Beth Hart

Hollywood clubs, a hit, and what came after it

Beth Hart was born in Los Angeles on 24 January 1972 and sat down at the piano at four, working through classical repertoire before she found Etta James and Led Zeppelin. She was singing in Hollywood clubs by 15. Her first proper album, Immortal, came out on Atlantic in 1996 and produced the single 'God Bless You'; she toured Lollapalooza the same year, after which the band around her broke up amid internal conflict.

The commercial breakthrough arrived with Screamin' for My Supper in 1999 and the single 'L.A. Song (Out of This Town)', which went to number one in New Zealand, reached the top five of the US Adult Contemporary chart and turned up on Beverly Hills, 90210. What followed was harder to script. Hart has spoken openly for years about drug addiction and a bipolar diagnosis, and has been sober for a long stretch, using transcendental meditation as part of how she keeps steady. She has been married to her road manager, Scott Guetzkow, since 2001, and lives in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles — a detail that matters to the current record, because the title came from something he said to her on a bad day.

The Bonamassa run and a second audience in Europe

The partnership that reset Hart's standing began in 2011, when she started making records with the guitarist Joe Bonamassa. Don't Explain came that year, Seesaw followed in 2013 and brought a Grammy nomination for best blues album at the 2014 ceremony, and Black Coffee arrived in 2018. The run moved her out of the rock-singer-with-a-past bracket and into blues programming proper, where the audience is older, buys physical copies and turns up again the next time round.

Her own albums tracked the same curve. Fire on the Floor and War in My Mind filled out the back catalogue, and in 2022 A Tribute to Led Zeppelin entered at number one in the Netherlands and became her highest-charting solo album across several European markets. The pattern since has been consistent: modest numbers in the United States, serious ones in the UK, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Low Countries, which is where the bulk of the touring now goes.

You Still Got Me

Her eleventh solo studio album, You Still Got Me, was released on 25 October 2024 through Provogue and the Mascot Label Group. It was recorded in Nashville with Kevin Shirley producing, and runs to just under fifty minutes. It was her first album of original material in five years, after War in My Mind in 2019.

Two guests anchor the record's rock end: Slash plays on 'Saviour with a Razor' and Eric Gales on 'Suga N My Bowl'. Three singles preceded it — 'Little Heartbreak Girl' on 22 March 2024, the title track on 28 June and 'Wonderful World' on 23 August. The title song came out of a conversation at home: Hart has described being in a flat, unpositive mood when Guetzkow said 'you still got me', and going downstairs to write with those words. He appears in the video.

Commercially it did what her records now do. It reached number one on the UK jazz and blues albums chart and number two on UK Americana, hit number five in Austria and the top ten in Switzerland and Germany, and topped the Billboard blues albums chart. Reviews kept returning to the same thing — the size of the voice and the weight she puts behind it.

Where she is in late 2026

On 24 April 2026 Hart announced a digital deluxe edition of You Still Got Me, which came out on 17 June through Provogue. It adds six tracks previously confined to a limited box set, among them 'Mean Ole Man of Mine', 'Stuff for You' and extended takes including the Slash collaboration. At the point of that announcement the album had passed eleven million streams.

The touring around it has been heavy. The April announcement set out a European run starting on 4 May 2026 and continuing through July, a US leg to be confirmed for September, and a return to Scandinavia and mainland Europe in November. Setlist.fm has logged more than forty Hart shows across 2026.

The most recent development is the furthest out. In late September 2026 she announced four UK dates for September 2027 — Manchester's Bridgewater Hall on the 21st, York Barbican on the 23rd, Glasgow's SEC Armadillo on the 25th and the Royal Albert Hall on the 27th, her first time at the London venue in nearly a decade. Planet Rock held a 48-hour presale from 30 September and general sale opened on 2 October 2026 through Alt Tickets, Gigantic, Ticketmaster and her own site. The five-date UK run that preceded it in May 2026 — Bristol Beacon, Edinburgh Usher Hall, Nottingham Royal Concert Hall, the Glasshouse in Gateshead and Oxford New Theatre — had gone on sale a year earlier, in October 2025.

Inside the show

The 2026 shows have followed a loose shape rather than a fixed script. At Nottingham's Royal Concert Hall on 18 May, Hart opened alone and unaccompanied before the band came in; at Oxford New Theatre on 4 June she walked in from the back of the auditorium singing the title track with no backing at all, then worked the aisles. Most of the set is played from the piano, with occasional moves to acoustic guitar, a stool, or the lip of the stage — one reviewer described her spending long stretches sitting or lying at the front.

Her band through the run is Jon Nichols on guitar, Tom Lilly on bass and Todd Wolff on drums. Wille & the Bandits have been opening, playing roughly half an hour acoustic, with pedal steel in the mix; the Nottingham reviewer singled out 'Four Million Days' and said they won the room on charm and songs rather than volume.

Averaged across thirty logged 2026 setlists, the main set runs to fourteen songs with a two-song encore. Regulars include 'Pimp Like That', 'Wanna Be Big Bad Johnny Cash', 'Bad Woman Blues', 'Baddest Blues', 'War in My Mind', 'Woman Down', 'Saviour with a Razor', 'Mama This One's for You' and 'Broken & Ugly', plus three covers — Bobby 'Blue' Bland's 'I'll Take Care of You', Connee Boswell's 'Lullaby of the Leaves' and Etta James's 'I'd Rather Go Blind', the usual closer. Individual nights wander: Nottingham took in Led Zeppelin's 'No Quarter' and 'Babe I'm Gonna Leave You' and Melody Gardot's 'Your Heart Is as Black as Night', and the encore there ran on until the crew signalled that the curfew had already gone.

Criticism, where there is any, is about balance — the Nottingham reviewer thought the set leaned too far towards ballads. Otherwise the response has been close to unanimous. The Oxford notices described her explaining the story behind each song, taking the hands of people in the front rows during 'Lullaby of the Leaves', bringing her husband briefly onstage, and reducing the room to tears with the Etta James cover. One writer, on his ninth Hart show, called the atmosphere closer to a gospel meeting than a gig.