She’s won a Grammy, two Brit Awards, and one season of the Masked Singer. She’s collaborated with Mick Jagger, Common, Van Morrison, Lauryn Hill, Ricky Martin, Santana, Jeff Beck, Al Green, and so many more. She’s released eight studio albums, toured in almost every country on the planet, and is a mother of four young kids. And now, she’s been interviewed by the Herald.
Born in Kent and spending much of her childhood in a small village in southeastern England, Joss Stone broke into the music scene as a teenager, garnering three Grammy nominations for her album “Mind, Body and Soul,” released when she was 17 years old. Since then, she has released 6 more albums, including “20 Years of Soul” in 2024.
We spoke on the phone for thirty minutes. Her soulful, blues-infused contralto on stage translated into a sweet and lilting speaking voice, her Devon accent and open-hearted tone immediately charming. We chatted about her current “Less is More” tour—coming to Ridgefield, CT, on Oct. 2.—as well as her globe-trotting “Total World Tour,” pre-show secular prayer circles, and her definition of success.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
JOSS STONE: Hi Will!
WILL SUSSBAUER: Hiya, lovely to be speaking with you.
JS: Oh, nice to be speaking with you, too.
WS: Where are you calling from? How are you doing?
JS: I’m good! I just arrived here in Nashville to rehearse with the band, and then we’re gonna get on the bus tomorrow. Actually, no, tonight, we’re gonna get the bus tonight.
WS: And you’re heading up to Milwaukee for the first stop on your tour, right?
JS: Yeah, that’s the first one.
WS: So you’ve been touring now for, for over 20 years now. How does it feel now to be touring? Does it still feel the same getting back on the road, or how has that feeling changed over the years?
JS: Well, now I have four kids, and I have one of them with me right now, because she’s three and a half months old, so it’s sort of a different thing, you know?
But it’s still good. When kids are involved, everything has to be super organized and super calm. Like, you can’t just wing it—well, you can to a point, because she’s so small, I can just pick her up and go. But there’s an amount of organization that you have to do that I never really had to do before. I was a little bit more of a loose cannon before.
WS: Sure, yes. And while I have lots of questions about this current tour, your “Less is More” tour, I’d love to ask if you could talk to me a little bit about your “Total World Tour.” That previous adventure you took, which I assume must have been done without kids involved.
JS: Right, yes.
WS: And so, what are some things that you learned from that massive adventure?
JS: It was certainly an adventure. Well, I learned that we’re all the same. No matter where you are from, it doesn’t matter what your culture is, or your language, or your style of dress or style of music—all of us are very much just human beings, just wanting to be happy, and wanting our families to be okay, and wanting peace. Everybody has that. It’s really, it’s really quite lovely.
I’m glad that I did it, really. I’m really, really glad I did it, before I had this new sort of adventure with the kids. I just knew that I had to do it. It was a bit of an injustice that I wanted to right. Right the wrong of the whole “world tour” thing. Because when I was growing up, I believed wholeheartedly that when someone said they went on a “world tour,” they went to every country in the world. And then—I swear I must have been like, 20 or something—after doing a gig in Japan, I was like, Oh my God, we can get so far, we can connect with people from so far away with this music thing, and it’s magic. And I said, well, “Why don’t we just go and do a world tour?”
And my friend said, “Oh, yeah, people do world tours.”
I’m like, “Yeah, okay, cool. So we’ll go to every country in the world.”
And he was like, “Uh, no, no, no. People don’t do that.”
I’m like, “But why?” And then that “Why” took me down the path to figuring it out, and it’s a sad answer, you know, because there are a lot of musicians that do have the money to do it. They do. It’s just all money, man. There’s only, like, 47 or 50 countries that really will pay you. And I think that’s why. It’s not because there aren’t people who want to come and listen to the music. It’s nothing to do with that. It’s just because they can’t pay, and I think that’s such a shame. I understand if you haven’t got the money to fund it, but fuck, what’s the purpose of playing music? You want to bring people together.
WS: Do you think there’s something specific about your music, about singing soul music, these very visceral, big songs, that lends itself well to that global appeal?
