Debut UK tour after ten year-break for US singer-songwriter Juliet Lloyd
US singer-songwriter Juliet Lloyd is touring the UK for the first time this summer, with dates including The Folklore Rooms in Brighton on July 1 and The Hyde Tavern in Winchester on July 2.
The tour comes a few years after Juliet returned to music after a ten-year break.
“The UK has been on my wish list for a long time, and actually this will be my first time in the UK at all. I have flown through Heathrow but never stepped outside the airport.
“But really I suppose part of it is timing. I was writing songs and making music professionally for a long time, but then I took a break for about ten years. I got really burnt out. As an independent artist I was really struggling. I did an album in 2007 which was pre-social media. YouTube was just starting but we didn't have a lot of the tools. I thought that I was working towards being discovered and being signed by a major label. That wasn't realistic then and it's probably even less realistic now! But I thought that that's what I needed to do. CDs were still around but income streams were drying up, and as I say I just felt burnt out.
“I had a degree in economics and I'd always gone back and forth between the creative side of me and the more practical side that is fairly risk averse. I felt the pull towards needing something that would have a more linear pathway to success. I was struggling to make it as an independent artist. I was living in Boston at the time. I had released a second album and I couldn't really see what success looked like. So I stepped away and didn't write a song for about ten years to the point where I was thinking can I even really consider myself a songwriter anymore.
“But during that break I still performed very occasionally at a coffee house or at a winery. And then the pandemic happened, and like so many people I was working from home. And even though I wasn't actually trying to pursue a career in music at that point, when the pandemic started I still felt that sense of having had something taken away from me. Even if I had wanted to perform, I wouldn't have been able to. And it was that combined with having more space and more time to think that really started to get me back into it. I was thinking about how do I really want to spend my time, and I was thinking about what is important. It was a moment for me to get some perspective on what success meant but also what it means to have a successful and happy life, and I started thinking that maybe there was a way to think about the artist’s path differently. I had the luxury of having had a successful corporate career long enough that I could take a risk. And so I started writing again, but from a much healthier place.
“When I was in my 20s I was trying to write what I thought I needed to write so that other people would like it and so that I would get a record deal. I was trying to be what I thought a songwriter was but once I came back to it a few years ago I wasn't trying to do that anymore. I just started writing about things that were important to me and what I was experiencing. The very first song I wrote during the pandemic was about the pandemic taking away the arts. I am in my 40s now, and I think I'm just much more sure about who I am now, and I feel that I can translate that into my music much better now.”
Inevitably Juliet is enjoying it all so much more second time around: “The practical part of me on a daily basis is still looking at the pros and the cons but I do think I'm now much more aware of just how important it is to enjoy the process of getting to write and of going out to perform.”