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More than just her heart, Brandi Carlile wears her entire life on her sleeve. And her shoulder, chest and back. “They’re gas station patches,” she says, showing off the numerous badges sewn all over her otherwise smart blue jacket, each celebrating a town she’s passed through on her 30-year journey from the backwoods of Washington state to the peak of Mount Americana.
Sitting attentively in her record label’s London offices, short blonde hair in a flamboyant flick and her natural friendly smile lighting the room, this 44-year-old US country-rock star with 11 Grammys to her name – and the crystalline voice to justify every one – looks like the world’s unlikeliest lot rat. To UK audiences only recently discovering her via this year’s No 1 collaboration album with Elton John, Who Believes in Angels?, she might seem more like an instant, overnight Americana star; a bolt of rich emotion from the heartland-sky blue. Being embraced in Britain, homeland of both her beloved Elton (her primary musical inspiration since the age of 11) and her wife Catherine, feels a little like a homecoming. “It feels very much like it’s been a missing fragment, a missing piece of my life,” she says. “And I love this feeling of being discovered. I don’t think everybody gets that in their forties again.” She beams broadly. “I get it twice, seriously?”
For Carlile is, in fact, a long-gestating talent 20 years into a successful US career (she shifted half a million copies of her 2007 breakthrough album The Story alone), and no stranger to the long, hard road to redemption. “I understand poverty really well, having lived in and out of it,” she says, citing her upbringing in a secluded house in the countryside outside Seattle, brought up by drug-addicted parents. “Sometimes deep nature, the rural environment can conceal quite a lot of chaos. It’s something I feed off of for every song ever. Every single thing that I create with art has to do with my upbringing and how crazy it was.” Still, the smile endures. “But there was something really magical and wild about the way that I was raised,” she continues. “And my parents, as complicated as they were, are equally as magical and wise. There’s a lot of twisted beauty in the wreckage that I was raised in.”
Such open and unguarded reflections on her past are the bedrock of her new, eighth album Returning to Myself, a collection of intimate life stories and ruminations steeped in the “otherworldly” textures of co-producer Aaron Dessner of The National and Taylor Swift co-writing fame (there’s also a guest spot from Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon). Carlile refers to the record as a “mid-forties f***ing ‘a-ha!’ moment”, her more centring version of a mid-life crisis. “I have reached a place where I’ve stopped being embarrassed of my younger self,” she admits. “I don’t mind old songs or old pictures or home videos [anymore]. Everything feels like it’s all been leading up to this moment, like it’s all part of the story.”
The album is that story in microcosm, its key beats almost playing in reverse. It begins with a title track based on a poem she wrote last October, “utterly alone” and suffering from “this incredible emotional and actual hangover” in the barn-house guest room of Dessner’s remote upstate New York home. She was there to begin undefined writing sessions, the day after her six-year journey as an instrumental figure in bringing Joni Mitchell back to music – following a 2015 brain aneurysm which left her unable to play or perform – had culminated in a show at the Hollywood Bowl as part of a Joni Jam band alongside Elton, Meryl Streep, Annie Lennox and more. “I was approaching a crash and burn, fundamental,” she says. “I knew I needed time off to recover from that, because it was all consuming and very existentially complicated for me.”
Returning to Myself then travels backwards through marital monotony (“Anniversary”, inspired by a time when Carlile was “struggling to find my footing” in her marriage) and youthful foreign flings (“A Woman Oversees”). And it ends, on “The Long Goodbye”, with the 17-year-old ingenue – already singing since the age of eight, writing songs from 15 and performing around Seattle with her long-time musical partners Phil and Tim Hanseroth from 16 – leaving home on her first ever flight to chase her musical dreams across America. “I was really poor,” she says, “really determined and really hopeful and idealistic about what the world was like.”
The world would ultimately prove overwhelmingly kind. Her showstopping voice wasn’t god-given, but by the time of her second album The Story she’d “willed it” to be incredible: “I had these big notes built into it because I had all of this show-off energy where I wanted to get onstage and create these fireworks shows with my voice.” And come the 2019 Grammys, America sat up. She sang her anthem for the unloved and illegal in Trump’s America, “The Joke” (a key track in her standing as activist, ally and fundraiser for humanitarian causes, racial justice and LGBTQ+ issues), typhooning the song’s heart-stopping high notes into a golden microphone.
Stateside, it was her “Someone Like You” moment, unleashing a “fire-hose of opportunity” that she constantly feared would eventually fade. “For six or seven years now I’ve felt, well, one day the phone won’t ring and I’ve said yes to everything and everyone and shown up and shown up.” As a result, she scattered herself into too many pieces; Returning to Myself is something of a re-grounding exercise, of reminding herself who she is, four minutes at a time.
Elton was pivotal. He and Carlile had been friends for some time. She guested on his 2021 album The Lockdown Sessions and co-wrote the theme to his 2024 documentary Never Too Late. But working together on a full album was challenging: Carlile’s undercurrent of lifelong hero worship ran headlong into the iPad smashing, lyric sheet-shredding realities of batting creative heads with one of pop’s most volatile superstars.
