When Brandi Carlile woke up in an unfamiliar barn one morning last fall, she was a little lost, more than a little hungover and feeling unexpectedly, profoundly alone.
She had arrived the day after her final Joni Jam, the epic series of concerts that Carlile had helped orchestrate at the Hollywood Bowl with the long-elusive Joni Mitchell, one of her longtime heroes, alongside a constellation of rock and pop luminaries. The performances capped a period of incandescent ascent for Carlile, the singer-songwriter with the golden-ranging voice, 11 Grammys and a sideline as an icon whisperer.
Her musical idols — Sir Elton John! — were now her regular-phone-call besties. She had a devoted wife and two daughters, a family compound stuffed with loved ones and an acclaimed supergroup. She was in almost every respect at the top of the mountain: “I had done everything,” she said. “Twenty-five years of career-development work, in five or six years.”
And yet, she was also at “a breaking point, where I realized I had sort of totally forgotten how to stand on my own two feet.”
In that rural refuge in upstate New York, she wrote a poem that captured her mood: “Why is it heroic to untether? / How is alone some holy grail?”
It was a song. And a midlife crisis.
The verses became “Returning to Myself,” the title track off her new album, due Oct. 24. She started it with Aaron Dessner of the National — the man with the barn studio — the first time they’d worked together, and he later pulled in his pal Justin Vernon, of Bon Iver. The result is a sound that pinpricks her usual plaintive guitars and orchestral strings with occasional distortion and delay. Except for one song, she is the only vocalist — the background harmonies are just her protean voice, stacked on top of itself.
The project and the new collaborators “put me in a really permissive space, sonically,” she said. “But it didn’t feel new. It felt really old. Like back to my very beginnings, when I first started writing songs, and the way I first felt living outside of Seattle.”
At 44, Carlile, who grew up and still lives in rural Washington, has been a bandleader for more than a quarter-century; the symbiosis of writing with her bandmates, particularly twin guitarists Phil and Tim Hanseroth, was ingrained. This record, she started on her own, to tunnel into her story herself. It is, in her words, a turning-point album, modeled after Lucinda Williams’s “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” or Emmylou Harris’ “Wrecking Ball.” It has the luster and confidence of an artist realizing her prime, finding memory and maturity in the lyrics.
“I’m not scared at all about what people think about the album,” she said. “I’m way past that, and I’ve never felt that way before putting out music.”
We were lounging, one recent afternoon, in a greenroom at Electric Lady, the storied Greenwich Village recording studio, where Carlile had just played her album for invited guests. Sipping an espresso martini and rife with anecdotes, she mouthed the words and pounded along to the beats (“I know every drum fill, every tom hit”). Cross-legged from her club chair, she nonchalantly seduced the whole audience.
Later, when she had at last been pried by her wife, Catherine Shepherd, from greeting everyone in the room, Carlile plopped onto a couch and put her feet, in white Chucks, up. She wore jeans and a Valentino tweed jacket, decorated with stylist-supplied pins and one of her own: a tiny silver guitar with working strings, a gift from John. When she removed the blazer, she morphed from rock star into real-life Brandi Carlile, complete with a hole in her T-shirt.
When she was younger, Carlile said, she had “tunnel vision. I couldn’t even carry on a conversation with you unless we were talking about music and my ambition. But now it’s really diversified. I feel like I’m a more balanced and centered woman, at this age.”
In a nearly two-hour conversation, I saw them both: the far-reaching artist, with a bestselling memoir, who has built a brand — and multiple music festivals — propelling herself creatively, and the local Pacific Northwest mother (her daughters are 7 and 11) who lives near the elementary school she attended, relishes grocery shopping and cooking, and spends as much of her time as possible on the water, crabbing, shrimping and catching rockfish and halibut. (She may be knuckle-deep in fish guts, but her boat is named Captain Fantastic, à la John’s 1975 album.)
In neither case is she a loner; she and her bandmates, who have married into her and her wife’s families, live in a bohemian utopia of communal child-rearing and music-making, yards apart in the wooded foothills of the Cascade Mountains. Carlile has refused to pave the path leading to her home, “because,” she said, “that sound of car wheels on a gravel road means somebody’s coming. And whatever’s happening in the day, it’s about to change.”
That made her solo foray all the more rare, and — at least at the beginning — unsettling for her. But lyrically, it worked. “It was just coming, all fully formed — like she’s tapping into some ancient thread of consciousness,” said Dessner, a go-to for cinematic, emotionally driven compositions, and a regular producer for Taylor Swift since “Folklore.” “Musically, for me, it’s always really interesting when people are in transition,” he added.
Carlile had long been on his wish list. “She’s incredibly personable and magnetic, but she also has these legitimate artistic gifts,” he said. “She’s just one of those singular voices in music.” In the studio and out, he found her unusually open. “A lot of artists are more cagey,” he said. “Brandi is very much about community and building connections.”
One of her sparks was attending Lilith Fair, Sarah McLachlan’s all-women music fest, as a teenager. It inspired Girls Just Wanna, an annual weekend-long showcase of female and nonbinary artists — many of them queer — that Carlile has programmed in Mexico since 2019. (Between her band and her friends, “I travel there every year with 28 kids,” Carlile said. “Their sunscreen will never be topped up more.”) McLachlan, who performed in 2024, called it “a well-run, inclusive, joyous festival.”
