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Jan 13, 2021 By Joey Arnone East India Youth

William Doyle (formerly known as East India Youth) has announced a new album, Great Spans of Muddy Time, and shared a lyric video for his new song “And Everything Changed (But I Feel Alright).” Great Spans of Muddy Time will be released on March 21 via Tough Love. Watch the lyric video below, followed by the album’s tracklist and cover art.

Doyle says of the song in a press release: “Like other favorite 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.”

While working on Great Spans of Muddy Time, Doyle dealt with a hard-drive failure and was only left with cassette recordings of the album’s songs, which had a direct impact on the sonic quality and creative direction of the album. Regarding this situation, Doyle states: “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 goes on to speak about his influences that inspired him during the album’s creation: “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. 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.”

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

Doyle’s most recent album, Your Wilderness Revisited, was released in November 2019.

Check out our interview with Doyle from last year.

Great Spans of Muddy Time Tracklisting:

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]

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