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Heather Aubrey Lloyd Builds a "Panic Room With a View" and Lets the Light In

Pandemic, wildfire, stolen gear, and a voice that never gave up. The alt-folk storyteller opens up on the making of her album, Panic Room With a View.

By Eugenia RoditisMusicngear Editor

Six years in the making, Heather Aubrey Lloyd's new album Panic Room With a View is a survival story disguised as an alt-folk symphony. Through a pandemic, a robbery, and a wildfire, Lloyd built this collection "like a custom house", layering acoustic beauty with humor, hope, and the occasional storm.

In our conversation, she opens up about the disasters that shaped her songs, the fearless honesty that guides her writing, her dream collabs and what it means to stay authentic as an independent artist in 2025. She talks about the emotional wreckage that birthed Panic Room With a View, the meaning behind her haunting final lyric "Songs are the prayer we only half believe", and why, despite it all, the stage remains her safest place.

Eugenia Roditis, Musicngear: Hi Heather, welcome to Musicngear! Can you tell us about the instruments and gear you relied on most while creating "Panic Room With a View"? Any favorite guitar, pedal, or piece of equipment that became essential to the album's sound?

I absolutely love the Rode NT4 Stereo condenser microphone. We used it for everything from the drum overhead to all my acoustic guitar parts to the accordion. It’s just a Swiss army knife of a mic, and everyone I ever show it to winds up buying one for their studio, too.

Whenever I make these “solo” albums, we assemble each song more like a custom house than a pre-fabricated band that will just work for every track. Thank goodness I have a producer/engineer (Joel Ackerson in Reno, NV), who is up to the task of professionally recording harp, flute, upright bass, mandolin, drums, electric guitars – in living rooms and bedrooms, if necessary. He’s kind of a Swiss army knife.

And then David Peters, our mixing/mastering engineer at Oak House Studios in Altadena, CA, is also a glorious gear nerd who did an entire 18-minute YouTube video on exactly how he used the Atomic Squeezebox tube compressor by InnerTUBE Audio (famous for its invisible vocal compression and tube tone) on my particularly dynamic vocals and guitar takes.

Musicngear: What was the hardest creative or emotional obstacle you had to overcome while making the album, and what would you say to other artists currently feeling stuck or sidelined in their own process?

We faced so many actual disasters. A pandemic at the start of recording! Studio robbery as we neared the finish of the first two songs at the Virginia site!! Wildfire two songs into mixing the final album in Altadena!!! I’ve almost forgotten the “creative” or “emotional” obstacles.

I mean, mixing is always going to be hard on the artist's psyche … that repetitive dissection. But a positive realization surprised me as I surveyed the finished project as a whole; FIVE tracks – almost half the content – were inspired by songwriting prompts I was given.

Everything from a single word (“kazoo” inspired the love song “Hum”) to having “Hometown Hero” kind of dragged out of me in bitter response to “A different success that you were expecting.” Two songs have “monkey” in the lyrics because they were written for a yearly contest where using that word earned you extra points.

Prompts – viewed as subversively or as contrary to the obvious response as possible – have given me some of the best songs I would have never otherwise thought to write.

At a certain point, the absurdity of that level of trauma becomes too big to understand, let alone sulk over. And I’ll be damned if THAT wasn’t exactly what we’d been making this album about all along

Musicngear: You’ve described the album as “anxiety immersion therapy”. After everything that happened - the pandemic, the robbery, the wildfire - how did those experiences shape the overall mood and production of the album?

It took almost six years to get it right, and then as we funneled the first things to mix, we got delayed without power for almost a month. My mixing engineer, David Peters – who’d successfully kept burning debris and looters from his house – was keeping his daughter’s fish warm in the tank with a little generator or something? I mean, COME ON.

Screw it; I paid everyone in advance because I had done a very successful crowdfunding campaign, we threw the deadlines out the window, and waited for the lights to come back on.

At a certain point, the absurdity of that level of trauma (and your tiny little paper boat of an art project batted about in the middle of a storm consuming so many actual lives and worlds) becomes too big to understand, let alone sulk over. And I’ll be damned if THAT wasn’t exactly what we’d been making this album about all along. We were learning our own lesson.

So, I think we got even more playful in some of the arrangements as a balm against despair – a big drunken bar sing for the end of the world in “The Valley is Ours,” and the barbershop quartet in “Mary Golden Going Gray” that I just imagine as swaying, singing flowers.

But we were all struggling, and we delved deeper into the dark, too. The last thing we did in the recording studio while mixing started back up in the other studio, was the string arrangement for “To the Girl Who Shared the Siege,” and we made it … uncomfortable. Joel Ackerson theorized air raid sirens out of violin/viola and then Kiara Ana played them and made them real.

