Olivia Ellen Loyd - Do It Myself

“Sometimes, I fantasize that I lie down and die with my old car,” laments Olivia Ellen Loyd. “Puny Sorrows” bookends her sophomore effort, Do It Myself, centered around self-acceptance and other trinkets of ideas. This song, in particular, sees Lloyd unstitching her heart, allowing every emotion (even the most trivial) to pour forth. It’s an apt closer for a record that also depicts the “curious exploration of independence and co-dependence and love as it comes and goes from our lives,” she explains. 

Across 10 songs and 40 minutes, Loyd confides that she’s “doing fine,” as she does on “Live with It,” on which she also adds, “If this don’t kill me, do you know something that might do the trick?” Loving and living can take a crushing toll on someone, often leaving them depleted and decayed. The edges peel and fall off, with Loyd taking the petals in her hands and turning them into songwriting gold. The title track arrives as another bull-dozer of a thematic moment, as she declares: “I’ll do it myself!” The repeated refrain lurches from her lungs like a cold jab of a knife. “Don’t call me / Don’t cry to me / Don’t tell me I’m your friend,” she sings. She sets boundaries in song, putting up walls that protect her heart and mental health.

“I can’t cry anymore, so I tell myself I’m angry,” she wallows in “Billy Pilgrim,” a bar-set tearjerker that sees Loyd confiding to herself into a drink. It’s a delicately spun and decorated downtempo that features one of the singer-songwriter’s most plaintive and earnest vocal performances. That’s what’s most evident throughout the record – Loyd’s precise and pointed approach. “Beautiful Mess” is another stunner, as well as “Friday Night.” She plucks the heartstrings no matter the musical exterior (“Bound to Lose” is quite the saloon toe-tapper, brimming with her honeyed, honeysuckle vocal tricks) and gets the tear ducts working over time. Once you dig into the lyrics, they’re quite forlorn and tragic and seem to puncture the skin.

Loyd leaves bruises and handprints across the album. She exposes the most vulnerable parts of herself–from self-loathing to insecurities–as a way to find herself in 2025. She lays out all the cards on the table, inviting the listener to find their own meanings beneath the tattered layers, and it’s up to us to parse out the intentions. Loyd confronts the intricate components of the human experience and finds a light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak. She might not have completely processed her identity and self-worth in totality, but she admits as much in the music. She lets the lyrics float away by her hand up and into the airstream – only barely-legible trails carve out a path in the breeze.

Do It Myself is Loyd’s statement piece. It declares that she doesn’t need anyone or anything to make herself feel loved. She loves herself. In processing life, love, and heartache, Olivia Ellen Loyd cobbles together a makeshift mosaic of her existence that bursts with bright colors and muted, muddy tones to create a perfect snapshot of her life. It profoundly captures every facet of living, and the audience may walk away forever changed.

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