Brandi Carlile on Leaving Behind Superstar Collabs With ‘Returning to Myself,’ While Still Cherishing Community — and Why She and Joni Have an Even Tighter Connection Now
As her new album opens, Brandi Carlile is having a slight argument with herself. The title track of the record, “Returning to Myself,” wonders aloud about how much value there is in going deeply inward for solitary reflection, versus constant connectedness. It’s a question the singer-songwriter had to resolve for herself, to some degree, because she knew her season of being her friend Joni Mitchell’s right-hand woman in her current musical endeavors was ending, and also that it was closing in on time to start in on her first solo album in four years. Perhaps she needed to give herself a pep talk, or permission, at least, that it was all right to go off indulge in splendid isolation.
But the debate in that title song is not really a fair fight. Carlile has often said that a big way in which she and her wife (and manager), Catherine Carlile, differ is that Catherine becomes completely anxious at the idea of guests dropping by without massive advance notice, and Brandi can’t imagine anything more delightful. So guess what? Carlile spends much of “Returning to Myself” making the case for returning to attachment, as a life philosophy, even if she’ll allow that having time to hear your own thoughts has some value too. So the new record does mark the return of Carlile standing musically on her own two feet — as if she ever wasn’t, even when she released a duo album with Elton John, “Who Believes in Angels?,” in early 2025 — and there are no big collabs in the works and no features on the album. But, naturally, she is just as enthralled to talk about her producing partners, namely Andrew Watt and Aaron Dessner, as about any life lessons she picked up in the moments she allowed herself to be stuck in her own head.
Variety spoke with Carlile on the eve of the release of “Returning to Myself,” which stands as one of her finest efforts and one of the best albums of the year. The conversation turned toward the messages the new album sends out to her fan base (the “Bramily,” as it’s known) about how to navigate increasingly tense times in the world… to her just-announced 2026 arena tour… and yes, to Elton and Joni, because returning to herself is acknowledging how deeply they’re ingrained in her essence at this point.
This feels like a true singer-songwriter album. Not in a way that emphasizes you solely or diminishes the contributions of your band or producers, but if “singer-songwriter” is a genre, this might fit that even more squarely than some of the other recent albums. Whereas with your last album, “In These Silent Days,” you were talking about getting in touch with your inner diva. This is not a diva album, per se.
No, no, it’s not. You’re right. On that album, I think l was, like most people were post-pandemic, wanting to step out. I was feeling like coming right out of the gate with a big voice, sparkly suits, Shakespearean pose, strutting across the stage. I wanted to be out and loud, because we had all been locked in for so long. And that’s not how I felt this time. I felt like I did that already, and I wanted to reflect on some of my atrophied ways of being and thinking.
Were they any false starts in your mind before you settled in on the approach for this? In an interview we did at the end of your last album cycle, we were talking about the song “Broken Horses,” which is one of the most hardcore rock ‘n’ roll songs you’d ever done, and you told us then you thought that might be the direction your next album would be headed. But of course that was years before you actually got into making this new record, and maybe surprising yourself.
Yeah. Which I hope I always do. I remember Rick Rubin telling me when I was really young, “You can’t make records in your head.” And I was like, “Well, sure you can! I make everything in my head, years in advance.” And it’s not true. You can’t make records in your head, if you do it authentically. You have to be prepared to be surprised by the muse. That does tend to happen to me every so often in these big, pivotal moments in my life, and that’s certainly what happened.
You know, I remember telling you that “Broken Horses” felt like the template for the next album, and there’s a reason for that. It’s like my favorite records, sequentially in the long arc of an artist’s career, blend together like a color wheel. I think there’s always an indication on the album of where the artist has just come from and where the artist is going, so I’m always thinking about that. And so looking back in retrospect at what that transitional song was, I thought, “Well, maybe the transitional song on ‘In These Silent Days’ is ‘Broken Horses,’” because it just felt like an under-explored tributary for me.
