“I make music for myself. I write songs that I want to hear. At the end of the day, my job is to make you feel something. So if I don’t feel it, I’m just faking it.”— Joanne Shaw Taylor
Detroit Was the Way In
Joanne Shaw Taylor did not set out to become a Michigander. Detroit simply kept pulling her back. When she was preparing to tour the United States around the release of her first album, a Detroit band that had opened for her in the UK gave her a way in. Taylor funded the visa, booked the first run herself and based out of Detroit. A few weeks became a six-week tour, then an agent, more returns and eventually a permanent move.
Back in 2008, she jokes, Detroit also had one practical advantage for a broke musician: she could afford to live there. But cheap rent was not why the place stayed with her. Taylor grew up around Birmingham and the Black Country, another industrial region with a deep musical identity. Detroit felt familiar — a place where hard work, humor and creativity live close together. “I just fell in love with the place,” she told me.
That Michigan connection was one reason I wanted to talk with her in the first place. The more important reason came after listening to “The Trouble With Love” several times. Taylor is still unmistakably a blues-rock guitarist, but this album keeps opening doors into soul, pop, Americana, country-blues and darker cinematic spaces. It sounds less like an artist protecting a genre label than one trusting everything she has absorbed along the way.
The Trouble With Love Is Bigger Than a Breakup Record
At first glance, the title suggests a relationship record. After a few listens, that idea feels too small. Love here is romantic, unreturned, bruised, stubborn, friendly, self-protective and, by the closing track, dangerous. Taylor says the title song came first. Once it did, she decided to “double down” and explore the subject from as many angles as the songs would allow. She does not especially like calling it a concept album, and that makes sense: the songs are connected, but they are not marching through one single story.
“Art, for the most part, is predominantly about love,” Taylor said during our conversation. “It’s the most fascinating subject, and it’s the best thing that we have in life.” What keeps “The Trouble With Love” interesting is that she never treats love as one emotion — and Kevin Shirley’s production never makes the ten songs sound like one repeated arrangement either.
The Guitar Talks Back
“The Trouble With Love.” The title track opens with Joe Bonamassa, but the real attraction is not simply the guest name. Their guitars behave like two people talking across the room. One line pushes; the next answers. Taylor laughed when I told her it sounded conversational. That was not planned, she said, but she heard the same thing afterward. Her own entrance came with a very human thought: “Oh shit, I’m following Joe Bonamassa. How am I going to top that?” Her answer was not to out-flash him. It was to come in angry. The result is a guitar exchange with personality instead of a technical exhibition.
“Hell Or High Water.” starts lighter than you might expect, with an acoustic rhythmic feel and small percussion touches before opening into a fuller rocker. To my ear it has the kind of radio-ready punch Melissa Etheridge can bring to melodic rock, but the blues stays underneath. The lyric is about resilience and self-belief — pushing forward even with fear, failure and doubt in the room.
“This Is Who I Am.” changes the temperature. It is smoky, slow and self-possessed, the kind of track that feels built for a dim room rather than a highway. Taylor’s voice becomes the main instrument. It is also the one song on the record she did not write: a reinterpretation of Celeste’s song that Kevin Shirley brought into the project. In Taylor’s hands, its ideas about acceptance, self-love and being seen clearly fit naturally inside the larger album.
“Tired Of Being Right.” was my sleeper. The arrangement is warm enough to slow-dance to, and I heard some Susan Tedeschi in the pacing and soul of Taylor’s vocal. Then the lyric lands and the whole thing gets tougher. This is not romance settling into comfort; it is the exhausted moment when somebody finally admits that love alone is not going to change the other person. Taylor said the contrast was intentional. There is relief in finally giving yourself permission to walk away.
Swagger, Pop and the One She Nearly Left Off
“Bad Boy.” has windows-down swagger, twang in the guitar and just enough grit in Taylor’s voice to make the song feel loose. But the story underneath is darker than the arrangement first suggests. The pull of a destructive relationship is part of the point: the music can feel exciting even when the situation clearly is not. That tension between what sounds good and what is actually happening is one of the album’s recurring strengths.
“What Good Is My Love?.” goes in almost the opposite direction. The subject is unrequited love, but Taylor deliberately set it against what she called an almost “obnoxiously catchy” pop framework. Orianthi takes the featured guitar spot. Taylor told me they had known each other for roughly a decade through mutual connections without ever having met in person. She wanted someone versatile enough to give the song a memorable melodic solo rather than simply duplicating what Taylor herself would have played. “There’s no song that actually needs a guitar solo,” she said. “It’s my job to do a solo that justifies being on there.”
“The Girl That You Loved Before.” is more reflective. The melody moves easily, but the question underneath it is more complicated: what happens when someone remembers the person you used to be rather than the person you have become? Taylor looks back at a relationship through distance and time, and the song lands somewhere between nostalgia and identity. It is wistful without getting stuck in the past, with the guitar eventually giving the bottled-up feeling somewhere to go.
