Judith Hill
Judith Hill’s current reality, as a 39-year-old career artist grateful for the people who made her, and deftly aware of the bumpy path she’s chosen, and the force she’s becoming.
– Live and Onstage @ World Records Friday November 7, 2025

Gutsy and nuanced as a vocalist, Judith Hill is an accomplished songwriter, arranger, and multi-instrumentalist – and one of the few musicians who can cite Elton John, Spike Lee, Prince, and Michael Jackson among those who have sought out her talent. One of the highest-profile background singers of her generation, she got her start in the early 2000s, and in the next decade established a solo career built upon a discography of increasingly refined and creative albums that includes the Prince-produced Back in Time (2015), Golden Child (2018), Baby, I’m Hollywood! (2021), and her recent album, Letters from a Black Widow (2024).

Letters from a Black Widow

Anyone who’s followed Judith Hill’s story will recognize Letters from a Black Widow as one jaw-dropper of an album title. The tabloid-coined phrase “Black Widow” arose after the overdose deaths of her two star-making collaborators, Michael Jackson and Prince. It became a term of abuse that internet trolls hurled at the celebrated artist, driving conspiracy theories and shame campaigns – trauma that nearly ended a career that includes a Grammy for her role in the Oscar-winning documentary film “20 Feet from Stardom.”

“For years the Black Widow was such a dark presence in my life that was too looming and intimidating to even talk about,” Hill says.

But a year into the pandemic, she had time and space for a momentous reckoning.

“Being forced to stop allowed me to reach a deeper place, to really marinate and figure out what’s at my core, what I really needed to talk about. I found I had the courage and strength to face all this – to be authentic to my core, to dive into the whole experience, and turn an ocean of darkness into expressive fire.”

If Hill’s previous album, Baby, I’m Hollywood, was the rowdy coming-of-age tale of a mixed-race child of bohemian California, Letters from a Black Widow is a formidable battle cry – an album-length soul/funk/gospel passion play that’s spectacularly written, arranged, and performed.

One signal moment in Hill’s writing process came during a visit with friends to a hot spring outside of Los Angeles, where a communal psychedelic experience wound up shunting her off into a more private and terrifying realm.

“An entire mountain appeared before my eyes,” she recalls. “And I knew it represented all the trauma in my life that I hadn’t realized was still there.”

Her antihero energy truly ignites on “Flame,” a song that evokes the raw vocal power of a young Aretha Franklin, stabbing every syllable of the declaration, Give me chaos and give me pain/but you can never kill my flame. Hill says this is the kind of power she could only access by moving through that mountain.

“All the guilt, shame, and paranoia can get to be like a cancer growing in you,” she shares. “You feel like nobody will understand, nobody will really care, and this becomes your whole reality. Making songs about it means giving yourself permission to even speak. It’s a kindness to yourself to even pick up the paintbrush and draw it, and it can take on a momentum of its own.”

Judith Hill
– Live and Onstage
@ World Records – Friday November 7, 2025!

Seating Chart