WHY BRANDI CARLILE COMES ON LIKE SOME HEROINE TO WIND BACK WEDNESDAY
- Aug 5
- 11 min read
Worker bee musician, organiser, promoter, friend of Joni & Elton & Tanya, collaborator with dozens more, ultimate Pacific Northwest represent, and no mean songwriter and singer, Brandi Carlile can do, and does, a lot. Including playing at the Super Bowl.
She’s currently on tour through the USA, a tour which is unlikely to make it to Australia, so Wind Back Wednesday looks to fill the gap somewhat. Not a show but an interview with Carlile from 2020 that originally ran in three parts – three different publications got value from a meaty chat about how she got here and why it matters that she doesn’t waste it – but here comes together in the one spot.
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HEROES COME IN ALL KINDS of packages, and with all kinds of reputations.
For the teenage Brandi Carlile, growing up in a small town in semi-rural Washington state, it came one day on the TV in the form of a small but intense singer with a gift for being a handful, and a strong desire not to be like the other girls in American country music.
“For me, coming from a place of gender dysphoria and not understanding why I felt I needed to feel so tough as a little girl, realising I was somewhere on the gender spectrum that was different from my siblings and friends, Tanya Tucker really satiated that in me,” says Carlile.
“She had this wide gait and she was the female Elvis and she screamed and hollered. I was like, I really like that, I don’t know why but I really want to perform that way.”
Jump forward 25 years and two decades into Carlile’s career as a lyrical, storytelling singer/songwriter of rare quality, the kind who straddles roots music, Americana, pop and country and reached a golden climax with a triple-Grammy score for 2018’s By The Way, I Forgive You album, she could repay Tucker’s moment of inspiration.
Carlile wrote and produced with Shooter Jennings, son of Tucker’s old drinking partner, Waylon Jennings, this year’s Grammy-winning country album, While I’m Livin’. It was a comeback of sorts for Tucker, long sidelined by the establishment, and the circle was complete.
So how much of her interest in working with the veteran – whose first hit was in 1972, blossoming for the next decade before watching her career shrink in the 1990s - was to connect or celebrate that teenage self and what Tucker meant to her then?
“Some of that was subconscious I’m sure, and I love that experience in retrospect [but] at the time I was feeling a little bit slighted as an American roots artist and wondering why so many of our matriarchs had been forgotten or not upheld,” Carlile says. “And the reasons for that, especially with Tanya, were blatantly misogynistic.
“The exile that was imposed by the country music establishment was just a purity test, plain and simple. She had a problem with drugs, she had had a problem with alcohol in the past, she got around town and caused problems and closed down bars. Basically did all the things that we worship her male counterparts for doing. With her it was deemed inappropriate and she was blacklisted.”
So there was some element of righting a wrong? Of doing right by her?
“I thought if there was anything I could do with this time in my life, after a Grammy and my album doing so well, it was to illuminate this issue and get involved with it,” she says. “When I was invited to become part of the project I became obsessively determined.”
That respect for a woman who was willing to be frank, direct and defiant, in a field where women for so long were asked to be anything but, extends into the even murkier world of politics.
When we speak it’s soon after Elizabeth Warren eviscerated presidential aspirant, Michael Bloomberg. Carlile is yet to see the Democrat debate, but is already primed.
“Oh yes!, Whoa!” she says excitedly as I detail some of Warren’s best lines. “I’m a big fan of Elizabeth Warren’s, huge. I think she is fantastic. I’m actually quite fond of about half of our candidates. I’m probably going to have a glass of wine and watch [the debate].”
It’s clear that Carlile has long abandoned any idea that being a political animal is risky for an artist. She told a newspaper last year, that being political doesn’t come from outside her anymore, it comes from who she is. Or as she puts it today, if you’re existing outside the borders of what once was assumed to be the only way to live “you become innately political just by trying to change the understanding of that”.
“So much of my life and so much of my understanding of civil rights and politics in this country has to do with me being gay, and the fact that I got married before it was legal,” says Carlile, who is married to former philanthropy manager Catherine Shepherd, with whom she has two young daughters.
“[And] what I had to go through to live in the same country with my wife, the fact that I am listed as the father on my children’s birth certificate because we don’t have a template for same-sex parenting, or parenting and family structure outside of our cultural understanding of it.”
