Allen performs two tracks from her latest album, West End Girl, with actress Dakota Johnson joining for one
Lily Allen returned to the Saturday Night Live stage after nearly 19 years away with two performances from her latest pop album, West End Girl.
Allen, an SNL musical guest in early 2007, opened with “Sleepwalking,” the third entry on the track list.
Rooted in her separation from Stranger Things actor David Harbour, West End Girl finds the British singer-songwriter “taking a brutal inventory of the scars she amassed while her marriage was falling apart,” Rolling Stone‘s Maura Johnston wrote in a positive review.
Allen said the trouble in her personal life ended up pulling her out of a bout of writer’s block.
“I thought I didn’t have any good songs left,” Allen, 40, told The Times upon the album’s October release. “My writing had been really bad and it took something to happen in my life, for everything to be blown up, for me to be able to go, ‘Oh, here she is.’”
Allen on Saturday returned to the stage alongside actress Dakota Johnson for “Madeline,” with Johnson playing the part of the woman with whom her husband is having an affair.
West End Girl, Allen’s follow-up to 2018’s No Shame, has been named one of Rolling Stone‘s best 100 albums of the year: “Here we find Allen, nearly 20 years after her debut, Alright, Still, delivering her most ruthless music yet, an odyssey of betrayal and heartbreak, a work where musical storytelling is laid out in its barest and sharpest form.”
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Allen will perform the album in its entirety on her nine-city North American tour in April.