But then the Elton album came along, and I felt that I got to do a lot of that on that album, just in terms of up-tempo, in-your-face rock ‘n’ roll. And the very next song I wrote after “In These Silent Days” was probably “Swing for the Fences” (which appeared on the record with Elton). So there was a truth to what “Broken Horses” was leading me toward, but then I did that there. And I kind of wound it all down with “You Without Me” (a tender ballad from the Elton album that Carlile also put on her new solo album). And right then, I knew that was my color-wheel moment that was blending me into the next era of my life.
You’ve said you wanted this album to have an otherworldly palette. You’ve mentioned the Emmylou Harris album “Wrecking Ball” as some kind of template that occurred to you somewhere along the way.
Yeah, and also “Joshua Tree.” The Daniel Lanois intersectionality of all things was discussed by me with Andrew I think to the point of exhaustion. I made Andrew these exhausting, several-hundred-song playlists of songs that were coming back to me, like flashback from youth, in ways that I hadn’t revisited before. I didn’t even know why I was sending him these abstract snippets and things that I haven’t thought about in years and years — you know, deep cuts from (Radiohead’s) “Pablo Honey” and live recordings of Sarah McLachlan in the ‘90s and obscure Indigo Girls special releases and the “Philadelphia” and “City of Angels” soundtracks. These moments were like a revisitation of a really pure place that my music used to come from. It’s not that it ever wasn’t pure — it’s just that I got in a van and I joined a band and I just started working. And that’s authentic too; work is authentic, and my music and my work were inseparable. But back when it wasn’t work, that’s where I got to with this album.
There’s a fascinating origin point for this album that would be interesting to explore with you, that involves you landing at Aaron Dessner’s place in the Northeast for a writing session. You flew out there literally the day after doing the second of two shows with Joni Mitchell at the Hollywood Bowl. And you were feeling you needing to detach yourself from those famous collaborations a little bit, whether it was with her or Elton John, and get back to working on music on your own. But you are known for being the great collaborator — “plays well with others” might be the operative phrase. That’s been a real joy in your life, obviously, to either reach upward and work with your heroes or reach downward to lift up artists who could use your touch as a producer…
It has been, yeah.
So to step away from that consciously is interesting.
Well, it wasn’t conscious, and that’s the truth. My favorite thing to do, probably, if I’m really honest, is just to take my voice and bend it around someone else’s voice and join musically with others, so I always probably will do it. But if I ever got as close to the end of it as I could, it would’ve been at that Hollywood Bowl show. Because there was nothing cumbersome or negative about it; it was quite the opposite, actually. It felt more like a peak moment. And I didn’t really want to slow-roll down the hill of that. I wanted to just jump off the cliff.
The second night, I was sitting next to Joni — best seat in the house, by the way; nobody had a better seat to the Joni miracle than I did — while she was singing “Both Sides Now,” and I was just fighting back tears. Not the kind of tears that wet your face in the stage lights and make you look like a Disney princess; the kind of fucking tears that are full-body, ugly-face kind of tears. Fighting it, just fighting it. And I didn’t know really why at the time, but there was this feeling in me that it was the last time that I would be in that seat doing that for that song, in that moment. And I just thought: What a journey. From the first time I heard her open her mouth and say “rose and floes of angel hair” to here, it all was right there, just laying on my shoulders, and I was overpowered by it. When I woke up the next morning, I still was. And when I met Aaron, I still was. And then when he left me alone in his barn, I still was. And that was why I felt so alone: because I knew it was time for me to say goodbye to something so special, so important. And honestly, it wasn’t even my choice, it was just the end of that, you know? Joni was just gonna float off into Joni prestige and beauty, in the way that she does, and I was gonna find a way to reinvent myself. That didn’t even need to get said. It’s just what happened. But I really felt it.
