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The profile · researched 22 September 2026
Willow, a Smoakstack year, and the violin that came first
Lydia Maes built a debut album around a full-time marketing job in Nashville, released it in November 2025 and expanded it in February 2026; autumn 2026 has her working theatre-sized rooms across the American north-east and eastern Canada.
Prior Lake, by way of a middle-school band room
Maes grew up in Prior Lake, Minnesota, south-west of Minneapolis, in a household where music was not a hobby kept at arm's length. Her mother taught the middle-school band she played in, which is an unusual apprenticeship: the instrument gets corrected at school and again at the kitchen table. She came out of it holding saxophone, piano, violin and guitar rather than specialising in one, and that breadth is the single most useful fact about her records — the string and horn parts on them are hers.
At eighteen she moved to Nashville to study at Belmont University, taking music business alongside sociology. The pairing turned out to be practical rather than decorative. After graduating she took a job in music marketing at a talent agency, which meant she spent her working hours on the mechanics of other people's careers while assembling her own in the evenings.
Asked about influences in an interview published on 28 August 2025, she named Adrienne Lenker, Andrew Bird, Laura Marling and Madison Cunningham — a set that explains both halves of what she does. Bird and Cunningham account for the violin lines and the harmonic restlessness; Lenker and Marling account for songs that stay small and close-miked even when a full band is in the room.
A year at the Smoakstack
The album was recorded primarily at the Smoakstack in Nashville, across roughly a year, in the gaps a full-time job leaves. Maes co-produced it with Jack Kathriner and assembled a band of local players rather than writing parts for hired session specialists. The violin and saxophone were left to her.
That slow schedule is audible in the finished thing, and Maes has been fairly blunt about the cost of it: more than a year of balancing employment against the demand that every word, note and string be right before it went out. It is a common enough story in Nashville, where the ratio of people making records to people able to live off them is unforgiving, but the detail that matters is what the delay bought — an album with written string arrangements rather than pads, and with the arrangements played by the person who wrote the songs.
The first single, "Woodworking Woman", came out on 8 August 2025. Maes has traced it to a meditation that turned into a past-life image, and the song works the same seam the title suggests: craft, and the nerve required to admit publicly that you are making something. "In My Dirt" followed on 5 September 2025, and "Enamored Child" and "The Way It Is" arrived before the year was out.
Willow
Willow was released on 2 November 2025, eleven songs, issued through Ten Thousand Lakes — a label name that points back to Minnesota rather than to Tennessee. Maes described the record in advance as hopeful and reflective, full of string arrangements, but carrying angst and rock as well, and the sequence bears that out: the four singles front-load the album, and the longer, less resolved material sits behind them.
A deluxe edition appeared on 20 February 2026 with twelve tracks, running a little over forty minutes. The added weight is at the back end. "Tightrope" runs 5:29 and "Bending" 4:41, both roughly twice the length of "Willow" itself, which passes in 2:11. For a debut that is a deliberate shape — the concise, radio-legible songs are the door, and the extended ones are what is actually behind it.
The Bandcamp copy frames the album as arriving "straight from the coarse, gritty earth", which is marketing language but not misleading about the register. The songs are about how a point of view shifts from childhood onward, and about honouring creative work that was present long before anyone was paying for it. Vinyl of the deluxe edition sells for $35 through her own site, alongside a Willow T-shirt at $30 — an independent operation, with management handled by Zach Jones at Triple 8.
Studio Paris, and the two-person version
The most recent release is Willow (Live Album from Studio Paris), out on 7 April 2026. It is the clearest public document of how this material travels, because it strips the Smoakstack band down to two people. Maes covers guitar, saxophone and violin; Kathriner covers cello, guitar, percussion and what the credits call sounds. Chris Peranich mixed it.
This matters more than a standard live-in-the-studio companion piece usually would. Reducing a twelve-track album with written string parts to two players forces decisions — which line survives, which is played and looped, which is abandoned. The Paris session is effectively Maes publishing her answer to that question, and it is the configuration a touring version of the record can realistically sustain.
It also fits her other working life. Through late 2025 she was booked to tour Europe as a violinist and guitarist, hired for other people's bands. An artist who earns part of her living as a sideperson tends to build a live show that can be carried by two people and a handful of cases, and that is what the Studio Paris recording sounds like.
Autumn 2026
The current run is the largest she has played. Listed dates open at House of Blues in Chicago on 23 September 2026 and continue to Saint Andrew's Hall in Detroit on the 24th and the Roxian Theatre in Pittsburgh on the 27th, before two nights at Irving Plaza in New York on 30 September and 1 October. The 9:30 Club in Washington follows on 2 October and Roadrunner in Boston on 5 October.
The Canadian leg runs Forest City Little Music Makers in London, Ontario on 8 October, two nights at the Danforth Music Hall in Toronto on the 9th and 10th, The Bronson in Ottawa on the 12th and Théâtre Beanfield in Montréal on the 13th. Doors are listed at 7pm throughout, with Washington the exception at 6pm — an early start that usually signals a multi-act bill and a curfew.
The jump in room size is the story of the year for her. As recently as 2 February 2025 she was playing The East Room in Nashville on a three-act bill with Nolen Durham and ken xox, and posting phone-shot clips of "Enamored Child" from the 5 Spot. Eighteen months later the same songs are being played in theatres holding well over a thousand people. No national press reviews of these shows have been published, which is normal at this stage; the recorded evidence of what the set sounds like is the Paris session, and it is a fair guide.
The show, now
The show is built from Willow and its deluxe edition, so the material runs to roughly forty minutes of recorded music and the set is drawn from the same twelve songs: the four 2025 singles — "Woodworking Woman", "In My Dirt", "Enamored Child" and "The Way It Is" — plus the longer, looser pieces at the back of the album, "Tightrope" at 5:29 and "Bending" at 4:41, where the arrangements open out. The configuration to expect is the one documented on the Studio Paris live album of 7 April 2026: Maes switching between guitar, violin and saxophone, with Jack Kathriner covering cello, guitar, percussion and effects, which is the album's written string writing reduced to two players rather than replaced with backing tracks. Staging is plain; there is no production element in evidence beyond a band on a stage. The autumn 2026 run is a step up in scale from the Nashville club shows of early 2025 — House of Blues Chicago on 23 September, two nights at Irving Plaza on 30 September and 1 October, the 9:30 Club on 2 October, Roadrunner in Boston on 5 October, two nights at the Danforth Music Hall in Toronto on 9 and 10 October, closing at Théâtre Beanfield in Montréal on 13 October. Doors are 7pm on every listed date except Washington, which opens at 6pm. Full bills for the individual shows have not been published, and no national press reviews of the current run have appeared yet.
Researched from charcharhowee.substack.com · lydiamaes.bandcamp.com · lydiamaes.bandcamp.com · music.apple.com · music.apple.com · lydiamaes.com · youtube.com
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