William Doyle announces new album with lead track "And Everything Changed (But I Feel Alright)"

"And Everything Changed (But I Feel Alright)" marks Doyle's first release since 2019's Your Wilderness Revisited album, although he did contribute to last year's Shards and Isolation Choir's "Inside I'll Sing" with Anna Meredith, JFDR, alt-J's Joe Newman, Douglas Dare, Red Moon and more.

On the new track, Doyle says, "Like other favourite songs of mine, this arrived when I least expected it, almost fully formed. It's partly a reaction to the complexity and excess of my last album. I wanted to get back into the craft of writing individual songs rather than being concerned with overarching concepts."

Great Spans of Muddy Time was created from the remains of a hard drive that failed. Doyle had to accept the recordings as they were due to only saving the work on cassette tape - a complete contrast to his 2019 album Your Wilderness Revisited, which Doyle spent four years crafting. Doyle says of the process, "Instead of feeling a loss that I could no longer craft these pieces into flawless 'Works of Art', I felt intensely liberated that they had been set free from my ceaseless tinkering."

Doyle adds of his new album, "The album this turned out to be – and that I’ve wanted to make for ages – is a kind of Englishman-gone-mad, scrambling around the verdancy of the country’s pastures looking for some sense. It has its seeds in Robert Wyatt, early Eno, Robyn Hitchcock, and Syd Barrett."

"I became obsessed with Monty Don," Doyle continues. "I like his manner and there's something about him I relate to. He once described periods of depression in his life as consisting of ‘nothing but great spans of muddy time’. When I read that quote I knew it would be the title of this record. Something about the sludgy mulch of the album’s darker moments, and its feel of perpetual autumnal evening, seemed to fit so well with those words. I would also be lying if I said it didn’t chime with my mental health experiences as well."

He adds, "For the first time in my career, the distance between what I hear and what the listener hears is paper-thin. Perhaps therein reveals a deeper truth that the perfectionist brain can often dissolve."

Tracklist:

1. I Need To Keep You In My Life
2. And Everything Changed (But I Feel Alright)
3. Somewhere Totally Else
4. Shadowtackling
5. Who Cares
6. Nothing At All
7. Rainfalls
8. New Uncertainties
9. St. Giles’ Hill
10. Semi-bionic
11. A Forgotten Film
12. Theme from Muddy Time
13. [a sea of thoughts behind it]