Duncan Lloyd - Green Grows Devotion (Selected Works)

Early last year in that strange sort of limbo of a time, I was releasing songs as & when I’d finished messing around with them. It was kind of therapeutic to work as a musician in a more spontaneous way, no deadline or pressure other than to create songs that were a standard I was happy with and as a reaction to whatever was happening at that point. I started to build an album of these songs with no planned finishing point, making music to escape the strange days. Around the same time I received a message from Tom at Reveal Records asking if I’d like to release a compilation of my solo work. I already knew of Reveal Records as it is based back in my home town of Derby but even though we had lost touch over the years, I remembered Tom had been an enthusiastic early supporter of Maximo Park (we played a couple of in store sessions at his record shop around our first two albums). In fact our paths had crossed way before that even because I used to go into his shop as a young kid in the 90’s (saving up my pennies to buy records by Sonic Youth and Pixies and U.S. import Lemonheads t shirts). That all informed my path to becoming a musician so it feels fitting & fortunate that things have come full circle & we are now working together.

After going through the songs, we came up with, Green Grows Devotion. A collection of selected songs written & recorded all over the place and spanning nearly 12 years of writing.

The collection travels through a mixture of styles, veering from spacey experimental ideas to quieter acoustic songs, one, “Cathedral Doors”, was written shortly after I lost my Dad & pushed me further to explore my own self sufficiency and sound, from the rawer punk spirited to the sparser & psychedelic ones.

The recordings vary from lo-fi home recordings to full band recordings done in rehearsals spaces with a handful of microphones. Some of the songs are from short run albums I’ve released myself, some are unreleased & some are from EPs or singles I’ve put out leading right back to 2010 when I started. It's been exciting to hear them come out of the dark & cathartic to sequence them all like this on the new album.

- Duncan Lloyd