Lilly Hiatt confirms European tour with new album "Forever"

Lilly Hiatt has released Forever earlier this year via New West Records. The 9-song set is Hiatt’s first album in four years and was produced by her husband, Coley Hinson, and mixed by Paul Q. Kolderie (Radiohead, Pixies, Hole). Forever is a raw, unvarnished work of love and trust that walks the line between alt-rock muscle and singer-songwriter sensitivity. It is a bold, guitar-driven, exploration of maturity and adulthood that grapples with growth and change, escape and anxiety, self-loathing and self-love, and the songs are intensely vulnerable, full of diaristic snapshots.

Born in Los Angeles and raised in Tennessee, Hiatt first earned buzz with a pair of early solo records before breaking out with 2017’s Trinity Lane. That record helped her earn dates with the likes of John Prine, Drive-By Truckers, Margo Price, and more. NPR called it “courageous and affecting,” while Rolling Stone hailed it as “the most cohesive and declarative statement of the young songwriter’s career.” Hiatt delivered on the album’s promise with her similarly acclaimed 2020 follow-up, Walking Proof, and unable to tour due to the pandemic, quickly returned to the studio again for 2021’s stripped-down Lately, which Uncut proclaimed to be “captivating.” When it was finally time to get back on the road, though, she found herself feeling overwhelmed and bewildered. The world seemed to be changing faster than she could keep up with, and rather than embracing what should have been her triumphant return, Hiatt instead began retreating from everything she’d worked so hard to build. “I was on the phone with a friend who said she wasn’t sure where I’d been,” Hiatt recalls. “I realized I wasn’t too sure of that either.” The search for answers—where she’s been, who she’s become, what it all means—lies at the heart of Hiatt’s striking Forever.

“I fell in love, got married, adopted a dog, all the things I’d always dreamed of doing,” Hiatt reflects. “But I felt like an outsider watching myself stumble through it all, just constantly critiquing myself to the point where I became so paralyzed I could hardly leave home.” She tried therapy and antidepressants, talked to friends and family, wrote dozens and dozens of songs about her feelings, all in the hopes of quieting her racing mind. “There was this intensity where I felt so jacked up all the time,” she explains. “Eventually I just realized that my life was passing me by, that the love I was living in required presence to accept. So I started doing the little things you have to do to show up for the people in your life: listen, grow, change. I learned to expand my world.” Hiatt left the bustle of Nashville for a more rural setting just outside the city and scrapped all the material she’d been working on, starting from scratch in pursuit of something that would resonate more with the new chapter she was embarking upon.

Hiatt and Hinson worked quickly in their new home, tackling the writing and recording of each song one-at-a-time from the ground up and sending the material off to Kolderie to mix as they finished them. “Paul brought so much enthusiasm and dimension to the project,” Hiatt explains. “Every time we had a song tracked, we’d share it with him and then he’d get really excited about it, which was really affirming and encouraged us to turn right around and get started on the next one.” That excitement is plain to hear on Forever.

With Forever Lilly Hiatt will be touring across Europe in October, proud to be announcing the following dates today:

17/10: Lint, BE - 't Groot Verzet
18/10: Utrecht, NL - Ramblin' Roots
20/10: Bristol, UK - Hen & Chicken
21/10: Oxford, UK - The Bullingdon
22/10: Nottingham, UK - The Angel Microbrewery
23/10: Newcastle, UK - The Cluny 2
24/10: Manchester - Gullivers
25/10: Hassocks, UK - Mid Sussex Music Festival
26/10: London, UK - Oslo Hackney
29/10: Isernhagen, DE - Blues Garage
30/10: Essen-Werden, DE - Jugend- und Bürgerzentrum
31/10: Lauchhammer, DE - Real Music Club
01/11: Groningen, NL - Take Root
05/11: Madrid, ESP - El Sol
06/11: Avilés, ESP - Factoria
07/11: Zarautz, ESP - Modelo Aretoa
08/11: Zaragoza, ESP - Rock & Blues Café
09/11: Santander, ESP -  El Almacén de Little Bobby