Brandi Carlile thinks she might have an problem with co-dependency.
She may well be the most decorated Americana artist in recent memory; she’s won 11 Grammys over the course of the last six years (among a whopping 26 career nominations) alongside a pair of Children’s and Family Emmy Awards and an Oscar nomination. She routinely sells out arenas and has been heralded by many as a singular live performer. She’s even sent four of her eight albums to the top ten of the Billboard 200.
But even still, the 44-year-old singer-songwriter says that she’s long felt a sense of “inadequecy” when it comes to both her everyday life and her career, thanks to what she deems a reliance on the companionship of others. It’s not hard to see why she might feel that way — Carlile is one of the most sought-after collaborators, with featured appearances on songs from modern pop stars like Miley Cyrus and Sam Smith, to musical legends like Elton John and Joni Mitchell.
“That’s kind of permeated my personality since I was a little girl. I don’t want to spend the night with myself, I don’t want to go have a meal with myself, I would never watch a movie by myself,” she tells Billboard on a video call. “My aversion to aloneness makes me feel a bit unevolved. Is my tendency to be with, to be in service to, to walk with other people really me being unevolved? Or is it just who I am? I guess I’m still pulling it apart.”
Those thorny questions rest at the center of Carlile’s remarkable eighth solo studio album, Returning to Myself (out today via Interscope Records/Lost Highway). Written and produced alongside pop-rock maestro Andrew Watt with additional work from The National’s Aaron Dessner and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, the album tracks Carlile’s own untangling of deeply personal insecurities around ego, legacy, politics and independence. A mid-life crisis has never sounded quite this poetic.
The artist says that her new album was born, oddly, from her lack of desire to get back to creating solo albums. “Part of me really didn’t want to do it. Part of me wanted to just go back to being knee-to-knee with all my collaborators and writers and producers and friends,” she says. “It’s incredibly affirming when the people that you idolized growing up are looking at you going, ‘You’re really good, you’re very, very good.’ And that could be an addiction in and of itself — you can very easily just live in that affirmation and never take another risk.”
Those idols include John, who Carlile released an entire duets album with earlier this year, Who Believes In Angels? Carlile recalls being 11 years old living in Washington state, where “there wasn’t an inch of my bedroom wall that didn’t have an Elton John poster on it,” citing her “profound” love for John and his music.
Then there’s Mitchell, who Carlile famously brought out for her first live performance in decades at the 2022 Newport Folk Festival before going on to organize a series star-studded “Joni Jam” concerts to reintroduce the world to one of the most influential musicians of the last century. Tanya Tucker is another decorated performer who Carlile re-centered the spotlight on after decades away, by producing her lauded 2019 album While I’m Livin’ and co-starring in her 2022 documentary The Return of Tanya Tucker.
The through-line between every collaboration with one of her “superheroes,” Carlile notes, is the presence of a cause for her to take up. “Tanya was not getting her flowers — she was getting a stigma that she certainly didn’t deserve. With Joni, she had her flowers, but she didn’t know it,” she says. “Even for smaller artists, like Brandy Clark, she wasn’t being seen for the genius she is in country music … there was always some cause, and then that cause has to intersect with musical undeniability. And in that case, you know, these people are an embarrassment of riches.”
But when beginning her work on Returning to Myself, Carlile wasn’t finding a cause. She had reached the proverbial mountaintop of her professional career, and was now left to try and find some new cliff face to ascend. She remembers one particularly hard songwriting session, where she, Watt and her band were sitting in an expensive studio space creating melodically fascinating passages, and she couldn’t find any words to put to them.
“I was just in there watching money fly out the window, because I just couldn’t make the songs happen,” she says, grabbing fistfuls of her coiffed blonde hair as she recalls the stressful day. “I kept going to this little office space at the back of the studio and basically hiding from everyone. It was so destabilizing.”
In that office, Carlile noticed a purple Rhodes piano — “I think it was just there as decoration,” she offers — and sat down at it. She pulled up a poem on her phone that she had written weeks prior about wisdom and age, started putting a simple melody to it, and within 15 minutes had constructed the emotionally complicated track “A Woman Oversees.”
Writing lyrics separately from the music composition proved to be uncharted territory for Carlile — throughout her two decade career, Carlile routinely wrote her music and lyrics in concert with one another. In establishing a new precedent for the album, the singer-songwriter found that she was starting to deconstruct her own ideas about how music gets made.
“If there’s anywhere that I’m on thin ice with my ego, it’s trying to work in musical complexity where it isn’t needed. But when you have the words first and you’re now suddenly in the studio, the music has to be natural. It can’t be overthought, it can’t be intentionally complex,” she says. “I did a lot less in terms of the musical math on this album than I ever have before. I was really open to two-chord soundscapes, and I have to say, I’m finding it really emotionally fulfilling.”
