Joanne Shaw Taylor returns to Colorado’s Front Range November 5–7 for three nights that promise to showcase the full range of her blues, rock, soul and pop instincts. Her fall tour stops at the Phil Long Music Hall in Colorado Springs on Thursday, November 5; the Aggie Theatre in Fort Collins on Friday, November 6; and the Boulder Theater in Boulder on Saturday, November 7. Adding to the draw, genre-crossing Canadian seven-piece Bywater Call will open all three shows.
Taylor’s a formidable guitarist, certainly—but she’s also a singer and songwriter with a knack for moving from a searing riff to a tender ballad without losing her own unmistakable voice. That range was already part of the story when I last spoke with her in February 2023, ahead of her Boulder show two months later. At the time, her 2022 album Nobody’s Fool was the latest chapter in a career that has never stayed neatly inside the blues.
Since then, the story has kept moving. We’ve watched her evolve through the 2024 album Heavy Soul and the 2025 album Black & Gold, but the real centerpiece of the moment arrives TODAY, with the release of The Trouble With Love. It is a ten-song collection that has been simmering in the public consciousness for almost a year; eight of those tracks have already surfaced as singles or across a series of EPs, building a slow-burn anticipation for the full album’s arrival.
Two days prior to the release of the new record, I caught up with Taylor to talk about the conceptual foundation of The Trouble With Love, annoying sausage dogs, her coining of a new genre category, and what’s changed since our last conversation—while tracing the path from that 2023 Boulder show to this return.
Joanne: Hey Rick.
Rick: Hey Joanne, how are you doing?
Joanne: I’m doing all right, love. Been a long day of interviews, and I should warn you that I’ve got a sausage dog (a common British nickname for a Dachshund) here that’s been a very good boy all day, but he’s getting rather testy, so he may interrupt us at some point and start barking just for attention. So I’m very sorry.
Rick: You don’t need to apologize. I have the same situation here. In fact, I just opened the door to my office because she’s camping out in the hallway, staring at my closed door.
Joanne: Yeah, and what dog do you have?
Rick: She’s a rescue. A mix primarily of Rhodesian Ridgeback and Greyhound.
Joanne: Oh wow! Well, I’ve got a little sausage, and unfortunately, the rumors are true. Little dogs are absolute nightmares, and he likes to make his opinions known.
Rick: Oh, I get it, and no worries. So, listen, I want to thank you very much for joining me. I know our time is limited, and for that reason, I’ll skip some of the usual opening chit chat and just get right to it, if that’s okay with you.
Joanne: Yeah, it’s been a while.
Rick: You and I last talked a little over three and a half years ago, in February of 2023.
Joanne: For Heavy Soul?
Rick: No, it was before Heavy Soul. Nobody’s Fool had been out about four months.
Joanne: Oh wow!
Rick: You were getting ready to play a show in Boulder, Colorado – your first show in this area in five years. After I interviewed you, I covered the show, and it was terrific. So I appreciate the opportunity to catch up with you after all this time.
Joanne: No, thank you for having me, love.
Rick: Oh, absolutely. There’s two things that I want to try to get to in the time we have. Number one, obviously I want to talk about the new record which drops – drum roll, please – the day after tomorrow. Number two, I want to try to bridge the gap between when we were chatting about back in early 2023 and today, as we prepare for your upcoming shows in Colorado. Does that sound like a plan to you?
Joanne: That sounds lovely. I’m in.
Rick: All right, so let’s start with the catch up piece of it. You have been busy. You have been recording and releasing a lot of new material. You’ve been touring a lot. You released Heavy Soul in mid-2024, Black & Gold in mid-2025, and you’ve got The Trouble With Love coming out at the end of the week. When we talked in 2023, we spent a lot of time discussing your desire to not be confined by a single genre-based characterization. You indicated that Nobody’s Fool really gave you the freedom to spread out a bit more after having released a couple of blues centric records. Certainly the projects you’ve done since then continued in that same direction. And I clearly hear it again on the new record. So that seems to be something where you’ve stayed the course since the last time we talked. But you also talked a lot about the importance of just being you, being authentic, and being allowed as an artist to, and I’ll paraphrase you here: to feel whatever you want to feel and to explore. So, in the spirit of feeling what you want to feel and exploring, what’s changed for you in the last three and a half years in terms of your life, your songwriting, and your approach to making music?