“Never Gonna Please ’Em All.” is still my favorite. It comes out hard — a low-slung riff, heavy backbeat and hammered low guitar notes that brought Stevie Ray Vaughan and Kenny Wayne Shepherd to mind. “Rock and roll, baby” was the first thing I wrote in my notes. The surprise is that Taylor fought to keep it off the album.
The riff had been hanging around for years, possibly as far back as the Reckless Heart period, and Taylor had gotten in her own head about it. Shirley and her manager Sharon pushed for the track. They won. Taylor now laughs that it has become one of the songs people respond to most.
The lyric gives that muscular riff a purpose. Taylor talked about the noise that comes with being a public artist — strangers online deciding what they think of you without ever meeting you. “On any day, I could go down the rabbit hole and find 50 people saying not very nice things about me,” she said. The song is not pretending criticism disappears. It is deciding not to build your life around it. You are never going to please them all.
Love Is Not Only Romance
“You And Me (Rachel’s Song).” is the song that makes the album’s larger idea impossible to miss. It began as a birthday present for Taylor’s best friend Rachel after a lovely afternoon together on the roof of the Met in New York. They had been talking about careers, life and the things they still hoped to do. With the rooftop closing for a long renovation, Taylor turned the day into a five-year promise: each of them would write down five things they wanted to achieve, keep the lists hidden, then meet again at the Met and open them together.
What began as a private gift became something Taylor felt belonged on the album. She described female friendships in her thirties and now forties as an essential support system. If the record was really going to explore love, leaving that kind out would have made the picture incomplete. That is why Rachel’s song matters more than a sentimental detour near the end. It changes what the album title means.
When Love Turns Dangerous
“Death Wish.” closes the record by changing the atmosphere again. The percussion rattles, the slide guitar moves slowly and the rhythm feels hypnotic. I told Taylor I heard somebody being lured somewhere they probably should not go. She liked the image and connected the mood — along with parts of “Bad Boy” — to the heightened visual darkness of Sin City. That description fits better than trying to make the closer into another conventional blues rocker. It feels like a warning.
That darker edge also connects to one of Taylor’s earliest fascinations with the blues. As a kid she loved supernatural stories and history, and the blues gave her both: Robert Johnson, the crossroads, the devil, gospel and blues living close together while pulling in opposite spiritual directions. She still likes flirting with that tension. On “Death Wish,” it becomes sound rather than mythology explained in words — slide, percussion and atmosphere turning the album’s central subject into something you might want to back away from.
What Joanne Shaw Taylor Sounds Like Now
By the end of our conversation, the question of what to call Joanne Shaw Taylor seemed almost beside the point. She is unquestionably a blues guitarist, but her musical education never stayed inside one room. As a self-taught player, she could learn guitar from men like Stevie Ray Vaughan or Jeff Beck. Learning to sing forced her to look elsewhere for female voices — into soul, Motown and artists like Tina Turner and Mavis Staples. Her mother was a big Motown fan. Songwriting widened the palette again.
Taylor believes there are two ways to move through music: decide what you are supposed to be and keep trying to fit it, or stay open, learn everything you can and let the mixture become your identity. She chose the second route. That is why The Trouble With Love can move from the title track’s guitar conversation to the slow ache of “Tired Of Being Right,” the pop motion of “What Good Is My Love?,” the defiance of “Never Gonna Please ’Em All,” the friendship at the heart of “You And Me,” and the noir-like warning of “Death Wish” without sounding like ten unrelated records.
The album is not blues trying to escape the blues, and it is not pop wearing blues clothes. It is Joanne Shaw Taylor using all of it — Black Country roots, Detroit years, soul, rock, country, pop and the darker mythology that first made the blues feel mysterious — to tell ten different stories about a subject nobody ever really finishes figuring out.
“I’m a blues guitarist-singer that likes writing rock-pop songs with a touch of Americana.”
That line may be the simplest description of where Joanne Shaw Taylor is in 2026. “The Trouble With Love” sounds like an artist comfortable enough with her blues foundation to stop proving she belongs there. The guitar still matters — a lot. But the songs come first, the guitar answers them, and love keeps changing shape all the way to the final note.
| Album: The Trouble With Love Release: October 23, 2026 Label: Journeyman Records Producer: Kevin Shirley Guest guitar: Joe Bonamassa; Orianthi | Track Listing 1. The Trouble With Love feat. Joe Bonamassa 2. Hell Or High Water 3. This Is Who I Am 4. Tired Of Being Right 5. Bad Boy 6. What Good Is My Love? feat. Orianthi 7. The Girl That You Loved Before 8. Never Gonna Please ’Em All 9. You And Me (Rachel’s Song) 10. Death Wish |
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Artist Website: joanneshawtaylor.com
Official YouTube: Joanne Shaw Taylor
Stream music from Joanne Shaw Taylor here
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Interview & Review by Chad B. Cubberly
Interviewer note: Interview quotations are drawn from Chad B. Cubberly’s recorded conversation with Joanne Shaw Taylor on October 12, 2026. Album information, artwork and press photography were supplied through Noble PR. All supplied press photographs are credited © Alysse Gafkjen
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