Deloyd Elze
Los Angeles via Jacksonville, FL
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About the Artist
Deloyd Elze—the project of Georgia-born, California-based Jacob Henry Allen, makes what he calls “digital twang”, music that sounds like it’s been captured on a digicam, rather than film, taking snapshots from the places he’s lived his life—glugging Hamms with the alligators on a Florida swamp pontoon, to working blue-collar jobs on boats and construction sites to scrape by in Los Angeles. The name Deloyd Elze originally belonged to his great-grandfather: his legend is one of a Georgia-born dairy farmer-turned-alleged moonshiner who was run out of his hometown of Cairo by the cops and fled to Florida to start over, where he founded a successful family business in the infrastructure of seawall construction. Deloyd’s connection to home and family is felt deeply on his latest release, titled Nellene, which is named after and dedicated to his grandmother, Margaret Nellene Williamson.
With influences ranging from John Prine, MJ Lenderman, and Bon Iver to Dijon and Mk.gee, Deloyd’s music sounds natural when it’s all woven together. As a Berklee grad with a blue-collar background and multi-generational Southern roots, Deloyd Elze’s form of country music is inspired by the myriad of lives he’s intersected with, from the grit of job sites to the inspiration of music scenes to the undersung glory of the swamps of his youth. His songs struggle through the search of finding warmth and a home in this world, with grace for all of its strange turns and deeply twisted characters. Deloyd’s craving to push the sonic form and musical boundaries of country music is what he sees as an exploratory way of writing songs; the touchstone of his particularly Floridian lens on country music.