Joanne: Yeah, I mean, I don’t think I’ve strayed too far off that course, you know. And I probably talked about this the last time we spoke, but I can’t promise you what the next song will sound like in terms of genre, or what you perceive the genre to be. But I can promise you, it will sound like me. It just might not be your perception of what you expect from me. And I just think that’s the best way of approaching anything in life, particularly art, is to just be your authentic self. You know, at the end of the day, I’m always going to make music for me. And I’m very lucky that I’m in a position right now where I get to share it with other people. But if all of this ends tomorrow and I have to go get a real job, I’m still going to come home and write a song. Probably not as often as I do now, but I’m always going to have that in my back pocket as a way I cope with life.
Looking back, Nobody’s Fool was a very important album for me because it was the first time I allowed myself to not worry about what other people were expecting and just do it anyway. And I think because I got that out of my system, I think it also helped me redefine who and what I am. I’ve joked that I’m a blues guitarist and a soul singer that likes writing rock/pop songs. And I think it’s all kind of blended into that. I’ve been telling people that for this album I’ve decided to name my genre “blues/pop” and just embrace it, even though some people are probably going to hate it.
Rick: I get that – people just instinctively want to put everything into its own bucket because it’s convenient and neat. But art doesn’t work that way. So you might like it, or you might not, but that’s the way it is. It’s your music, right?
Joanne: Yeah, exactly.
Rick: You know, for the short time I’ve known you, you’ve always impressed me as being extremely self-aware, and present in and understanding of where you are in the world. Listening to you now, it sounds like you’ve become even more so.
Joanne: I think so. I think it’s probably an age thing. But also, I got lucky with coming from the sort of background I came from. Of coming from a very working class kind of place and a very authentic kind of family. I had a good foundation in life, which some people don’t get. It’s really nice to start your life from a foundation of honest, genuine people who make it known on a daily basis that you are loved and supported for who you are. That’s not to say we don’t all go through things, and you question who we are and have other people’s negative opinions of us affect us. But the beautiful thing I think about age and experience is, at some point, you have to like who you are as a person. There can be things about yourself that you don’t like and that you aspire to change and work on, but at the end of the day, life is gonna come and go, whether you want it to or not. And so I can either like who I am as I travel through this, or I cannot. One road’s gonna be very easy, and the other very hard.
Rick: Yep, it will be a heck of a lot easier if you like yourself.
Joanne: Look, I’m not perfect all the time, but I try to be a nice person. Some days are easier than others with that. But yeah, I’m just trying to be who I am, and that will hopefully resonate through the music for some people. Some people won’t like it, and that’s cool too. You know, there’s people out there who don’t like the Beatles, and they’re, I mean, the Beatles.
Rick: So let’s talk about the new record. And I know I sound like a broken record when I keep talking about our conversation from 2023, but I want to go back to that one more time because you and I talked back then about an upcoming change of focus with regard to new material, with less of an album release strategy and more of a focus on releasing singles at a steady pace, so that your audience was getting new music coming out more frequently. Clearly, that has happened, in what to me seems like an accelerated pace. There are ten songs on the new record, and eight of them have been released either as singles or included as part of three or four song EPs since January. So here’s the question: In this day and age where owning an album or a CD or a cassette, whatever, isn’t nearly as important as it was back when you were first starting out, do you worry at all that dropping nearly all of an album ahead of the full album release date might actually make that ultimate release date less of an event?
Joanne: Yeah, well firstly I will say that wasn’t my decision. That was very much the label’s decision and management of how they wanted to do things for me and for Joe. And I understand the reasoning behind it. I mean, when you release an album you get a month’s worth of interest about it in the press and online, and then 11 months of the year you’ve got nothing to help promote your tour. So I understand the business strategy that if you release a new song every month, you’ve always got something new to talk about. Artistically, I do wonder because I am very much someone who when I buy an album, I buy the vinyl. Let’s see… (Looks away) …what’s the first… Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally. That’s the first record in my vinyl over there. It’s the new Harry Styles album. I listened to the single, so I kind of got a vibe for what it was. What I really look forward to is getting the vinyl and having an experience one afternoon of sitting down and seeing how I feel about it. I am someone who likes to absorb music that way. I don’t know if everyone is like that. So I don’t know. All I can say is, from experience, it doesn’t seem like I’ve dipped off album sales or support. So I kind of leave those decisions to the people who went to school and know what they’re doing, and I’ll just try and make sure that every song that comes out is as strong as I can make it. That’s my job, and I’ve got enough jobs. I’ll stick with that one for now.