So, obviously it was not the end of your friendship with Joni or anything like that, just…
Oh God, no. If anything, I think the joy that we get from being around each other and having a laugh, knowing that there’s not some big fucking scary thing in front of us that we’re stressed about, is amazing. Because every time we’ve seen each other for six years, we were just about to do something huge, and right on the edge of something that was going to really challenge both of us, together and separately. That feeling was always in the room, and now it’s really not, so that’s so much fun. I still do not go to L.A. without going up and sitting with Joni and watching TV or having wine or whatever.
It’s just so dramatic that you had booked yourself to go the very next day after doing the Hollywood Bowl with Joni to go be with Aaron Dessner across the country. Was it that deliberate, to make the transition as abrupt as possible? Like, this will help me decompress from this weekend of concerts to go do something radically different, immediately?
Well, I knew whenever I was gonna make the record, I was gonna make it with Andrew Watt. And Aaron was somebody that I’d only met passively backstage at a couple of shows here and there and really liked him, and obviously I’m a massive fan of the National and of the work that he’s done with Justin Vernon and Big Red Machine and all that stuff that he’s been involved with. I just knew he was a really unique conceptualizer or a creator or facilitator at that point. So it was something I knew I wanted to do for some kind of next phase. I just didn’t know what it looked like. I certainly didn’t think it was for production. I thought it was for songwriting, and I didn’t actually know how he does that until I got there. But I was looking at it as the end of a work trip after the Joni show: I’m gonna do this one more work thing, then I’m gonna take a bunch of time off and figure out who the fuck I am anymore. At the end of a work trip, last thing I’ll do is head over to the east coast, meet this guy, and then I’m going home for a long time. I love to hibernate in the fall.
And little did I know that that actually was the first day of my album. And then I had to come home and tell Andrew and the twins that: “Hey guys! I wrote my first song without you, and accidentally chose us another producer without even talking to you.”
Settling in at Dessner’s place by yourself at the end of that day, finding yourself alone the night after the big event with Joni, that’s when you wrote the lyrics to “Returning to Myself”?
Yeah. I got there and went into the barn, and Aaron was there with this amazing girl, Bella, an engineer that he works with, and I sat down on the couch and I told ’em what I had done the day before. I started to feel really emotional about it. Then he was like, “Well, it’s getting late. I’m gonna head off to bed. There’s a blueberry muffin in the kitchen.” And then he left, and I was just alone in this barn. I went upstairs and I picked a bedroom in the loft of this barn to sleep in, and I sat down on the bed. I still had a hangover, a literal hangover, and was having an existential crisis, and I wrote the lyrics to “Returning to Myself” as a poem.
The theme of that song is interesting because it feels like there’s a debate going on within the song. Like, is it good to go find yourself in isolation, and not rely on others, or are others vitally important?
Yeah, it is like that. It’s like (in the opening lines), first of all, who is God? Like, is God this reckless, leather-jacket-wearing, menacing, James Dean-looking guy just sitting there holding your life between their fingers on fire, and watching it burn down like a matchstick, watching you squirm? Or, are we universally and unconditionally loved? And then, what are we here to learn? Are we really here with all these other people to learn how to exist in solitude and be alone? Is that what it means to be evolved? Is that the point?
You know, I’m in a generation that is fixated on self — self-preservation, self-care, self-exploration. And I’m antithetical to that, I think to a fault, a bit. That’s not to say that I’m not selfish in my own ways, or at least misguidedly self-important at times. But I don’t know if the journey inward is really the point. I don’t know if that’s really the way to self-discovery. I think who you are in the context of who you love is probably the journey. And that’s kind of what I’m asking myself — because I don’t want to have a made-up mind. I don’t want to be atrophied in my thinking at 45; I want to still be growing and evolving. So, is it necessary for me to take the journey inward? And I think that’s what I did when I made this album. I got it out of my system.
Knowing you, if you are going to err on one side of that argument or the other, it’s hard to imagine you not almost always erring on the side of connection. But you did find some value in moments of reflection.
Yeah, exactly — you got it. I did it, and yeah, and I think I still stand by a preference for connection.
