Brandi Carlile Tells Her Truth Through Song

Andrew R. ChowThu, February 26, 2026 at 12:35 PM UTC

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Brandi Carlile Credit - Collier Schorr

It’s the best of times and the worst of times for Brandi Carlile. Professionally, the 44-year-old singer-songwriter is on fire. Her eighth studio album, Returning to Myself, was released in October to critical acclaim, achieving the second highest Billboard chart position of her career. She was a featured guest on CNN’s New Year’s Eve Live, performed a poignant rendition of “America the Beautiful” at the Super Bowl in February, and is now on a massive global tour across the U.S. and Europe. “I can’t believe I get to go out and play all these new songs—it’s like I’ve got eight shiny new cars,” she says.

The songs on Returning to Myself tackle love and fear; selfhood and nationhood. She loves them “with a passion that I have not loved songs with since I was a teenager,” she says. One standout, “Joni,” documents her blossoming friendship with Joni Mitchell, whose career comeback she helped spearhead following the folk legend’s ruptured brain aneurysm in 2015. Carlile says that her work in bringing Mitchell back to the stage, which began with jams at Mitchell’s home and culminated in iconic performances at the 2022 Newport Folk Festival and the 2024 Grammys, “falls into the category of my legacy as a human—like raising my kids, marrying my wife, and honoring my parents,” she says. Given these feats, Carlile is trying her best to savor the rarefied air she is now breathing: “I’m definitely at a time in my life where I feel the most vibrant, the most aware, the most centered, the most grateful.”

But she is also grappling with her role as an artist in an increasingly divided and often violent world. On the 2024 night Donald Trump was elected President for a second time, she wrote “Church and State,” singing of a failing empire. She performed a fiery rendition of the song on Saturday Night Live in November. “I feel a big responsibility to meet the moment,” she says.

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One of Carlile’s most famous lyrics confronts sexism: “You get discouraged, don’t you, girl? It’s your brother’s world for a while longer,” she sings on 2017’s “The Joke,” which won two Grammys. Carlile says that when it comes to women’s rights nearly a decade later, “It feels like we’re in a backslide. It’s not just about what the media is saying. It’s an innate animal instinct that knows we have a heightened level of danger right now.”

When Carlile sang “America the Beautiful” before the big game, the crowd roared in approval, and the jumbotron showed soldiers standing at attention from the Middle East. But Carlile didn’t necessarily think of the performance as a patriotic ode. “I view this song as much more prayer than celebration,” she says. “It can be a lament, a bastion of hope, in a time when there isn’t a lot of that on offer.”

Carlile notes that the song’s lyricist, Katharine Lee Bates, is believed by some scholars to have been a lesbian, which would place Carlile in a unique lineage. Looking back on her two-plus decades in the music industry, Carlile says that while success “comes and goes,” the “one thing that has proven true and steadying to me is to have a community, a chosen family. And I think LGBTQ people have a unique perspective and ability to do this. I don’t think an artist can do it alone.”

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”