Olivia Ellen Lloyd’s excellent song “Emily was featured on two recent episodes of Adobe & Teardrops — episode 139 and voted the favorite to reappear on 140 — and I’m thrilled to introduce you all to her new single, “Sheperdstown.” Just in time for Halloween, Lloyd counts the ghosts in her town and her past, all to a carefree, rollicking beat. Lloyd’s debut solo album, Loose Cannon, will be out in Feburary of 2021 off Brooklyn Basement Records, which gives me at least one thing to look forward to next year.
I’ll leave it for Emily to tell you about the song herself — it’s a doozy.
I’m from the oldest town in West Virginia, and from a family that has lived in the foothills of West Virginia since before it was a state. My hometown is the main subject of a (very cheesy) show called “The Ghosts of Shepherdstown” on some discovery channel network. The show was pretty staged but the stories of ghosts roaming the town are real.
The eastern panhandle of West Virginia and surrounding areas was a hot zone of conflict in the civil war (Antietam is ten minutes away). During that time, Shepherdstown was a civil war hospital. Stories of generals pacing bakery aisles, Grey haired women waiting for you at the bottom of a flight of stairs, and college students from decades past still roaming the hallways of shepherd university filled my childhood. My Pap knew ‘em all – and now Bones Wright Drive (his namesake alleyway) still smells like Pall Malls and Budweiser. Sometimes if I’m walking close to the river i can hear him shuffle a deck of cards or issue a wheezing laugh.
Some people insist the town is under an energetic vortex like Sedona or Cassadaga. It’s hard to deny that the town has a certain pull to it. Staying away isn’t easy.
When I moved away at eighteen, bad things started happening. People started dying; tragedy after tragedy struck. In my grief and shock, I started to wonder if I cursed myself by leaving Shepherdstown. Maybe the town was trying to pull me back – like it wasn’t done with me yet.
Ten years after leaving, Shepherdstown is still the only place I have ever called “home”. I never really left. My next single is kind of a ghost story. It’s about ghosts of the past, my friends, my regrets, my failed marriage. But it’s a party too. It’s a carefree dance to the closing song on the band’s third set. It’s the last drink (or two) at last call. It’s an invitation (and a warning). It’s a wink and a smile.