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“It was stormy,” Carlile grins. “It contained multitudes. But ultimately, it was totally life affirming, and it centred me into myself in probably the way that began the process that led to this album because I really had to hold on to myself in that situation. There were moments of bliss, which can only come from having worked for something your whole life, and then have the person that’s the reason you do it look at you and say ‘you’re really good’. Those moments far outweighed the trials and tribulations of watching someone at the level of Beethoven compose music.”
Having to square the sainted rocket man Carlile had idolised as a child with the sweary brat bashing his headphones against his piano in infamous online footage from the studio was jarring. “He was this conduit, this fantasy outside of my life and childhood, this place I wanted to live and frolic around, which was that I wanted to make it as a singer songwriter,” she says. “I thought the man was an angel, and then I’m with him and I’m realising he’s so much more. He has angelic tendencies, and then he’s formidable and foreboding and cheeky and naughty, and he loves a goss. I had to go back to my 11-year-old self and go, ‘Hey, is it OK that Elton John actually isn’t an angel?’.”
Reconnecting with that abandoned inner child launched Carlile along the reflective path towards Returning to Myself. Elton also (very swearily) insisted that the album should include her most intimate and touching contribution to Who Believes in Angels?, “You Without Me”. The album’s other guiding light was Joni Mitchell. Having met the legendary songwriter at her 75th birthday tribute concert in 2018, at Mitchell’s behest Carlile began to curate regular Joni Jams in Mitchell’s LA home. The likes of Paul McCartney, Elton, Meryl Streep, Kathy Bates, Bonnie Raitt and Harry Styles would join loose circles of players, encouraging Mitchell to sing again after suffering a debilitating aneurysm. “I was addicted to witnessing the miracle,” Carlile says. “Every day a new thing came back. One week I would leave, and the next week I’d come back, and she’d remembered how to play guitar. I got to see that shit happen. Even more than being with a legend, what was most moving about it was watching a person scrape their way to recovery.”
It was during Carlile’s set at the Newport Folk Festival in 2022 that Mitchell performed her first full show in over 20 years, seated in an armchair and surprising even the band itself with the lustre of her performance. “Everybody had learned to sing these songs to her or for her,” Carlile grins, “then she gets out onstage and she just starts f***ing singing…she’s taking the songs back.” She’s dismissive about her importance to Mitchell’s return, though. “Whether Joni knew that she’s the one that planned to get herself back to music or not, it really was all Joni. She allowed me to have the best seat in the house and I played a role, but she’s learned to walk three times in her life and she didn’t need anybody for that.”
A new album song called “Joni” paints the revered singer as a down-to-earth, no-nonsense, fun-loving “wild woman”. “Joni will drink you under the table,” Carlile laughs. “She’s the last person to leave the party, she’s 83 and she’s a party animal.” The track recalls one memorable night at the Grammys in Las Vegas when Mitchell spent the night bitching about the acts (“listening to the s*** she was saying, it was f***ing hilarious”) and convincing star-struck blackjack dealers to lower their stakes so she could play all night.
When Joni smiled and called me an a**hole, I knew she loved the song
There’s also the curious line “she threw a party on her grave”. “That’s real,” Carlile reveals. “She has this grave in Hollywood and it’s just a blank grave marker and she sometimes goes there and has lunch and drinks champagne with a couple of her friends.” Carlile was naturally “s****ing myself” over playing the song to Mitchell. “She held that contemplative, furrowed brow until it got to the part of the song that said ‘when I tell you I love you and you tell me, ‘OK’’. Then she had a huge smile on my face and called me an a**hole. I knew that she loved the song.”
Someone who might not be so enamoured of the record is Donald Trump. The fury-driven “Church & State” – the album’s one overtly political punk rock track, jammed out on the night of Trump’s second election win – imagines an intellectual revolution against the current US administration’s appropriation of so-called Christian values to enable its oppressive ideology.
“It’s just straight up about the separation of church and state and the creeping in of theocracy into the ideology and eventually the laws and practices of the country that I live in,” she says, herself a faithful Christian. “The mystical does not belong in the practical. When we start legislating along dogmatic and religious lines, we’re seeing the beginning of a significant decline as a people…And it’s deeply, deeply personal, because my marriage depends on that not being the case.”
Her eldest daughter, worried by her parents’ conversations about their marriage potentially being illegitimised by cases and resolutions being put before the US Supreme Court to overturn gay marriage laws, recently reassured her mother that they’d just “bebop up to Canada” instead. But Carlile believes that sense will eventually prevail. “The song is saying these ideologies, these people, they don’t live forever,” she says. “They’re replaced by better and younger ideas.”
While the META (Make America Trumpless Again) uprising gets its writs together, Trump horrifies Carlile with virtually every utterance. “It’s shocking. I have daily spiritual, emotional and intellectual whiplash.” Seeing the galvanizing effect of the song on audiences, though, has bolstered her belief in the value of her platform. “It’s made me really realise how important protest music is,” she says. “If that’s your gift and you do that, every time your words are gonna strike.” Especially if you’ve the voice of the vengeful angels; there’s few that are a patch on Brandi Carlile.
‘Returning to Myself’, the new album from Brandi Carlile, is out on 24 October