Rick: I understand it too, and there’s definitely aspects of it that I love. But there’s other parts of it that I just wonder about. Ultimately we just accept that it’s different from what it was a decade or two ago, and we need to just roll with it. It’s what it is.
Joanne: Well, that’s the thing. It’s the way we’ve changed as consumers. Everything’s now, now, now. You know, when I was growing up, I’d have to wait for it to come out, and then I’d have to cycle into Birmingham to get it six weeks later because it was being imported from the States. I’d go in one day and tell them, I want B.B. King Live at the Regal, and they’re like, “All right, that will be six weeks.” But now, we don’t have to watch what’s on TV. We can choose what we want to watch and then go find it.
Rick: And it will be instantaneous.
Joanne: Yeah. So as much as I would love to release one album every two years and have it be this thing, we unfortunately do live in a society these days where we want everything now. Maybe someday we’ll revert backwards. Who knows?
Rick: Yeah, who knows. But I do know this. If you wait two years to release a new record and don’t release anything in the interim, you really run the risk of completely falling off the radar.
Joanne: Yeah, it’s strange, isn’t it? But then you get artists like Adele that don’t do anything for seven years and come back and it’s the biggest thing. I’ve not had that luxury yet. But I also really like writing songs and making albums. So right now, touch wood, it’s not been a problem for me. (In British culture, “touch wood” is a common, usually lighthearted superstition. People say it after mentioning good luck or hoping something will continue, to avoid “tempting fate.”)
Rick: This record is the third one in a row now where you’ve worked with Kevin Shirley as your producer, so I would take that to mean that that relationship is working out pretty darned well. What is it that he brings to the table that makes that working relationship such a good one?
Joanne: A very dark Australian sense of humor, which is very much appreciated if you’re me and from where I’m from. But I mean, everyone’s relationship with their producer is different. I think I really benefit from the trust level between me and Kevin, having become really good friends over the course of, let’s see, when did I first meet him? 2010, so 16 years. He’s seen me evolve as an artist and as a woman – a girl to a woman, if you want to say that. So to have that trust level of “Kevin, these are my songs.” He knows what they’re about and what I’ve been through. Maybe not the ins and outs of it, but he’s been there in my life every day. I’m actually going for dinner with him in a bit. So to have that kind of level of trust, and also the experience of doing a few albums with him. You know, I could take these 10 songs to Kevin Shirley, or I could take these exact same 10 songs to Rick Rubin, and I would get two very different Joanne Shaw Taylor albums. There is a partnership there that you have to trust. If he takes a song and says, “Let’s try it this way,” but I say, “Kevin, this just doesn’t feel like me.”, he’s absolutely fine with that, because he wants me to speak my mind. Any good producer will tell you, “This is your album. I’m doing it for two weeks. You’re going to be touring it for two years, so you better like it.”
Rick: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. The new album is amazing, not only for the breadth of musical styles, but also for the range of emotions and themes that it captures, all related to the concept of love, both romantic and non-romantic. And I think I read where you have described it as being about the “beautiful chaos of the human heart,” which I really like. As I listen to it, it comes across as almost a concept album. Was that intentional, or did it just work out that way?