To talk about a couple of the tracks on the album, “Human” and “Church & State” seem like they might be connected, because you’ve said you wrote both of them in close proximity to the 2024 election. But they seem almost like polar-opposite reactions. It seems like the theme of “Human” is that, even though the world may be going to hell, we need to focus on the things that are most meaningful in our lives and not panic and not get totally distressed. And then “Church & State” is more like: Sure, let’s panic. Or more like, it’s okay to get upset.
I actually wrote “Human” the night before the election, and then “Church & State” while votes were coming in and being counted. But I tried not to tie it to something as temporary as U.S. politics, and it’s not, the way I look at it. “Human” is about striking that really difficult balance between recognizing that we’re here for a very short period of time, like the blink of an eye, and that we have got to find a way to be happy in the chaos. We have to find a way for all to be well with our soul while we’re here in this split second. Then we also have to find a way to not be apathetic, inactive, passive and neoliberal about the things that are happening in our world. That is a really difficult balance to strike, because one could accidentally block out the things that need work and the things that need activism in order to make ourselves happy. Or one could accidentally block out the need to be human, while they are virtue-signaling and running as fast as they can on a treadmill that’s outpacing them. And that balance is the challenge that I’m putting forward with “Human.”
With the rocker “Church & State,” you recite the words of Thomas Jefferson about the separation of church and state. You’ve joked that recitation goes where a guitar solo would otherwise go.
Well, when the lyrics were coming together for that song, I just couldn’t stop thinking of the wisdom of Thomas Jefferson’s address to the Danbury Baptists. What he said to the Baptists was intended to reassure them that they would be allowed to practice their faith, spirituality, religion, however you wanna refer to it, freely. He also makes a really important distinction that we aren’t an autocracy. We’re not a theocracy. We can’t rule over people with our interpretation of an extremely opaque scripture and religion as it pertains particularly to the Christian religion. Now that we’ve seen over time the integration of so many beautiful cultures and faiths in the United States, it’s, it’s a connotation that’s safekeeping for all people because it allows for the law to be secular as it should be. And I just find that to be an essential and life-giving part of that text. In my faith, even Jesus was clear about not ruling a people based on an interpretation of religion. Even Jesus said, “Give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.” So I can’t get behind rules and laws that I know are secretly based on an interpretation of a religion. I can’t get behind that even if I agree with the religion.
Soon after the election, you did a livestream for your fan group, the Bramily, to answer questions just having to do with the mood of things, not about any project or anything. A lot of your fans were panicked, with good reason, and they didn’t necessarily want to be calmed down about it, but you were offering a somewhat reassuring message. It felt like you had a challenge in that moment, recognize that people have a right to be upset, and then put it in a bigger picture. In a moment when people are feeling nothing but alarm, it felt like it could be difficult to suddenly start talking in terms of existence and mortality and the shortness of the moment. As you do further, speaking to a much larger group, in “Human.”
It’s really difficult. And sometimes when I’m saying those things, I’m reassuring myself at the same time. Like, I need it too. I need to zoom out to 30,000 feet, too, sometimes. And I think that if you’re in a unique position to be able to help put that in perspective, it’s good for humanity. You know, since the beginning of time, every civilization has believed that they’re living through the apocalypse. And it helps that even in the worst of times, even in a wildfire, the sun looks really beautiful. You have to find that one little thing, let it soothe your soul, and then go out and do the work. When our adrenals are all jacked up because of the things that we’re consuming and seeing and the way that social media is meant to spike our adrenals and give us these dopamine hits based on what we do or say in that realm, I think we really lose perspective.
