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Having spent six years together on the road, Leonard Cohen came to think of Hattie Webb as “a pilgrim, deeply committed and highly trained, on her own path to perfection.” Hattie’s latest step along that path, Wild Medicine, Hattie's second solo album, is a breathtaking journey that opens on a mesmerizing title track that sets the scene with “Come with me for a while, then let me take the path alone.”

The song was written in Australia with Paul Kelly, a singer-songwriter she got to know when he opened a string of Australian dates for Cohen. On the flight home, Hattie started thinking it could be the cornerstone of her next album because of how it seemed to sum up who she is and where she is in her life and career.

“I’d come to a point where I’d had a lot of chances to explore, then an opening of time where I could feel into where that had all landed for me” she says. “How am I finding ways to feel empowered, not letting the past hold me back? It’s not so hard to get lost in the human experience. What if I didn’t censor myself? I feel that in making this album, I was given the chance to go deeper and be more direct with my writing.”

Born in Kent, England, and raised in a musical household, Hattie learned to play harp as a child and began performing with her sister Charley in a duo called The Webb Sisters, who released a debut album titled “Piece of Mind” in 2000.

After gigging around London, playing twice for Princess Anne and once for Queen Elizabeth II, the sisters relocated to Los Angeles, where they landed a publishing deal and a record deal. A second album, Daylight Crossing was released in 2006, become Album of the Week at iTunes and BBC Radio 2. Before they’d had a chance to properly tour the album, the sisters got the call to go on the road with Cohen.

“We thought the tour was going to be six months but it turned out to be six years. It was the best of times. It was also the most challenging of times. But never was there a moment it wasn't extraordinary, particularly to witness Leonard's presence and process in everything he did.” By the time the tour concluded at the close of 2013, Hattie and Charley had played more than 400 concerts with Cohen to more than four million people.

In the midst of all that touring, they managed to carve out the time to record and release a third Webb Sisters album, 2011’s Savages, and in 2013, an EP,  When Will You Come Home? Produced by Grammy-winning legend Peter Asher, one song from Savages called “Baroque Thoughts” won the International Music Award for Best Contemporary Song.

After six years of working with Cohen and collaborating with her sister on three albums, Hattie “felt ready to explore some of my own narratives within,” she says. That’s how she came to find herself recording her first solo album, To the Bone with Tori Amos collaborator Marcel Van Limbeek, an album which Cohen praised as “flawless, uplifting and utterly original.”

A month after mixing the album, in 2017, she joined her sister Charley in rehearsals with Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers for their 40th Anniversary Tour that turned into their final tour closing at the Hollywood Bowl.

It was after the Heartbreakers tour that Hattie started working on Wild Medicine setting out to write songs exploring the sense of immediacy she felt watching Petty perform. She mentions Stevie Nicks, Kate Bush and Heart as frames of reference. “The space that they embody, I find it to be luscious, with depth and it gets your blood flowing,”she says. “I'm really interested in the female perspective and having that strong pulse.”

Two songs on the album, “Night Soul” and “Hearts Connect,” were written with Mike Campbell, Petty’s right-hand man, in collaboration with one of Hattie’s frequent writing partners, Nina Baker. “Shakespeare’s Shores” was written with the Heartbreakers’ Ron Blair, who appears on the album alongside fellow Heartbreakers Campbell, Benmont Tench and Steve Ferrone.

“Because their roles with Tom have been the mastery of bringing flesh to the music, I felt them inject that kind of support into what I was making without any kind of judgment that I was a woman,” Hattie says. “I really felt that they were wanting me to be able to express what I wanted to express without holding me back.”

Wild Medicine was co-produced by Hattie and Cohen’s musical director, Roscoe Beck, who also co-wrote “Waltz for Leonard,” a song inspired by “marinating in the stories and experiences of being in Leonard’s intimate ether.” Hattie says, “It is incredible to work with Roscoe in the studio. We have a natural language together after so many years on the road and share a deep respect for being in service to the song.”

The album also features several members of the legend’s touring band: Javier Mas, Mitch Watkins and Alex Bublitchi.

The end result is not, perhaps, the type of album we’ve come to expect from someone whose primary instrument is harp. “Playing the harp growing up, people expect you to be more gentle, or to perhaps not be so direct with how you feel,” Hattie says.“In my years of studying, going to harp festivals, I struggled with the more creatively narrow narrative that the harp is sometimes given. There's so much intensity and meat in the instrument, like a grand piano, and I really wanted to explore how that could translate into the songs I was writing.”

She didn’t put a timeline on the project, allowing the ideas time to “marinate.” As luck would have it, she was single at the time, “not having to come home for anything or anyone,” which freed her up to focus on the music.

“In the U.K, when you turn 18, it's kind of accepted in the community to take a year and go traveling the world,” she says. “And it felt like my first opportunity to have that kind of youthful anchorless exploration into who I am and what had happened to me up to that point in my Journey.”

She’s made videos for several songs from the album – including “Golden,” “Never Just Your Daughters,” “Shakespeare’s Shores” and “Forever.” One of her favorites is “Shakespeare’s Shores.”

“It’s about turning a corner after heartbreak and finding a way to accept the losses one faces in life,” she says. “It’s like a ‘Hansel and Gretel’ story, leaving a trail so you can still be found but also a bittersweet letting go of how life once felt, and letting go of someone who is technically in your past but still living on within.”

Another of her favorite tracks is “Ruined in the Rain,” a heartbreaking meditation on suicide. “I have this theory that there can be an original wound in a person, which is often from childhood, and then throughout your life, you go through other deep woundings but somehow they reach back to that original wound,” Hattie says.' "Ruined in the Rain” is about the intensity of an original wound through the lens of a woman who’s experienced great suffering in relationships. I know what it’s like to come to a feeling that you’ve reached the end and to feel too ruined to carry on.”

The narrative is drawn in part on Hattie’s own experience with suffering but also on the work she’s done with ‘AAFDA - 'Advocacy After Fatal Domestic Abuse’, a charity that has used another album highlight, “Never Just Your Daughters” as part of a campaign against gender-based violence and violence against women and girls.

Hattie co-wrote “Never Just Your Daughters” with Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” collaborator Patrick Leonard. “When Patrick and I were writing, I was reflecting on my own experiences particularly in my early 20s, living in Los Angeles and feeling at times vulnerable in that environment and in the life on tour as well,” Hattie says.

“A Song Called Love,”  co-written with Nina Jo Baker,  is about having the right to choose who we love.  It is about unity, breaking through prejudice to find love and community.  ”It’s not always easy out there in the world at large, where there are so many obstacles. We are sometimes torn, by others' judgment, by rules and expectations we feel we have to adhere to, and by listening to others opinions.” She continues, “When someone takes that leap to love, or to choose love, there is a chord of bravery pulling through. This song is for all brave souls around the globe, who show up for their right to love who they love and how they want to love." 

If there is a running theme to the album, she says, “it’s getting my hands in the soil of who I am and finding my own wild medicine wherever that may be.”

In addition to working with Cohen and Petty, Hattie and her sister have collaborated with Sting, Gotye, the Lumineers, Steve Martin and Edie Brickell, the Swell Season, the Avett Brothers and Natalie Maines.

In September, she and Charley return to the road, this time as part of David Gilmour’s touring band.

David Gilmour Tour 2024

Circo Massimo, Rome

27, 28, 29 September, 1, 2, 3 October

Royal Albert Hall, London UK

9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15 October

Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles

29, 30, 31 October

Madison Square Garden, New York

4, 5, 6, 9, 10 November