Loyal Revival (Loyal F-K)

“My name is Loyal and I just wrote and performed the album of my life. It took two years and a bunch of musician friends to help. It's called ‘I Am a Seed’ because a seed has to be broken open in order for new life to come."

Over the past six years, Loyal speaks of how he had been broken by depression, a miscarriage, abuse, a crisis of faith, doubt about the integral characteristics about who he understood himself to be. And now he’s made it out to the other side.These 12 songs of I Am a Seed uplift and cut to the heart. It's a combination of soaring horns, strumming guitars, buzzing organ, pounding drums, traveling bass lines, and vocal melodies that dream with new possibilities.The songs sound like ancient melodies set atop indie folk like they came here from another time and place. The album opens with “Conquer More Than Cope” which Loyal tells was the first song written for the album, imagining when he would be resurrected from his troubles, “far from this place of icy fire and reunite me with desire… a life of passion, zeal and hope, a cause to conquer more than cope…”From there the listener is moved through stories of deep inner conviction, loss, rebirth.

There are songs that sing of the mother-child relationship, of romantic declaration, and sweetly of life and death. The album concludes with a fitting a song: “There’s a City.” In it, Loyal sings of a place where one may find that “the light outshines all of the fears while the hopes that you held in secret are coming true… come with me, come with me, come with me.”

I Am a Seed was mastered by Emily Lazar at The Lodge in New York City, who has previously worked with artists such as Bjork, The Killers and Lou Reed. Yet, Loyal Revival is an independent artist from Gainesville, Florida, where albums get pieced together on nights and weekends around day jobs, recorded in basement-like spaces, oft fueled by coffee and beer as well as hope and passion.“This may sound lofty or too idyllic, but I want to change people's lives, with music. It's why I wrote the album, and I believe it will.” And it just may.