While Billy Childish has fashioned a career out of making music that's raw and immediate -- sometimes at the expense of instrumental precision or clean recording technique -- the William Loveday Intention is a project that presented his songs in a new and different light. While a far cry from slick, the William Loveday Intention found him approaching material from his back catalog with arrangements that presented them in fresh musical contexts" '60s-style blues-rock, Dylan-esque folk-rock, and vintage pop, sometimes complete with strings and horns. The more controlled instrumental work and (relatively) polished production were more gentle than Childish's best-known work, though his vocals were still deeply passionate (if more measured), and his personal, brutally honest lyrics stand in sharp relief to the melodies. Childish's first albums with the William Loveday Intention, 2020's The New and Improved Bob Dylan, found him interpreting 12 classic Dylan tunes with backing informed by his first electric era in the '60s, while 2021's People Think They Know Me But They Don't Know Me was an especially ambitious exercise in grand-scale pop, and The Bearded Lady Also Sells the Candy Floss was a bracing set of full-bodied blues-rock.

Billy Childish hatched the idea for the William Loveday Intention around 2000, when someone suggested he stage a concert tour accompanied by a small orchestra. While he was unable to do so at the time, the idea remained in the back of his mind, and it occurred to him again in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced him to abandon some other projects. With plenty of time to focus on recording, he revived the concept of the William Loveday Intention, with the goal of reworking songs from earlier in his career. (William Loveday was Billy's great-grandfather's name, which was mistakenly entered on his birth certificate before it was corrected with his real name, Steven Hamper.) On lead vocals and guitar, Childish assembled an ad-hoc band for the Intention, featuring J.W. Loveday (his wife) on bass and vocals, David Tattersall on lead guitar, Jon Barker on organ, Jim Riley on harmonica, Richard Moore on violin, Tom Orley on trumpet, and Adolphus Havard on drums.

The Intention issued their debut album in 2020, The New and Improved Bob Dylan, which juggled the original interpretive concept to include a full album of songs by Bob Dylan, with the band evoking the sound of his Highway 61 Revisited period. Before 2020 was over, the prolific Childish had recorded and released two more LPs with the Intention, People Think They Know Me But They Don't Know Me (the most elaborately orchestrated and pop-oriented effort of their initial releases) and Will There Ever Be a Day That You're Hung Like a Thief (rooted in rough-and-tumble folk-rock). Two more albums followed in early 2021 -- the bluesy The Bearded Lady Also Sells the Candy Floss, and an exercise in British-styled R&B called Blud Under the Bridge. For fans who had trouble keeping up with the small flood of releases, Childish and his label Damaged Goods made it easier by putting out the box set The Dept. of Discontinued Lines, which collected four of the five LPs (The New and Improved Bob Dylan was left out) in a single package. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi