GRAMMY-winning Guitarist Tommy Emmanuel Releases
First Solo Album in Ten Years Living In The Light
UK TOUR DATES IN JANUARY 2026
Photo Credit: Luciano Viti
October 10, 2025: Today, GRAMMY-winning guitarist Tommy Emmanuel released Living In The Light, his first solo album in ten years. Recorded and mixed with producer Vance Powell (Jack White, Chris Stapleton, Phish), Living in the Light is a virtuosic blend of acoustic pop, jazz, classical, and roots music delivered by one of the modern era’s most accomplished and versatile guitarists.
The album release comes with the video for Emmanuel’s rendition of the Sharon O’Neill hit “Maxine,” which is the current focus track. Widely acclaimed for his instrumental acoustic guitar work, Emmanuel reveals his rarely-seen talents on “Maxine,” taking on lead vocals and performing both electric guitar and bass.
Watch the Video for Tommy Emmanuel’s “Maxine”
“This song was a big hit in Australia in the 80s,” says Emmanuel. “It’s the story of a young prostitute who is playing with fire in her life. The storyteller wants to understand and help her. The composer, Sharon O’Neil, is an old friend with a gift for storytelling.”
Emmanuel captured most of the performances on Living in the Light in one or two takes, and the sense of joy and wonder in these sonic explorations is more than just palpable; it’s intoxicating. While many of the recordings are solo instrumentals, Emmanuel lends his voice to several of the album’s tracks, as well, grounding his dazzling, percussive fretwork with a poignant dose of warmth and vulnerability. “There are elements of rockabilly, blues, even traditional African music all woven into the music,” Emmanuel explains. “I’m a world traveler, and I’ve absorbed so much music along the way. It all gets synthesized through a kind of osmosis into my psyche and my soul and then comes out in my own unique style.”
In celebration of the release of his new album, Emmanuel will tour extensively, including UK dates in January 2026 as follows:
Jan 16 MANCHESTER Bridgewater Hall
Jan 17 GATESHEAD The Glasshouse
Jan 18 EDINBURGH The Queen’s Hall
Jan 20 LYTHAM ST ANNES Lowther Pavilion Theatre
Jan 21 BIRMINGHAM Town Hall
Jan 22 IPSWICH Corn Exchange
Jan 23 LONDON Cadogan Hall
Jan 24 LONDON Cadogan Hall
Tickets: Tour – Tommy Emmanuel
Tommy Emmanuel first began touring at the age of six in his native Australia as part of a family band. In his teenage years, he turned heads as a highly sought after session player and sideman, and by his early twenties, Emmanuel was playing on chart-topping hits and performing with some of the biggest names in Australian music, including Air Supply and Men at Work. Inspired in part by his hero, Chet Atkins (who would later become a friend, mentor, and collaborator), Emmanuel stepped out on his own as a solo artist in 1979, releasing the first in a string of critically and commercially acclaimed instrumental albums that would make him an unlikely celebrity in his home country and beyond. In the decades that followed, he would go on to headline everywhere from the Sydney Opera House to Carnegie Hall; tour with the likes of Eric Clapton and John Denver; win a GRAMMY Award for Best Instrumental Arrangement; perform for a televised audience of more than two billion at the closing ceremony of the Sydney Olympics; and collaborate with everyone from Les Paul and Mark Knopfler to Joe Walsh and Richard Thompson. NPR’s World Café declared him “one of the best acoustic guitarists in the world,” while the New York Times hailed him as a “prodigy,” and Atkins crowned him with the title of Certified Guitar Player (an honorary only ever bestowed upon four other artists).
Emmanuel continued to push himself throughout his career, relocating permanently to Nashville in the early 2000s and collaborating with a rising generation of guitarists like Jason Isbell, Molly Tuttle, and Billy Strings on his latest studio albums, Accomplice One and Accomplice Two. “Those albums were a real labor of love,” Emmanuel explains, “and I was thrilled with how they came out. But I felt a strong desire to focus on my writing again after that, and I found that the songs for Living in the Light just started pouring out of me.”
More than sixty years into his storied career, Tommy Emmanuel is still hungry for adventure. “As I get older, I find myself taking a lot more risks, and having a lot more fun in the process,” says Emmanuel, who recently celebrated his 70th birthday. “When young people come to my shows and have this awakening that it’s okay to be different, that the possibilities of music and self-expression are limitless, that’s what it’s all about for me.”
Tracklisting:
- Young Travelers
- A Drowning Heart
- Scarlett’s World
- Gdańsk
- Maxine
- Little Georgia
- Initiation 25
- Black and White to Color
- Waiting for the Times to Get Better
- You Needed Me
- Ya Gotta Do What You Gotta Do
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