That song is about the real horrors people endure, all while somehow finding love in the rubble. It was a good reminder.

Musicngear: What are your main goals for "Panic Room With a View"? Are you focused on reaching certain streaming numbers, booking live shows, getting the story told through press, or something entirely different? And what’s your strategy to get there?

Professionally speaking, I don’t want it to die in the dark, fall in the forest unheard.

When my husband called our back deck my “panic room with a view” those years ago, I saw the whole project form instantly in my mind: the girl in the terrarium facing a stark nothing of the album cover, pressing it on coke-bottle clear vinyl so you could actually “see through the songs,” the track order demarcating the record flip-over as an emotional pandemic turning point.

All the PARTS and the NARRATIVE were there for this to be a complete concept that could really matter to people. So, I went for it. Pressed the vinyl, hired a publicist (Sarah Frost PR) for the first time, which is a big, expensive way of believing in yourself.

But it was also me admitting that 1) I needed professional help beyond that of a therapist, and 2) my time is more valuable than it used to be. I had no spare hours/energy to do the hardcore publicity grind.

I’m in something like three different bands now, everything from original alt-folk with ilyAIMY, to lute music with Ayreheart, to a wildly successful Simon & Garfunkel Tribute with Newmyer Flyer Productions, in addition to solo shows of every stripe. I’m a working musician who needs to be in rehearsals and on stage.

For “Panic Room With A View,” press is my dominant interest – the breadcrumb trail of legitimacy – with new ears hopefully following. I’ve been performing the album live in track order at house concerts and the more intimate shows like Godfrey Daniels in Bethlehem, PA, and I would love to do that as much as possible.

As for streaming, with Spotify going the way it is, I plan to pull my whole catalog a year from now (I’d already paid and done up my distribution thing when the military AI investment news came out, now the ICE ads, ugh …), but for now I’m giving this album every chance to be heard.

I’ve always had anxiety and depression, and the stage feels like the safest place, somehow - a nightlight against whatever’s under the bed. I just want to keep finding ways to stay there

Musicngear: You’ve collaborated with incredible musicians and producers before. Are there any artists you’d love to collaborate with in the future or venues and festivals you’d dream of performing at?

I have a small bucket list. I would love to 1) open for Richard Shindell, 2) have one of my songs licensed for film or television, and 3) be a finalist in the Kerrville NewFolk Songwriter’s contest.

I want a pedal guitar tuner that even I can’t break (any recommendations?). Seriously, my dreams are pretty modest. Really, I want to play satisfying gigs for as long as I’m physically able.

Two of my bands boast bad-ass 70-somethings and I opened for Gordon Lightfoot when he was 83, so I’m feeling optimistic.

For me, that could be house concerts five nights a week or Red Rocks. I do have terrible anxiety – but not on the stage. They tell me that as a child, I sang any time I went upstairs alone “to frighten ghosts away.” As an adult, the reasons are still the same.

I’ve always had anxiety and depression, and the stage feels like the safest place, somehow - a nightlight against whatever’s under the bed. I just want to keep finding ways to stay there.

Musicngear: Your background as a journalist really shines through in the way you write; detailed, human, and full of observation. How does that part of you, the reporter, the listener, shape the way you approach songwriting?

Thank you! What I now consider a source of songwriting strength made for an incredibly difficult transition.

I always consumed stories ravenously, both true ones and fairy tales. At first, that took the occupational form of journalism, where you absolutely cannot make up what you cannot back up. To me, a great journalist was less of an observer and more of a conduit. A collector who noticed everything.

I’m still a shameless professional-level eavesdropper, stealing people’s discarded coffeeshop conversations. That is all super useful, except that songwriting THRIVES on the artistic license taken in those “gaps,” or the stitching together of separate stories to reveal the greater truth.

It took me years to feel comfortable writing a song like “The Valley is Ours,” which blends so many different stories and eras into one fictional family to tell the greater truth of rebuilders who live in the path of repeated natural disasters.

Journalism made me a songwriter who “checks,” whether it’s serious or silly; which animal crackers were featured in the box (so I could get monkey in for extra points), or if it snows in the Syrian city of Aleppo.

I’ve always written “aspirationally,” singing the lie to myself until I believed that I would be safe, that I would be found, that right would win out in the end like all the fairy tales

Musicngear: "December 32, 2020" closes the record with the haunting line “Songs are the prayer we only half believe”. What does that line mean to you today - what are you hoping or half-believing right now?

I initially composed these songs to stretch my guitar/vocal skills, but wrote them to trick myself into coping, caring about others, and having perspective.