JS: Yeah, I think so. We’re all human, and we all feel, we all cry, we all fall in love. We all fall out of love, we all get disappointed. If we find we can’t trust someone, it can break your heart. All of that is literally just human. It’s not just American, it’s not just English—it’s just human. So, yeah, I think when you’re dealing with a style of music that is specific to those emotions, then, yeah, I guess it does make a difference. Soul music is really about the heart and about your emotions, and it’s really like a therapy session. Soul music is like blues. Blues and R&B and jazz all sit in the same world of “This is how we discuss our hearts.”
WS: I think that’s a beautiful answer. And so now, after having seen this sort of humanness all over every country in the world, you’re now taking the opposite, the inverse direction with this new tour, your “Less is More” tour. Small audience, intimate shows—like a cozy and warm living room. So what is it about that feeling?
JS: So the reason why we’re doing this is because of the world tour. What happened on the world tour was that we started out with a full band and then realized, Oh, my God, it was so hard to fund because, as I told you, you don’t necessarily get paid. So we ended up doing most of the world with just me and a guitar, right? And some of those audiences were . . . well, some of them were bigger than five people, but some of them were just teeny weeny, and it was great. And I think we realized in those moments, like, how beautiful it can be when it’s really, really stripped back, and how you can take a whole room through all these emotions, and you can have the ebbs and the flows and the big moments and the quiet moments.
And then I went back to the band, and it was great again, and then I got pregnant with my daughter, Nalima, who’s with us now. I don’t really want to be pregnant and dancing around. She’s my third that I made—my fourth that I have, but my third that I made—and I was just exhausted. It’s so tiring, you know. Growing people is really tiring. So I thought, You know what, let’s get a sofa, make some tea and do a chill version, like we did on the world tour. It’s so nice. And then when we did it, people absolutely loved it.
WS: I think there’s a lot of want for a smaller, intimate setting. I’m also wondering: “Less is More” is both the title of one of your songs, and it’s a great title for a tour, but do you also think it’s a life philosophy for you? Like, how does that show up in other parts of your life?
JS: God, it’s such a good piece of advice, isn’t it? Less is more. I mean, honestly, sometimes we do too much and we say too much, and we might wear too much makeup, or the heels that we put on make us a little too tall. We might eat too much or drink too much, or party too much or sleep too much. Like, nobody needs too much.
There was a really lovely poem my mum told me about, and I actually wrote a song based around this poem, which I am in the midst of finishing. But I never read the bloody thing, she just told me about it. She said there was a lady in an airport talking to her son, and they were saying goodbye, and she said, “I wish you enough.” And then she sat down, and this other lady asked her, “What do you mean by that? I wish you enough?” And what she was trying to say was, if you have too much of something it is not going to make you happy, or not enough of something won’t make you happy, right? So, enough heartache to really know love. Enough of the dry weather to really appreciate when the rain comes. We need that balance. I love all those thoughts. I think they help us with our difficult days. And when you feel like you don’t have enough, you do! You 100% do! Look in the mirror, take a breath. Check, Are you still breathing? Yeah? Then you have enough.
WS: I think that’s a really wonderful piece of advice, especially for the college audience for whom this interview will be published, where everyone’s trying to do everything possible to make sure their future is exactly what they want.
JS: All they have to do is be happy and take one right action after one right action, and keep making it, and you’ll end up being right where you need to be. You’ve got to let go of the outcome and just do good things in the moment. Because all you have is your moment, all you have is your right now. We don’t have our yesterday and we don’t have our tomorrow, but we do have our right now. So if we just make sure that in our moments, we’re doing something good and beautiful, moving towards whatever you want to go towards, you’ll find yourself in the right spot.
WS: Yeah, that’s really beautiful. Thank you.
JS: You’re welcome. I hope I’m right.
WS: I think that there’s a lot right in there. And I’m also really interested in when you mentioned that you’re currently working on a song based off of a poem that your mom told you about—which is a lovely string of things. It reminds me that I was really struck when listening the other day to your “20 Years of Soul Live in Concert” album—
JS: Oh wow, you listened to it!
WS: Of course I did! In the intro medley, when you’re talking to the audience, you say “So much has happened! So many stories need to be told, songs need to be sung.” And I know that you were talking about the“How am I going to fit 20 years into one concert?” question. But it also made me wonder: what, to you, makes a story one that you need to sing about? How do you know that you need to write a song about something?
JS: That’s so interesting. I love that question. All right, so: I can only be me, and I can only feel what I feel. I can’t feel anybody else’s feelings. It’s like we have this propensity as humans to just project. We’re always projecting, aren’t we? Because that’s all we have. All we have is what we think, and then someone might say something, we may absorb it, and we might change how we think, which is a great thing.
