Joanne Shaw Taylor: 'My love has always been of a good catchy song and a good guitar solo'

This month the 38-year-old will be heading back to the UK for a tour to coincide with the release of her new album, Heavy Soul, her 12th in a career that began back in 2002 when Dave Stewart of Eurythmics invited her to join his supergroup D.U.P. It’s been preceded by a string of singles as “the label is trying a different take” to make the most of streaming. “In the blues scene, an album is really just a promotional tool for touring, that’s our bread and butter,” she concedes. “What we’re doing is releasing every single from the album to get the most out of the publicity, which sounds very manipulative when I say it like that, but it’s what you’ve got to do these days.”

Having breached the UK top 20 in 2016 and 2019 with her albums Wild and Reckless Heart, Shaw Taylor feels there has been a noticeable progression from record to record. “That’s been nice to see that slow build not only in my career but also artistically,” she says. “Fans sometimes say ‘I wish you’d do an album that was more like White Sugar (from 2009) or more like Reckless Heart’ and I say, ‘Well, you still have that album that you can listen to, but I can’t keep recreating the same album because it would be less authentic’. So I also hope there’s been a growth as a person, as an artist, to go along the career going up, thank God.”

Heavy Soul sees Shaw Taylor teaming up again with Kevin Shirley, the South African-born producer who has worked with Iron Maiden, Aerosmith and Black Stone Cherry as well as helming sessions for Shaw Taylor’s album Wild in 2015. “It just happened spontaneously,” says the singer-songwriter. “Kevin just happened to be spending a lot of time in Nashville working with Joe (Bonamassa) and I’m very close to both of them, we were hanging out a lot, and so I said, ‘Is now the right time for us to work together again?’ and fortunately he had time in his schedule.”

She says that after the experimentation of her 2019 album Nobody’s Fool and the more traditional-sounding covers records The Blues Album and Blues from the Heart: Live, she felt in a position where she could “pretty much do whatever” with Heavy Soul. Hence her idea was to “mess around with the songwriting and see how much more I could explore soulful and poppy melodies”.

“I want to be able to look back at my albums and go, there was a progression through all of them. They’re kind of snapshots of me ageing and changing, so I do want Nobody’s Fool to still work in the catalogue. It was a fun challenge to go, OK, how do I go from a more poppy album back to a more roots album, and have this be a stepping stone. We recorded it at RCA Studios in Nashville.”

It combines her love of loud, personality-driven guitar-playing with a fondness for a memorable chorus. “The guitar players that I loved were the kind that would play with a technique that you would never suggest, like Albert Collins – you would never try to teach someone to play like Albert Collins unless they really wanted to. Growing up, all of my guitar influences were male, but it’s a gender-neutral instrument, I could try to sound like Albert Collins or Paul Kossoff, but when it came to learning to sing, I had to find other influences that were female, which sent me into pop, Bonnie Raitt and Stevie Nicks, and more soul, Tina Turner, so I think that’s where that love of a good catchy chorus comes from blended in with a guitar solo.

“I’ve always said I would probably have been a very different artist had I been born a man. Maybe I could’ve tried to sing like Stevie Ray Vaughan or whoever. But my love has always been of a good catchy song and a good guitar solo, so I try to beldn the two to the best of my ability.”

Joanne Shaw plays at Leeds City Varieties on February 19. https://www.joanneshawtaylor.com/