Whenever somebody tries to get me wound up or is sort of acting contrary to their nature in terms of what it is that they’re saying or thinking, my initial reaction is, “Well, let’s go for a hike,” or “Let’s go fishing first, and then let’s decide what we’re gonna do.” Somebody said to me one time, “If you have a goal that you have, something you want to achieve, don’t tell someone else that you’re gonna achieve it, because it gives you this false little dopamine reaction that tricks your brain into thinking that you have achieved it.” And that’s the thing about activism: if you’re doing it all in the comments section, then you’re probably not putting your body in the middle of the process where you need to be. You’re probably not showing up for that cause, because you got what you needed from what you just typed into your phone.
That fits into the bigger picture of this album. There’s a sense of mortality throughout the songs, like “Human,” and again in the last couple at the end. We can think of earlier songs like “Beginning to Feel the Years” where you already had that consciousness. But this feels like a very kind of peaceful sense of mortality, as you encourage people to embrace what’s going on and what’s possible in your life right now, because we won’t be here have this chance forever. That infuses so much of the album.
Yeah, it does, doesn’t it? I have a lot of older friends, and when you’ve got older friends and you get a glimpse into what the second half or the third or the fourth quarter could look like, I think it does enable you, not necessarily to live in a future-thinking sense, but to at least understand, “Oh yeah, okay. I’m about to start the second half here. How do I want to finish this thing out?”
There’s some real Joni-esque phrasing on this album, and not just in the song “Joni,” where it’s meant to be overt, but in other songs like “A Woman Oversees,” too.
That’s the thing you can’t shake. Oh my God, I have tucked my voice underneath her voice now for so many different occasions that I have had to adopt her phrasing in ways that are just practical. And then it becomes the only phrasing. It’s like, yeah, I will never be able to unlearn the unpredictability of Joni’s phrasing. Which is to say, I think I’ve unlearned phrasing in general. Maybe that’s it.
You must have played the song “Joni” for her. Did she have a reaction to the musical homage, or to some of the kind of candid and funny things you write about her in the lyrics?
Yeah. So I played her “Returning to Myself” and I played her “A Woman Oversees,” which she loved. Then I played her “Joni,” but I worked up to it because I was so nervous about it. There’s some little jokes in there and little references that I thought she’d like, but nobody knows with Joni. So I played this song and she was just listening to it with a furrowed brow, putting clips in her hair and just sort of like staring ahead and listening. She wasn’t smiling for quite a long time. There’s that whole first verse about “laughing at the pop stars,” and she doesn’t even crack a smile or make eye contact or say anything. Then it gets to that chorus where it says: “When I tell you ‘I love you,’ and you tell me, ‘Okay.’” And she just started to laugh — like, just straight out of nowhere, she full-on laughed — and then she goes, “You asshole!”
And I loved it, because I knew that she got all of those references, and it was just a really, really great moment. Then she asked at the end of the song, “Why do you think I’m a wild woman?” And I got to explain it to her. It’s not very often that she’ll sit there and let you really give her a compliment, but she asked, so I got to tell her why I think she’s so wild.
Let’s talk a bit about Andrew Watt, your primary co-producer, who worked on every track on this album. You started working together on the album you did together with Elton, and clearly that went well for you to repeat the experience for your solo record. I just watched the Ozzy Osborne documentary and saw what a cheerleader he was for him. Obviously you’re far from that Ozzy state where he’s down and out and really needed someone to compel him to make music again. But clearly he has an effect on people in all state of their careers.
Well, I think we connect to each other based on some of that too, that we have such reverence for our way-pavers and the people that made the music that we feel built us. He could sit for hours and talk about Ozzy and Paul (McCartney) and the Stones and Iggy Pop; I’ll just be riffing on Elton and Joni and Tanya (Tucker) and my heroes. And we have that conversation probably every time we see each other: “How’s everybody? How’s Mick? How’s Keith?” And I was actually with him when Ozzy passed away, and he was absolutely inconsolable. But also a pillar of support for the family — got straight on a plane and went there (to the U.K.).
