songs feature evocative storytelling that reveals a simple truth: when the carnival inevitably leaves town, you’re left with an empty parking lot. And how you remember it is a choice. As Juliet sings in the title track, “If only there was a way you could bottle up that feeling / and you’d drink it in / when the days are short and you long.”
