Brandi Carlile is a now a music superstar, but she grew up poor in the trailer parks of Washington state with her “really young, unconventional, fringe” parents, her father an alcoholic who struggled to work. Does this background mean she has a responsible relationship with money?
“No!” Carlile splutters, incredulously, “I’m an idiot with money. I cannot keep it. No, I buy the fanciest cars. If there’s something on the menu and it’s expensive, I will buy it just because it is expensive.
“I’m not even rich, but I have such an impulsive, short-sighted way of living my life. I live like an addict because I was raised by one … what do they call someone like me? Nouveau riche!”
Carlile, 44, is sitting in the swanky London offices of her record company, looking every inch the rock’n’roll star, in what might well be a very expensive leather jacket. She’s cool, is Brandi Carlile, and now Britain is wise to it.
She calls herself a “late bloomer”, meaning she was in her mid-twenties when she released her debut album, then gradually become one of the most revered artists and producers in America. In 2019 her song for the dispossessed, The Joke, won one of three Grammys she scooped that year (she has now won 11, plus two Emmys). But she only became a household name over here following this year’s smash-hit collaboration album with Sir Elton John, Who Believes in Angels? Now a new album, Returning to Myself, is topping off a remarkable year, which also saw her play one of the most memorable sets at Glastonbury.
Her early afternoon Pyramid Stage slot clashed with Kneecap, but she managed to build a huge crowd from nothing, and by the end of an inspired set they were all chanting her name. “It was a total f***ing spiritual triumph for me,” she recalls. “And that chant was so sick. As I was hearing that I sat down at the piano, looked up to the side and there was Paul McCartney.”
I found myself truly alone for the first time in a very long time
Carlile’s triumph is an underdog story, but then so was Macca’s, so was Sir Elton’s; that Sixties generation were all post-war council estate kids dreaming of big things, and this may well be the reason why she connects with so many of these legends. Plus, she’s a fan girl — she encouraged Joni Mitchell to return to the stage and acted as a producer for her in 2023.
However, she says she realised all this collaborative work also carried elements of “self-repression, hiding myself behind these really powerful characters.” Returning to Myself is about her taking a moment to look in the mirror.
“I had such success late in life that I had to take every single opportunity that came,” she says. “I scattered myself in a thousand pieces and it culminated in a really intense reckoning for myself at the Brandi and friends show at the Hollywood Bowl, with Joni. After it, I found myself truly alone for the first time in a very long time.”
This Instagram concept of almost religious adherence to self-care... I’ve always been really against it.
Following the gig, in 2023, she was flown out to the East Coast to do some writing. Not paying attention, she thought she was going to Manhattan, but instead realised she was destined for upstate New York. “I drove out to this barn in the middle of nowhere, where I’m staying with a person I’ve never met. I was in this barn totally alone and utterly miserable. I just went up to this bedroom and wrote this poem called Returning to Myself.” While you’d expect the story to then go into woo-woo finding-yourself territory, it soon becomes clear this is not Carlile’s style at all. “I was almost disgruntled with the concept,” she winces. “I don’t know about this ‘journey into self’ bullshit, this Instagram concept of almost religious adherence to self-care. I’ve always been really against it.
“But to be that against something I’ve never taken a look at, felt bullish and immature. So I took a second look at the journey into oneself, as to whether or not it’s really a worthy pursuit. And I don’t think it is.”
Wait, so you took this journey into self-reflection and realised it wasn’t worth it? “Yes the conclusion is that I don’t need to return to myself.”
Don’t expect a Brandi Carlile self-help book any time soon. Indeed, what we have here is someone continually bringing delusions back down to earth. Carlile is all about reality. And in this manner, the other spark for her new album was Sir Elton, whom she had idolised as a child.
I felt my whole life had been taking me up to the Elton John collaboration
“I felt my whole life had been taking me up to the Elton collaboration,” she says. “I knew I just had to do it. And it was a game changer. I needed to get it out of my system. Ever since I put my hands on my first instrument I always wanted Elton John to tell me I was good… I was 11 years old the whole time I was in the studio with him. I was so embarrassed and so nervous about not meeting the bar. And he was mad sometimes and I think I had to set some of that stuff aside. Like the Who Believes in Angels? song and title is not [in mock dreaminess] ‘who believes in angels?’, it’s like [with a cynical snarl] ‘who believes in angels anyway?’
As captured in the documentary that accompanies the album, Carlile and Sir Elton make for a brilliant team, but they were working under pressure, and the big life-changing realisation that came to her was that her idol was human. People say never meet your idols, but few who have been disappointed by such encounters are humble enough to realise the fault lies with them; how could this real person live up to the hero you invented in your head?
The realisation made Carlile question everything. “I thought Elton was an angel. And I had to kill a part of my 11-year-old outlook, not just on him, but on my life. Because when I gravitated towards him, look at my life: I was living in a mobile home with an alcoholic father who was a hard-Right conservative and then this gay fantastical sober rock star comes along. Who I canonised as a saint.
“And then here I am having this midlife crisis in the studio with this guy, and he’s calling me a cow and telling me to f*** off!”
She laughs at the memory and quotes lyrics from the song — “If I lived an easy life, would I still choose you? Would I fall on the same knife?” — and adds, “I’m recognising that there were unaddressed parts of my childhood and Elton shouldn’t have had to adhere to any of that shit. He shouldn’t have had to live up to these expectations. And maybe I shouldn’t have demonised my family, either.”
This kind of reckoning allowed her to move forward and write this new album. It’s a hell of a record, ranging from the stark, intimate title track to the epic Church & State, which shows her as one of America’s most important musicians, melding the political and personal, without being preachy.
Indeed, another reason she has become such a respected figure is her activism and again, her approach is refreshingly straight-up. She says: “I think that if you’re an artist with an ear toward activism, you have to know what you can really stand behind and get more than surface deep on.
“As a person who’s had a foundation for 20 years now, it’s important to understand where the line is between activism and virtue signalling.” She says many people “get the dopamine hit from saying a profound thing on social media and believing that’s the end of the line. When the reality is there is probably a physical way to support that cause.”
Her Looking Out Foundation has been partnering with the Elton John AIDS Foundation to work on mitigating the cuts on US foreign aid, while another concern is “the plight of displaced peoples globally, immigrants, asylum seekers, economic migrants and refugees”. Within all this, she says singing remains her most effective tool. “It’s about garnering a sense of empathy for other people. One of the last bastions of this, of the softening of hard hearts, is to be done with music.”
It’s nice to encounter a true believer in the power of music, who looks outwards at the world rather than inwards at the self like so many other artists. “Yes, things can be really dark, but every generation has believed they’re living through the apocalypse,” she says. “So how can we lighten this up a little bit to find a way to be happy while we’re here for this moment in time? Because it’s a blink of an eye. We have to find a way.”
Returning to Myself by Brandi Carlile is out on October 24
Brandi Carlile’s Playlist
The Joke
The incendiary Grammy-winning record fighting back against prejudice and inequality.
Returning to Myself
A stark folk song delivered with a typically wry take on self-reflection.
The Story
Warm-hearted breakthrough hit, later recorded by Dolly Parton.
