“Heather Lloyd’s voice is enough for me. Voices this rich and emotionally hard-hitting – equal parts velvet darkness, barely contained heartbreak, and hard-won, unstoppable joy – don’t come around often. Sing me the phone book – I’ll ask for an encore.”
– Pat Wictor | Brother Sun
What do you get when a recovering reporter, performance poet and fairy tale collector writes songs? Heather Aubrey Lloyd has co-fronted Baltimore’s ilyAIMY (i love you And I Miss You) for 17 years.
Wielding a powerful tenor voice that flies from velvet to growl, her strength is providing just the right amount of force, grit, softness or sweetness a song calls for. Though interested in music her entire life, Heather did little more than play coffee houses for fun while she took an eight-year detour into journalism. She reported for The Baltimore Sun, and earned her degree from the University of Maryland, College Park. That journey was interrupted and rerouted to music when she and rob met at an open mic near her college.
A fateful encounter with percussionist Rob Spectre in Providence, RI introduced Heather to the incredible expressiveness of African djembe in ilyAIMY’s first year of touring. Showing an incredible aptitude for the instrument, Heather has gone on to write a number of songs completely on the drum (like “Can You Love a Girl Gone So Long”) and has been recognized nationally through touring as the percussionist for Dar Williams on her 2008 Promised Land Tour. Fate and Lyme’s Disease lead all of us to very strange places.
With a love of R&B, chamber choir, slam poetry and non-fiction, Heather has blossomed into an award-winning songwriter and performer. She can rap and strum and drum and rip through the emotions of ilyAIMY’s music.
Heather plays a Taylor 6-string and a djembe from the Ivory Coast that Sharif brought back from Africa with him, a cajon that’s cajon-shaped and sometimes her brother’s whisks when he’s not looking. Heather is married and Lives with her family in Owings Mills, MD.