Brandi Carlile: married mom, bestselling author, rock star

Brandi Carlile’s wife calls it “making a rod for her own back”.

That’s when the famous folk-rock singer writes a song with a big, showy vocal twist built in – a moment when everyone is watching me where her accompaniment stops and she lets her voice rip through all its hoarse. , trembling, rough – the glory sharp.

“She’s like, ‘You know you just created a problem for yourself,'” says Carlile, translating for British-born Catherine Shepherd, whom she married in 2012 and with whom she shares two daughters aged 7 and 12. 3 years. “And of course she’s right. It’s not a good habit to take.

To be clear, Carlile, 40, loves these moments in her music; it’s all about theatricality and “athleticism,” as she puts it, with a tune like “The Story,” her 2007 single that comes together to a grunge-soul climax. But she realizes that such a display sets an expectation among audiences that she’ll be able to do it live – to deliver the kind of fireworks she grew up expecting from Celine Dion and Whitney Houston, whose flowery voice comes from an award-giving performance. of “I have nothing,” she can still quote note for note.

“It’s my Achilles heel,” she said of her voice. “If something is wrong, I feel emotionally unstable. And I am well aware of the fact that I am getting older. She laughs. “But I keep creating these problems.”

Indeed, it does. In 2019, Carlile brought her song “The Joke” to the Grammys for a stunning performance that seemed to instantly turn her – after nearly two decades of practice – into a star. (She remembers Post Malone giving her a high five backstage.) Soon she found herself with people like Elton John and Joni Mitchell, from whom she covered the entire “Blue” album. at the Walt Disney Concert Hall; she formed a country supergroup, the Highwomen, and wrote a bestselling memoir, “Broken Horses,” retracing her sometimes painful journey as a practicing gay child in the wilderness of rural Washington State.

Today, she is back with a new album, “In These Silent Days”, which opens with another wonder: a great piano ballad entitled “Right on Time”, in which she reaches a high note, the grabs it, then climbs a few more steps just to make sure she tingles every spine in the room. Other cuts reflect on marriage, loyalty and religious hypocrisy – the overwhelming “Sinners, Saints and Fools” was “completely influenced by Black Sabbath,” she says – and offers hard-earned parenting advice to her. children, as in the harmony “Stay Doux.”

“I’m so drawn to the drama of domestic life and motherhood – the juxtaposition of being so free and so confined at the same time,” she says. Carlile recorded the LP, his seventh, with Dave Cobb and Shooter Jennings, the same team that produced in 2018 “By the Way, I Forgive You”, which won six Grammy nominations (including album, record and Song of the Year) and won three.

Sincere and intimate even when Carlile directs her songs towards the rafters, “In These Silent Days” is sure to appeal to longtime fans who have followed the singer since she and her loyal band mates, twin brothers Tim and Phil Hanseroth. , began working the Seattle Club Scene in the early 2000s.

Yet it’s also the first album that Carlile has made since achieving mainstream stardom which she considers with some sort of moral weight. “I see what has happened to me in my career and in my life as an opportunity for other queer people,” she said over breakfast in West Hollywood. Dressed in jeans and a black t-shirt, she had come down to the restaurant at the Sunset Marquis after a late night at Eddie Vedder’s Ohana Festival in Dana Point, where she had performed her own set and then went to do “Better Male “with Pearl Jam.

“It’s important for me to make sure the door stays open so that other people like me can walk through it.

Carlile, who says she started writing the album immediately after finishing her book – “I literally got up from the desk and walked over to the piano” – is still getting used to the reality of being a celebrity. The other day, she was driving from her home outside of Seattle in Mount Vernon, Washington, where she is guarding her boat, when “someone walked past me waving at me.” At first she thought she had a flat tire. “Then someone else did, and I realized, Oh, they recognize me.”

Part of what makes this strange is that, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, Carlile has spent much of the past year and a half confined within the sprawling forest compound where she, his wife and their children live with Tim and Phil (who is married to Carlile’s younger sister) and several other “chosen family” members, as she describes them. “For a long time, I was not to,” she says.

Also: 40 is an unusual age to become a pop star. Carlile says she spoke about it with Bonnie Raitt, who suffered something similar when her 1989 album “Nick of Time” won an armful of Grammys after working hard for years. “The kind of recognition she finally got was the kind she wanted, and that’s how I feel, too,” Carlile said. “When I was 22, 23, a time like the Grammys would have hit me and I wouldn’t have known what to do. I would have played on tracks and maybe tampered with the guitar, ”she says, instead of playing the raw real-time performance that turned so many heads.

Being celebrated for what she always has done – “I don’t mean to say that makes me feel justified,” Carlile said. “But it makes me feel at peace with some of the rejection I experienced throughout my life, very early on, coming out of the closet as a teenager.”

Those around him say fame hasn’t changed Carlile. “Still nothing makes her happier than turning on the grill,” says Tim Hanseroth. Courteney Cox, the actor and former “Friends” star who directed the music video for “Right on Time”, was a fan of Carlile’s music before they befriended and claims that “honesty and the authenticity “of his songs are true to the truth. .

“The person who attracted me is exactly the same person I know now,” Cox says.

What’s interesting about Carlile, who will once again perform Mitchell’s “Blue” at Carnegie Hall in New York City on November 6, is how she balances that humility with her natural artistic flair. According to Tim, Carlile has a “switch” that she flips on stage to access her inner vocal diva. “It’s almost like Dr. Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde,” he says. “Even when we were playing in these tiny little clubs, she was still huge in his mind.”

Carlile agrees. “When I was 14,” she said, “I was like, ‘There’s no way that won’t happen if I keep going. “And now that she does, she’s determined to hold her position. For some time after the Grammys, Carlile seemed to show up at every record industry charity gala or TV show related to the music you could imagine – singing songs, of course, but also shaking hands.

She wants to understand “being inside the mechanism, seeing how the machine works,” she says. “If I have been given a platform, the least I can do is functionally function within that machine. It’s an attitude that contrasts with the more passive approach taken by peers like Vedder and Sturgill Simpson, who interact with the machine as little as possible.

Carlile says that she and Simpson, who performed together, have “crazy respect” for each other. “But this is where we diverge, and it’s because I’m not from a place of privilege to be [accepted] by the biz. When Simpson, like Vedder, a straight white man, “does this little anti-establishment thing, I’m like, ‘Congratulations, the establishment is kissing you whether you kiss them or not.’

“When I have these tendencies, I have to ignore them. I can’t seem to please them. If I take my hands off the wheel for a minute, everything goes. If they take their hands off the wheel. , they’re on the cover of Rolling Stone.

For Carlile, the purpose of her success – beyond the obvious pleasure she takes in standing in front of a cheering crowd as she pulls off a flamboyant vocal maneuver – broadens the idea of ​​the type of person who can be expected. to win. There is a purity in his ambition that only deepens as his horizons broaden.

“I a m pure, ”she said with a smile. “And accomplice. And loaded with agenda. And totally innocent.