So if something’s affecting me, and I’m hearing the stories of other people, just because it’s not my story doesn’t mean it doesn’t become part of me, because I’m affected by that story.
Someone said something like, no good deed is not a little bit selfish—you’re doing what you think is the right thing to do, and I’m saying what I think will help people in that moment. And it’s because maybe I needed it, honestly, and that’s what makes it as honest as it can be, because you can’t be anyone else. You can’t walk in anyone else’s shoes because they’re not on your feet, but you can say how you feel about it because you’re walking in your shoes.
I often comment on what other people are going through, but it’s only because I’ve gone through a little piece of it —I’ve eaten a little piece of that pie and been affected by it. Rightly or wrongly, sometimes—sometimes I completely misjudge what’s going on, and I still write a song about it, and then it still becomes real for someone.
WS: Sure, whoever will sit in those quiet, cozy rooms on this new tour and listen to that, yeah,
JS: Exactly! I will say—before we go out, we do a little prayer before each show. And the prayer is not religious. It’s whatever you want it to be. We have people from all sorts of different walks of life in our band, so I never make it one thing. I always say, like, “Whatever it is that you feel, let it wash over you and walk through you, because you’re a vessel.” I like to remind everybody that there may be somebody in the audience that needs to hear one thing, and it might be one lyric, it might be one bass line. It doesn’t matter. If we just remind ourselves that’s why we’re there, it all feels totally worth it.
WS: Lovely, lovely. And I don’t want to take too much more time out of your preparation today, so here’s a last question: the Herald, being a college magazine, has a lot folks in our readership that have no idea what their future is going to look like, and all of us are kind of striving towards something that we call success. But we don’t really know what that is. I know you have your podcast about happiness, so I’m wondering: how do you define success?
JS: I think everyone has a different want, and it’s okay if that want changes, yes, but it’s really important to remember how it began, because that will help you sort of stay solid. And that doesn’t mean you should change your want. What that means is remember why you stood up, why you began—and if you do that, you’re going to remember your core and your root and your reasoning, because that’s really who you are, and that won’t ever change. You are who you are. You’re born the soul that you die as.
So I feel, if somebody says, “Well, I really want a Lamborghini,” okay, put that on your list. But why? And, you know, I could have said when I was a kid, “I really want to be a singer.” But why? So my want wasn’t to be a singer, it was that I really wanted people to get a good feeling out of what I was doing. So when we came to the COVID time, and all the gigs disappeared, I remembered the reason why I began. When I was younger, it was to make people happy. I wanted to be a vet, I wanted to be a midwife, a nurse. I wanted to be a singer. I wanted to bake cakes for people. I liked making people smile. So I thought, Well, oh, my God, all right, so my tool has been taken away, which is the singing live thing. And then I started going online every Sunday, doing a cooking show. I’m not a chef. I just wanted to make people laugh, and I don’t know, have a little back and forth chat, and it gave people joy. And that, to me, was like, “Okay, I’m successful now in the thing that I wanted to do.”
Everybody has a thing that they want, and it’s like, just figure that out, but don’t figure it out on a surface level. Figure out on a deeper level. Why do you want it? Why do you want?
And, by the way, happiness is success. If you don’t look at your life and go, I’m so pleased, I’m so pleased that I live here, I’m so pleased that this is my husband or my girlfriend, I’m so pleased that I have these children—if you don’t have these little moments of like, Oh, thank goodness, I’m so grateful, then you are not successful.
Right now I’m thinking, God, I’ve got these four kids, and I really wish that I could just be at home with them, looking after them, yeah, but I didn’t plan, I didn’t prep my life properly so I could do that, right? And I feel like “Shit, I fucked that up,” you know? But there’s a reason why it’s happened, and there’s so much joy in the job that I have. I do see it all as a success, in a way, but that doesn’t mean it’s always perfect.
I think we need a glass of wine for this conversation.
WS: It’s a big, big conversation that can’t be figured out in 20 minutes, nor can it be figured out on a world tour, nor in a lifetime, I think.
JS: No, no, not in a lifetime.
WS: I really appreciate you taking the time and trying to figure it out for us.
JS: Just walk forward and be positive, honestly. And just be brave.
An Editor-in-Chief, 2025-2026.
