“Let us advance our mortal bodies up Where hearts and minds will go Let’s walk, let’s roll.”

Madeleine Peyroux’s captivating ninth album, 2024’s Let’s Walk, is the acclaimed singer-songwriter’s most assured, courageous work to date. These unabashedly personal songs are powered by the distinctive, honeyed croon that delivered her from Paris streets to concert halls. Moreover, these songs are all co-written by the versatile Peyroux. They deftly interweave jazz, folk, and chamber pop, with themes ranging from confessional to political, from whimsy to yearning. In every note, Peyroux digs deep, rendering this exquisite work with the disarming grace and gravitas of an artist in peak form.

For the ardently civic-minded Peyroux, Let’s Walk continues the scintillating conversation with her audience – and with the world at large. “This music is part of a dialogue,” she says. “That’s what art is. It’s engagement, community. I believe more than anything in getting together with people and listening to music and conversing. Music is the only way I’ve ever built community.”

Let’s Walk was a long time coming, but well worth the wait. Following Peyroux’s 2018 album, Anthem, the enforced isolation of the global pandemic made any real-time community gathering impossible. From a creative standpoint, however, Covid offered Peyroux a silver lining. Thus, she seized the opportunity to hunker down with longtime collaborator, multi-instrumentalist Jon Herington. The pair reflected on the seismic era at hand and wrote and re-wrote in what Peyroux calls “a shadow of reckoning”.

The spare, slow-burning Let’s Walk material will effortlessly dovetail with Peyroux’s beloved versions of Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and Tom Waits classics. As she learned in her busking years, a great song can wield powerful magic. With Let’s Walk, Peyroux takes full ownership of that magic.

“It’s rare to find someone capable of injecting such life into every single lyric.” (London Jazz News)