I’ve always written “aspirationally,” singing the lie to myself until I believed that I would be safe, that I would be found, that right would win out in the end like all the fairy tales. Most of them, anyway.

I start the album with “Are You Lost?”, assuring the child “we will make it through,” but I had no idea … I have no idea. The child I was singing to was always me, and I still almost cry at the major chord strum that closes the album every time … that hope feels so plaintive and basic and fragile against this world.

On my darkest days, my honest answer is that there’s a “True Detective” quote I fully believe about mindfully and courteously accepting our extinction as the only ethical way for this all to end. So, I guess I best keep singing until I half-believe better.

Musicngear: You've worked independently for years and built a remarkable world around your music. What’s the best and hardest thing about being an independent artist in 2025?

The hardest thing is the sheer glut of content and the parfait of information pushing everything down into the bottom of the pile before you can blink.

We always joke that Facebook is for time-traveling audiences who’ll see the posts five days after the show. Artists’ mailing lists were the last thing we “owned,” that couldn’t be somehow taken away from us and made into a subscription service. But now, even the people who handwrote their names on all those pages can’t get the updates they ASKED for because spam filters and AI assistants are becoming like overactive immune systems, attacking all the wrong things.

Spotify is removing albums that look like they got a bot-based boost when an unsung hero is actually gaining ground. Bandzoogle, which hosts some of our websites and mailing lists for various projects and organizations, recently withheld sending out our newsletters because we “couldn’t possibly have real subscribers with ‘admin’ or ‘info’ on our mailing lists,” and we must’ve been spamming people.

We tried explaining to them that it was common for folk organizations to have rotating people receive mail at those types of addresses while in volunteer positions, and they had each personally signed up.

The absurd battle to get the word out to those who want it – while everything else got migrated behind a paywall – is enough to make most of us want to quit.

But the best thing about being an indie artist right now is that, if you let go of fantasy notions of fame and fortune, YOU get to decide what success looks like, and so many accessible tools exist to share your true self.

People have told me “authenticity” is “my brand,” and I’m proud to be seen that way.

On “Panic Room With A View,” I didn’t just write the songs and perform them; I did the photography, design and layout for every version of the packaging/website, filmed and edited all the promotional videos. Hell, I even drove several hours round-trip to pick up the vinyl personally.

In 2025, total control over your artistic vision is possible. And thanks to the trust and support of my fans through the successful crowdfunding campaign I created, my art didn’t have to answer to anyone.

Musicngear: If you could travel back in time, which musical era would you choose and why?

I wish my husband was awake for this question. It’s 2 a.m., and as usual, I told him I was gonna just finish something up real quick and come to bed two hours ago.

If you saw our music library – shelves wrapped around a room, reel-to-reel player, Victrola – you would understand this question would spark a debate in my house. And in place of paragraphs, our thesis papers would be stacks of records pulled off the shelves (Not alphabetical. Autobiographical!).

Nah, he’s gotta be awake for this one.

In the morning: Okay, knowing everything about my musical heroes and influences, he says 1988 Seattle. “The band Heart is still relevant, Queensrÿche has just put out Operation: Mindcrime, Mother Love Bone is performing, Nirvana is just starting up, and we’re a few years away from the Grunge explosion. It’s your perfect cross-section. That, or Laurel Canyon.”

Musicngear: What’s next for you after Panic Room With a View?

My alt-folk-rock band of 24 years, ilyAIMY (i love you And I Miss You), will finally finish our recent studio effort. The cobbler’s children have no shoes, and we’ve finished entire albums engineering or as backing band for other artists, while we keep putting our own project on the back burner.

Now that I have this solo record out of me, I think this winter, Rob Hinkal and I are just going to get snowed into our Baltimore studio for a while. It expresses a different, more aggressive part of me, and we have multiple lead singers/writers. Kind of post-modern Fleetwood Mac?

The first three songs of that are finished, released as the EP “Let Us Show You How To End It (Vol. 1)” on Bandcamp earlier this year.

I’ve been pretty open about the fact I think “Panic Room” is my last solo record (if you’re reading this, and it's my “first” record to YOU, don’t worry, there’s at least two more for you to discover).

I’ll likely record something singing for the lute-based project, Ayreheart. And my Reno producer, Joel, and I half-joke about doing a dance record together. Maybe we will really do it. The world (and I) could use some lightness.

Connect with Heather Aubrey Lloyd
Website / Facebook / Instagram / YouTube / Spotify

About Eugenia Roditis

Eugenia's passion for music was ignited from an early age as she grew up in a family of musicians. She loves attending concerts and festivals, while constantly seeking fresh and exciting new artists across diverse genres. Eugenia joined the MusicnGear team in 2012.

Contact Eugenia Roditis at eugenia.roditis@kinkl.com

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