He is going to be a really important part of the story of the music industry, in an enduring way. He’s gonna cast a very long shadow. And one thing about Andrew that is important to remember is that his enthusiasm is a certain kind of spiritually connected chaos that anyone could do with at any age, at any point in their life. If you’re in the studio with Andrew, only you will be able to call it the end of the day, because he will never will. You’ll be there until noon the next day and Andrew will still be making music with you. So every night I had to call it when it was bedtime, and that was an energizing thing. It pushed me to my limits and made me realize that some people are just gonna get in the fucking trenches with you.
Dessner’s presence is just really felt in a big way on the tracks he worked on, too, like “A War With Time.” It’s funny that you said you didn’t know how he operated in terms of songwriting. Now you know what every Taylor Swift fan knows by heart, from their descriptions of how they worked together starting with “Folklore.” What he provides is far from being the whole track, but he lays down a serious bed to act as a trigger for a top line melody.
It’s like I said: I am not attuned to or well-versed in writing songs with other people outside of the way me and the twins do it, which is very unique. So I’m over there, and I didn’t know what Long Pond was, either. I thought Long Pond was the name of the town! Everybody kept asking me where I was, and I was like, “I was upstate in New York in a town called Long Pond.” So when I got up there, he was like, “Well, the way I do it is, I’ve got these pieces, and it’s not to say they’re finished — like, you could add to ’em if you want, or take away from ’em — but really they’re kind of a piece. And then if it inspires you, you’ll sing over it.” And I was like, “Oh, well, that’s production first of all. So you’re the producer and we (don’t even bring in others to) co-write, so it’d be you and me and no twins.” It was really liberating, but it was so strange to not worry about production and not worry about creation — that it was either gonna come or it wasn’t, and then when it’s done, it’s kind of done. And “A War With Time” and “No One Knows Us” were both really like that.
So much has happened this year, it’s almost difficult to remember or believe this is really your second album release this year, after you and Elton put out “Who Believes in Angels?,” which you’d recorded at the end of 2023. Though you’re moving on to your next project, do you have lingering thoughts about how that album turned out?
Me and Elton’s album? Yeah, it’s left my mind as a musical achievement and it’s become bigger than that for me. It’s healed a part of me, as an adult, because it was essentially me being told by my hero that I was good and that I can do this. And it was me learning to see him through an adult lens. It feels now to me like the way it felt to get married or have children, like a very personal, very human milestone in my life. I love it musically (too); I think musically it’s one of the funnest, freest, most insightful things I’ve ever been a part of. But it’s gone to this place for me where it’s just so meaningful emotionally. Nothing can poke holes in it.
You just announced an arena tour for 2026, your first time headlining that type of venue. There’s an intimacy to your music, of course, but it will be interesting to see how the grandness of some of it gets accentuated in those rooms.
Well, my whole job has always been to make a big place feel small, and I’m really up for it. I’m gonna figure out a way to do it, and I’m gonna make everybody that comes to that show feel like it was a living room.
You didn’t announce a huge number of U.S. for that on-sale, but we can’t help but notice there’s a big, multi-month gap in there. So it feels like there could be more to come.
Yeah, exactly. Don’t worry. Those are just the ones we could sort out in time for the album release.
You have done a lot to set up this album, down to doing grunt work. You put up an Instagram post of yourself carrying records to sign into Easy Street Records there in Seattle, where you were doing an in-store. You’ve done a lot online, like a two-and-a-half hour campfire performance you and the Hanseroth twins did from your compound a few days before the album came out — which you streamed not just to your fan club but to everyone, for free. You have been rallying the troops.
I’m a very happy to. It’s hard to rouse the troops when you’re asking people to spend money, so it’s like, I’ve gotta show up for free a bunch, too, so that people can get something where they’re not being asked to fork over cash. Man, you gotta show up sometimes and meet ‘em in the middle, and I hope I’m doing a good job.
(Variety will have a separate track-by-track commentary by Carlile about the album’s songs in the coming days. Read our review of “Returning to Myself” here.)
প্রকাশিত: 2025-10-28 06:19:00
উৎস: variety.com
