The posts at the beginning of this thread (almost a year old) concur that you only need warmly to do the teir 1 armor, but ally to do tier 2+.
It sounds like you got the faction to work Free? Are you saying you were able to get the armor with warmly faction, or did you start with warmly and get it up to ally to get the armor? What I'm wondering is not whether the song had been nerfed on this NPC, but whether the minimum faction level required for tier 1 armor has been raised. Thanks if you know, it's too daunting to start factioning atm, plz tell me it's slightly less painful than for other classes ;)