Bebe Stockwell

The Boston house where three sisters had a band

Beatrice Stockwell grew up in Boston in what she has described as a very Bostonian family, with grandparents living on the same street and roots running north into New Hampshire and Maine. Her father put her, her twin sister and their younger sister into piano and guitar lessons at around the age of five, and the three of them formed a household band called the ABC Girls. The lessons mattered more than the band did. Her guitar teacher was Courtney Hartman of the bluegrass group Della Mae, and that instruction pointed a city child towards country and old-time playing early on. Stockwell has since described herself as a city girl who is also a country mouse.

At fifteen she took Berklee's five-week summer programme. She had been planning to go to college on a lacrosse place; meeting a teacher from NYU's Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music redirected that, and she enrolled there, arriving into the COVID period. Songs went up on SoundCloud and were played at her high school, and she still treated the whole thing as a hobby rather than a plan. What changed during college was the apparatus around her: she passed demos through the contacts the course put her next to, and producers and label people began to answer.

"Love Me Back" and the road to Columbia

The song that moved her out of the hobby bracket was "Love Me Back", released independently in 2022 and co-written with her best friend. She cut it with the Grammy-winning producer M-Phazes, and it has since passed seven million Spotify streams — the figure venues still put at the top of her one-page biography. Singles followed at an unhurried rate, among them "Robbie" and "Helium", and in 2024 "Minor Inconveniences", which remains the song she is most likely to open with.

Columbia signed her in 2024. Before that she had already been playing rooms well above her own draw, sharing stages with Claire Rosinkranz, Stephen Sanchez and M. Ward, and appearing at Newport Folk Festival and Boston Calling — two home fixtures for a Massachusetts folk songwriter, and the two most useful credits she could have collected at that stage.

Driving Backwards, and a year of thirty-minute sets

Driving Backwards, eight songs, arrived in May 2025 as her first record for Columbia. It is a collaborative piece of work: Amy Wadge co-wrote "Ruined", Casey Smith and Tommy King worked on "Blue Moon", Hans Williams appears on "Speak Too Soon" and Chance Emerson on the title track. She has also written with Noah Kahan, the other New England songwriter currently shaping what a young folk record from that part of the country sounds like.

The autumn that followed was spent opening. She supported Jeremy Zucker across the United States in late 2025, having already opened for Sam Harris of X Ambassadors, and the setlist archive from that run shows exactly what a support slot does to a set: five songs in half an hour at the Warfield in San Francisco on 22 October 2025, then nine songs between 8.00 and 8.35 at the House of Blues in Anaheim two nights later, opening on "Minor Inconveniences" and closing on "Love Me Back" both times. Her touring guitarist through this period was Natalie Moosher.

Volume 1, released in halves

Volume 1 came out on Columbia on 26 June 2026: eight songs, twenty-five minutes, filed under folk. It is the first half of a record rather than a record in itself — Volume 2 is due in the autumn, and the two are meant to be read together.

David Baron produced it and has acted as something of a mentor. The leadoff track is "When You Know"; the rest runs through "New England Regret", "Going to the Country", "Hard to Find", "Wild Love", "Look At Us Now", "Adeline" and "Ant Farm", a duet with Wesley Schultz of The Lumineers. Schultz's account of first hearing her — that the voice reminded him of the first time he heard Tracy Chapman or Ray LaMontagne, and sat in its own category — has been quoted often enough to function as the record's press line.

The Big Takeover's review, by James Broscheid, made restraint the point: arrangements that serve the song rather than crowd it, warm acoustic textures, emotional specificity in place of broad declarations, and the conclusion that quiet storytelling can carry considerable weight when it arrives with conviction, melodic instinct and lyrical precision. The piece reads her as a writer whose strongest work is still ahead.

Where she stands in September 2026

Stockwell was 23 when Driving Backwards came out and 24 by the time Volume 1 followed. The summer of 2026 was deliberately thin — two festival dates in July — and the autumn is the opposite. Her first headline tour of North America opened at Americanafest in Nashville on 17 and 18 September 2026 and runs to 23 October at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, with the club leg starting at Club Dada in Dallas on 21 September.

Listings put the run at roughly two dozen shows across the United States and Canada: 3TEN at ACL Live in Austin on 22 September, Center Stage in Atlanta on 24 September, The Southern in Charlottesville on 26 September, The Atlantis in Washington on 28 September, Bowery Ballroom in New York on 29 September, Johnny Brenda's in Philadelphia on 1 October and Brighton Music Hall in Allston — effectively a home show — on 2 October, then Montreal and Toronto, Schubas in Chicago on 8 October, the 7th St Entry in Minneapolis on 9 October, Denver, Salt Lake City, Holocene in Portland on 15 October, Barboza in Seattle on 16 October, Vancouver on 17 October, Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco on 19 October and the Casbah in San Diego on 21 October.

The rooms are the tell. A year ago she was playing the Warfield and the House of Blues as somebody else's support; this run is small clubs under her own name, which is the trade a new headliner makes. No UK or European dates have been listed for the period.

From half-hour slots to a full band

The headline tour is billed as her first with a full band, and that is the substantive change from 2025. The best-documented recent performance is NON-COMM in Philadelphia on 6 May 2026 — the free midday slot on the World Stage, thirty minutes, seven songs: "Minor Inconveniences", "Look How Far We've Come", "Want Me", then live debuts of "Adaline" and "Wild Love", then "When You Know" and "Hard to Find". Two of the seven were unreleased at the time, which is a confident thing to do in front of a hall of radio programmers.

The setlist database's tallies from her support years put "Minor Inconveniences" at the top with eleven logged appearances, "Want Me" at nine, and "Home" and "Ruined" at seven each. Those are the songs the headline set is built around, with the Volume 1 material now filling space a thirty-minute opening slot never allowed.