Joanne: No, it was (intentional). I wrote this album as I finished recording Black & Gold. We recorded it before Black & Gold was released. So I was writing, but having just finished a project so soon, I wanted to do another album, but I didn’t know what it was going to be about. I was home in the UK for Christmas, and I was talking to a friend, I don’t know how we got on the subject. I think we had just watched the Eras documentary, Taylor Swift, and we were talking about the differences of male and female in a male dominated industry. And one of the things I mentioned that I get a lot, or I’ve seen it over the course of my career, is what I call the Taylor Swift Effect. She can’t do an album unless she’s gone through a breakup. And the thing is, men write all the same songs about the same subject matters, you know, falling in love is so hard on the knees, Aerosmith. But they don’t seem to get that kind of feedback, so I just thought, why don’t I just double down and go, Yes, every single song on this album is about the subject of love, because to be quite honest, that’s the whole point of making art. It’s the greatest thing we have in the world. It’s the thing worth living for. And it doesn’t have to be a romantic relationship. I’m talking about unconditional love of a very annoying sausage dog, or my best friend, or the very strong female relationships I have, or the love I have for Kevin Shirley, and the support he’s given me not only in my professional life but in my personal life as well. Or unrequited love, toxic love. Yeah, I mean, what else do you make art about – the weather?
Rick: Well, I guess you could.
Joanne: You could. But if you’re a fan of Shakespeare, I don’t think there’s much in there about the passion of the weather. It’s hard to get too excited about that, isn’t it? So I just thought I’d double down, and yeah, it’s a break up album… sure, why not?
Rick: We’ve talked a lot about the influence of blues and soul and rock and pop and Americana on you, but something new came through on this record. That was this kind of cinematic influence that literally reaches out through the speakers on “This Is Who I Am.” Where did that come from?
Joanne: Again, you can thank Mr. Shirley. He knows what he’s doing, and he brought that. It’s the one cover on the album, and he brought it to the table. Over my career, I’ve tended to not do that many covers. Maybe on every other album or something like that. He brought it to the table, and once again, like most covers Kevin brings me, it was something I wouldn’t have chosen myself. Usually he brings me songs that I wouldn’t have written, so it’s hard for me to approach how I’m gonna, you know, wear someone else’s skin doing the song they’ve written. So I knew it was going to be a challenge. But I just love the idea of “This Is Who I Am.” That concept of self-love, especially considering everything we’ve been talking about with getting to an age of acceptance of yourself as a person and an artist, and being confident in the art you’re putting out there to be judged. So yeah, I just love the message.
Almost every time Kevin suggests a cover to me, I find something out about myself as an artist that I didn’t know was there, and it’s usually for me as a singer. I find a new range that I didn’t know I had, and I wouldn’t have done it unless Kevin picked it, like “Wild Is the Wind” or this one. So yeah, it was kind of fun to tap into. Like, please don’t hate me, because I’m a massive fan, but like Dame Shirley Bassey for me, like those kind of big voices. And they are cinematic, kind of beautiful, maybe jazz voices. I’ve never thought of myself as having a big voice, you know. I think I’m a big guitar player, but not necessarily a big singer. So it’s kind of fun to channel into that and to learn something new about myself.
Rick: Well, I think the song is just majestic in its sound, so I guess we all have Kevin Shirley to thank for that.
Okay, I know we’re up against it, so I’m going to let you go. Again, thank you so much for your time today. So you know, I’m going to be at all three of your Colorado Front Range shows – Colorado Springs, Fort Collins, and Boulder, and I’m really looking forward to it. So be well, travel safe, and we’ll see you out here in just a couple of weeks.
Joanne: All right, I’ll be there. I’ll see you then. Cheers, love.
Three and a half years after our last conversation, Taylor sounds less like an artist searching for room to move and more like one who has claimed it. The records have kept coming, the boundaries have kept falling, and the promise she made in 2023 still holds: whatever the next song sounds like, it will sound like her.
That makes The Trouble With Love feel less like a departure than a destination. Its songs may circle romance, friendship, heartbreak, self-acceptance and, yes, the unconditional love of an opinionated sausage dog, but they all lead back to the same place—an artist increasingly comfortable in her own skin and increasingly uninterested in anyone else’s expectations.
Soon, those songs will leave the record and meet the stage across three Colorado nights. Call it “blues/pop” if you need a label. Better yet just call it Joanne Shaw Taylor.
The best way for you to pick up tickets to any or all three of Joanne Shaw Taylor’s Fron Range shows is through her website, at https://www.joanneshawtaylor.com/tour/. You can certainly visit the venue websites, but the ticket buttons on Joanne’s website will take you to the same place.
Interview and article by Rick Witt www.rickwittphotography.com
Photos by Alysse Gafkjen and Rick Witt, as noted
