Juliet Lloyd: Debut UK tour
AMERICAN singer-songwriter Juliet Lloyd will play FortyFive Vinyl Café, Micklegate, York, on July 10 on her debut British tour.
The ten-date itinerary will take in further Yorkshire gigs at Café No 9, Sheffield, on July 6 (7.30pm) and Hyde Park Book Club, Leeds, on July 7 (8pm), supported by Zoe Cure.
Drawing on influences ranging from Laurel Canyon-era singer/songwriters to Lilith Fair rockers, confessional country/folk balladeers to indie pop, Washington DC musician Lloyd released her latest album Carnival in 2024.
The UK tour was preceded by her May 16 single Wild Again, a song born out of a New York Times podcast about efforts to return the whale that played Willy in the 1993 film Free Willy to the wild.
“It’s an insane, heartbreaking story that asks all kinds of thorny questions about human responsibility and humility, and what’s the ‘right’ thing to do and is that the same as the ‘kind’ thing to do,” says Juliet.
“There was a line that one of the trainers said in the podcast, explaining that they were trying to ‘train him to be wild again’. The complete absurdity of that statement hit me in the moment, and I immediately started jotting down lyrical ideas.”
Raised in rural New York, Juliet was a classically trained pianist and jazz trumpet player from an early age before studying songwriting at Berklee College of Music and becoming a fixture in the Boston singer-songwriter scene.
The artwork for Juliet Lloyd’s latest single, Wild Again
Lloyd released her debut album, the heavily jazz-influenced All Dressed Up, in 2005, although she rejected the “jazz” label at the time. “I am a piano player and a woman, so I was immediately compared to Norah Jones—and I bristled at that,” she says. “Listening back now, I can totally see that it was true, and it of course wasn’t a bad thing.”
After the slick piano pop of her sophomore album, 2007’s Leave The Light On, elicited five of its songs being placed on reality TV shows on MTV and VH1, in 2009 she walked away from writing and recording for more than ten years, feeling burnt out and unhappy with her career progression, like so many other independent artists.
She switched to a lucrative corporate job, but after going through a divorce in 2019, in the midst of the global pandemic, Lloyd found herself pulled back toward the siren call of songwriting, whereupon she made the leap to pursue it full time.
In 2022, she released High Road, an EP of five Americana/soul-tinged songs produced by Jim Ebert that earned her songwriting awards both in Wasahington DC and nationally.
Next came her first full-length album since her return. Recorded in an unhurried process over nearly 15 months and produced by Todd Wright, Carnival’s nine songs are a study in contrasts.
Light and dark, devastating and self-deprecating, apologetic and angry, conversational and conceptual, they weave elements of pop, folk, soul and rock to create an often unexpected platform for Lloyd’s unflinching storytelling.
“These songs have helped me make sense of emotions and experiences that have happened both recently and those that I’ve buried for 20-plus years, to confront truths about myself and about others that I’ve been afraid or unwilling to say out loud,” Juliet says. “I’ve never been a confrontational person. But this is definitely a confrontational album – and I love it.”
The cover artwork for Juliet Lloyd’s 2024 album, Carnival
Carnival is full of deeply personal songs drawn from Lloyd’s experiences and relationships. “Coming out of that album cycle, I was feeling a little exhausted by my own navel-gazing and I was craving inspiration elsewhere,” she says.
“So, a lot of the songs I’m writing now are an evolution of sorts – focused more on external stimuli and finding the personal stories and humanity in that.”
Carnival’s songs are marked by urgency and honesty. “I’ve always been envious of writers who say they write songs because they have to, because they had these things they just had to get out of themselves,” says Juliet. “I had never really felt that way until this album. I’ve become someone who writes because they have to.”
Take the song Sorry Now, for example, written as an interrogation of her divorce. “I had a really visceral memory of sorting through our shared stuff when I moved out, boring things like kitchen utensils and towels, and what felt so mechanical at the time now feels coloured with sadness,” says Juliet.
“I wanted to pose questions in the lyrics, to myself and to whoever needs to hear them, because I still don’t have everything figured out, and that’s okay.”
Carnival marked a shift in her songwriting too. “Though I still primarily consider myself a piano player, I write and play more guitar now,” says Juliet. “That definitely influences the kinds of songs I write, because I’m so limited by the chords I can play right now. It’s forced me to be simple and to put more of an emphasis on lyrics than I may have in past.”
Lloyd performs 150 shows a year, both solo and with her band, at clubs and listening rooms across the United States. Now comes her debut UK tour. Doors open at 7pm for her FortyFive Vinyl Café show; tickets are on sale at fortyfiveuk.com/events/juliet-lloyd. For Sheffield, wegottickets.com/event/650457; Leeds, seetickets.com/event/juliet-lloyd/hyde-park-book-club/3322164.