Naked Out Loud by Machan Taylor

New Haven Publishing

Published 3rd December 2025

Naked Out Loud, the powerful new memoir by vocalist and educator Machan Taylor, is now officially available for pre-sales, with its highly anticipated UK release set for 3rd December, followed by a full worldwide rollout.

The book arrives like a quiet thunderclap – bold, intimate, unguarded – and gives readers the rare invitation to step inside the inner world of a woman whose voice has travelled farther than most people will ever walk.

Machan Taylor’s journey is itself a story of reinvention. She began singing professionally in her teens, lighting up New York’s jazz clubs with a voice that critics later called “seamless,” and quickly moved into the upper echelons of the music world. Over the years, she toured the globe and stood on stages that most singers only dream of. Her résumé reads like a map of modern music history: she sang with Sting, including televised and international performances like the GRAMMYs and Royal Albert Hall; she toured with Pink Floyd; worked with Pat Benatar, Foreigner, Aretha Franklin, George Benson, Boz Scaggs, Billy Idol, Traffic, George Duke, Brenda Russell, David Sanborn, Charles Aznavour, and more. From rock arenas to jazz sanctums, her voice became a signature woven quietly into the fabric of legendary artists and unforgettable moments.

But Naked Out Loud isn’t about bragging rights – it is about everything beneath them. Machan writes with stark honesty about life inside the glitter and the shadows: the airports, the exhaustion, the constant search for belonging, and the quiet ache of wanting to carve out her own artistic identity after decades of supporting others. She chronicles her evolution from celebrated touring vocalist to solo artist, releasing her own albums – Machan in 2004 and Motion of Love in 2007 – where she began allowing her own stories to take centre stage.

The book also explores her dramatic pivot into education. After years on the road, Machan pursued and earned both her bachelor’s degree in Contemporary Vocal Performance and her master’s in Theory and Composition from NYU. She now teaches and mentors a new generation of artists, offering them the tools, wisdom, and emotional grounding she fought so hard to earn. This act of becoming a performer, a thinker, a teacher is the beating heart of Naked Out Loud. It reveals that the long arc of an artist’s life is never linear, never predictable, and rarely visible from the outside.

Early readers describe the memoir as raw, luminous, and unfiltered – a narrative unafraid to wrestle with fame, identity, and the lifelong quest to find your true voice. It’s a book that speaks not just to musicians, but to anyone who has ever stood at a crossroads and asked themselves what comes next.

With pre-sales now open and the UK release approaching on 3rd December, followed shortly by its worldwide debut, Naked Out Loud is poised to become one of the most compelling music-driven memoirs of the year. Machan Taylor, who has spent decades shaping the sound of icons, finally steps into the spotlight in her own words – brave, insightful, and gloriously human.

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All words by Eileen Shapiro. More of Eileen’s writing can be found in her author’s archive.