“Her ability to manage so much at once with such grace is inspiring,” she said of Carlile.
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Outside of her own, career-making songs — like “The Joke,” an anthemic ballad for the persecuted, and “The Story,” a soaring love song — Carlile is known for her collaborations as a vocalist and producer. She has duetted with a pantheon of rock, country, folk and pop stars, including John; “Who Believes in Angels?” their album together, was released in April. In 2019, as a producer, she helped coax rabble-rousing country star Tanya Tucker into a comeback record. It won two Grammys, including best country album.
When Carlile gets involved with an artist she loves, “I’m obsessed,” she said. “I see the whole path, from the first downbeat to the Grammy.” (She is the rare artist for whom having a big Grammy night six albums deep into her career proved trajectory-changing.) Producing a record for the country singer Brandy Clark, she said, “I would stay up, beat myself up at night,” worrying about Clark and “how she does interviews and whether or not she gives herself enough credit as a songwriter.” (Their admonishing crooner, “Dear Insecurity,” also won a Grammy last year.)
Brandi Carlile adjusts the microphone for Joni Mitchell during Joni Jam at the Gorge Amphitheatre in George, Wash., June 10, 2023. (Justin J Wee / The New York Times)
Carlile’s most notable pairing has been with Mitchell, the 81-year-old folk legend. When they met, six or so years ago, Carlile said that Mitchell, who was recovering from a debilitating 2015 brain aneurysm, seemed to believe that culture had passed her by — that music fans “didn’t appreciate” her, Carlile said. “Not just that, but they didn’t even like her.”
That misinterpretation was enough, Carlile said, to galvanize her into arranging what became an astonishing run of performances hailing Mitchell, who sang, robustly and delightedly, from her thronelike chair. It was, Carlile said, “me getting the front-row seat to a miracle.”
It ended because it had to; Mitchell’s music is such a draw, Carlile said, that if the concerts didn’t stop, “I would just do that.” But Mitchell herself was onto other things, like her paintings and a planned biopic. “The less she wants to do it,” Carlile said of the Joni Jams, “the happier I am for her.”
She still visits, when she has the fortitude. “Joni will drink your ass under the table,” Carlile vowed. “She’s really burly; people don’t know.” On “Returning to Myself,” there’s a sweet and funny, sax-spiked ode to her, called “Joni,” that celebrates her as “a wild woman.” (One of Mitchell’s favorite places to party, Carlile said, is around a tombstone she owns in Hollywood — she’ll turn up there with a picnic of sandwiches and Champagne to dance, with friends, on her own grave.) When Carlile played her the song, she said, Mitchell only laughed in unexpected places. “And when it was over, she just said, ‘You [expletive].’ But she was beaming.”
The Hanseroth twins, who are 50 and have been inseparably working with Carlile since she was 18, had no expectation that they would be making another album so soon after the Elton and Joni trains stopped. Shepherding all those other projects, alongside her own career, Carlile “just seemed really spent,” Tim Hanseroth said, in a joint phone interview with his brother. Then again, he added, “she operates at a high level of performance, not like the rest of us do. She’s kind of a machine that way.”
Onstage, though, she can still be walloped by emotions. “When I first walked out onstage at Madison Square Garden, I cried,” she said. In the listening session, the achingly tender “You Without Me,” about the moment a parent realizes their child’s fledgling independence, made me weep.
“About half the time when I sing it, I have to, like, go to another place,” she said. “And if I look out and I see another woman crying while I’m singing it, it’s like, that’s it.” (The track had originally appeared on her album with John, and he suggested it for this one. “Get that [expletive] banjo off!” he demanded, of the song it replaced.)
When Carlile emerged from Long Pond, Dessner’s studio, with a clutch of nearly finished songs, she and her band high-tailed it to Los Angeles, where they worked with producer Andrew Watt, who’d also done the Carlile-John LP. He and the introspective Dessner have almost comically opposing vibes. “You don’t ever have to worry about what’s on his mind,” Tim Hanseroth said of Watt. “It’s coming out of his mouth half a second later — which is great.”
Vernon’s drop-ins provided the finishing magic. The first day, “He was wearing an Emmylou Harris ‘Wrecking Ball’ T-shirt,” Carlile said. “It was a sign.” She described his contributions as “otherworldly.”
She is so glued to the material that she has, unusually, not been able to let it go. The galvanizing political rocker “Church & State” had a spoken-word recitation from Thomas Jefferson’s Letter to the Danbury Baptists. Performing it at the Red Rocks amphitheater in Colorado last month, she screamed that part. “I decided I liked that better. So now I’m going to go in and record over the talking bit, and have it be screaming.” (The crowd loved it.)
In “Returning to Myself,” Carlile wonders aloud about what it means to be solitary, asking, “Is it evolving turning inward?”
She made her exploration. What did she conclude?
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I do think it is essential to learn how to be steady in yourself.” But “aloneness is not necessary to find yourself.” It’s just one starting point.
This story was originally published in The New York Times.