Carlile is just as quick to credit Watt and Dessner’s work with her on the album for its sonic cohesion, noting that while the two had never worked together before, their collaboration on this album helped make it what it was. “I kind of Parent Trap‘d them,” she jokes. “I’m kind of culty, to the point where I’m like, ‘No, I need everyone to love each other and know each other! Will you guys come together on every song and show up in the studio and please be friends? Will you guys be friends for me?’ And they f–king did, man. It was amazing.”
When talking about Returning to Myself, Carlile keeps coming back to one other album in particular: Wrecking Ball, the 1995 magnum opus from Americana star Emmylou Harris. The projects may differ in tone and genre, but Carlile instead points to Wrecking Ball‘s larger cultural footprint as her true inspiration.
“She was trying to own the narrative and have some agency over who people believed Emmylou Harris was. The way that she asserted her Emmylou Harris-ness was to do something so unexpected sonically that it challenged the psyches and the ears of Americana listeners,” Carlile recalls. “That’s the ethos that really resonated with me. It wasn’t like I took a swing for that level of genius or refinement. It was more like I wanted to feel the same way.”
One of the most unexpected sonic turns Carlile makes on her new album arrives with its sixth track, the surging rock anthem “Church & State.” Amidst an album of plaintive, introspective folk songs, “Church & State” roars with rebellion and electrifying anger, as Carlile rails against the political powers that have tried to decide the future for her and her community.
The song was written largely on the night of the 2024 election, when Donald Trump won a second term in office. Carlile recalls the rage she felt as she watched the results come in. “I just saw my marriage hanging in the balance. Everything that my kids depend on in terms of feeling, and living within the legitimacy of our family, and how we walk through the world together,” she said. “I was just so, so angry, and stressed out, and I’m in need of some catharsis.”
She remembered a riff that one of her oldest friends and collaborators Tim Hanseroth had sent to her months prior. The two had joked about a time when Billie Jean King had once told Carlile, “‘We Are the Champions’ is too f–king slow, somebody needs to write a sports anthem that’s actually up tempo,” and Hanseroth made good on that promise with a pounding bassline that became the heartbeat of the song. “Writing that song was like I was running a mile; it just was coming out of me,” Carlile says.
The lyrics that came pouring forth concerned the “frailty” of right-wing politicians, reminding them that when their day comes, this will be how they’re remembered. She puts it much more succinctly in our conversation: “Time waits for no one, and no one stays a strongman forever,” she says with a smirk.
As they began to put the track together in a studio, Carlile pitched an odd idea to Watt, Dessner and her band. What if, instead of a guitar solo on the bridge, she simply performed a spoken-word rendition of an 1802 letter written by then-President Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptists Association? The choice may seem strange, but Carlile points to the famous missive for creating the oft-cited “wall of separation between church and state” that is fundamental to the functioning of American democracy.
“I think it might be the one of the most important pieces of text that has ever been introduced into the American political system. It is so timelessly wise, and it should offend no one — yet I know it will offend many,” Carlile says, before staring directly into her camera. “And if you’re offended by it, you are the problem. Period.”
Carlile knows there will even be some in her own fanbase who would prefer that she not speak out on political topics. But she says she cannot afford to stay quiet, especially when her existence is at-issue in the current administration. “We have no choice but to wake up and be political every day because we’re women and we’re gay and this is how we now have to live our lives in this country,” she says, exasperation punctuating each word. “There can be no ‘shut up and sing’ as an option for me, that’s just not possible.”
Even with its sonic left-turn, “Church & State” still finds itself fitting into the rest of Returning to Myself, as it finds Carlile re-examining and reaffirming her own relationship to religion and politics, the same way she re-examines her relationship to age on the emotionally bare “Human,” or reaffirms her marriage on the loving ballad “Anniversary.”
But there’s still the question of her “cause” for Returning to Myself — for an artist who has moved forward with a clear sense of purpose on each one of her projects, collaborations and performances, what principle guided Carlile through this latest phase of her career?
A pregnant pause forms as Carlile considers her answer. “I dropped out of school at 16, and I moved away from home at 17, I immediately had to work in order to survive. I had no skills and no driver’s license, and all I could do to make a living and pay for my rent was find places that would let me sing live,” she says, her brow furrowing as she thinks back to her earliest performing days. “As long as I can remember, I have had to make music my job.”
She smiles as she corrects herself. “There was a time, though, when I was a teenager and I could just sit on my bed and cry and just feel this magnetic draw into the magic of music. I hadn’t felt that feeling for a long, long time, and I could barely remember what it even was,” she says. “I needed to go back to that bedroom before the hustle and figure out what I loved about this. What can I unlearn about song structure? Can I become innocent about this again? So my next steps are going to be to find and stay in that innocence for as long as I possibly can.”
This story originally appeared on Billboard