From this has sprung a wider passion, with Carlile citing the plight of displaced people and refugees; the struggles on America’s southern border; her country’s relationship with firearms; “and a problem with greed and our inability to look out for the poor or the other or to want to take care of anyone who looks different to us” as causes she won’t stay silent on.
“These are political issues that I have awoken into by being gay, becoming a mother, trying to raise daughters in this time of the world,” she says. “If you are not political, you are lying to yourself.”
Somewhere, Tanya Tucker is applauding.
“You’re the soul who understands the scars that made me who I am/Through the drifting sands of time I got your back and you got mine.” As she sings in a song on the soundtrack to a new Pixar film, Onward, Carlile has long sought out and depended on the kindness, the kinship and the collaboration of others.
In any 20-year career there are friendships and creative relationships which come and go, burn brightly and then drift away. Or sometimes explode spectacularly. Even if, or sometimes especially if, love and family are involved.
Some, such as Underworld’s Karl Hyde and Rick Smith have lasted an age but still needed to be rebuilt decades in. Some, such as the Rolling Stones Mick Jagger and Keith Richards seem to exist with acrimony as the glue. Few last that long that you begin to lose sight of the origins or wonder where the joins are.
One of those has to be the three-as-one arrangement of Carlile and the Hanseroth twins, Phil and Tim, who have been inseparable since the three, all from America’s Pacific northwest, threw their lot in together. Phil plays bass, Tim plays guitar, Carlile is up front, but all write, all harmonise, and all work on their projects, whether they are Carlile albums, like her 2018 Grammy-winning By The Way, I Forgive You, her country music supergroup, The Highwomen, or the winner of this year’s Grammy for best country album, Tanya Tucker’s While I’m Livin’.
“That bond was formed in the early 90s in Seattle, Washington. It started with my admiration for them: they are older than me, they were cool, and I wasn’t cool. But they were kind and the sound that our voices made to me we created a complete chord,” says Carlile, who like most people inside and outside the band refers to the brothers simply as The Twins.
“For us it was an instant thing that just happened and we were completely freaked out by it. We didn’t understand how it was going to work out but they were going to quit their day jobs to hang out with a 19-year-old kid.”
They made decisions early on such as splitting their money evenly, merging families (with Phil married to Carlile’s sister), staying close (literally, with all three families living within spitting distance in Washington) and “setting individual parts of ourselves aside for one another”
“Which is not a hard thing to do with twins,” claims Carlile. “They have an understanding about the other that is different to the rest of us. Some people would say they are co-dependent fundamentally, but some people would say they understand something about being human that the rest of us don’t understand.”
Part of this kind of musical and personal relationship is understanding and respecting each other’s roles, rather than elevating ego. For example, David Rawlings, who is Gillian Welsh’s musical as well as life partner, used to describe the musical entity “Gillian Welsh” as a two-person/one face operation and it didn’t matter to him whether people recognised his role or were fixated on the lead.
For Carlile and the twins it is something similar.
“I always have been a little more hyperactive than them. I love entertaining people, starting conversations, and getting the attention, and they don’t. They didn’t want to be entertainers, but I did, so they don’t have to,” she says. “It’s interesting though because it wasn’t an issue, but when we all met we were in long-term relationships – they were married to other people than who they married to now; I was in a long-term relationship - and our band forming meant the end of the end of all our relationships outside of that. Nothing else could survive it because nobody else could understand how we could be okay with our arrangement.
“From that point on, anyone new that came into our lives understood that me and the twins can’t be separated and we won’t be competitive with each other. That’s just the way it is.”
What could she take from that particular adult relationship into a situation like the Highwomen, the band she formed and recorded with Natalie Hemby, Maren Morris and Amanda Shires – all of them female, all solo artists of varying experience, but each with a strong sense of who they were and what they wanted?
“Well [the twins] are in the Highwomen,” Carlile points out. “There is real feminism being supported by men. When that happens creates a contrast that’s really important. I feel like, and I will always know, on every level, that the twins were willing to stand behind me before anyone was talking about it, before it was politically equitable. Before people were talking about being feminist adjacent, they were.
“They are like that in the Highwomen, but they are not the only ones: we all have men that we collaborate with that are in that band and a purely supportive level. A really good example of that would be Jason Isbell [Shire’s partner and her collaborator in his band too].”
This arrangement of equals, at the front and the back of the band is “a really exciting dynamic for the Highwomen” who did contemplate having an all female band or just leaving it as the four of them. It would have made some commercial sense in terms of clean lines of sight for media looking for the easy angle.
However, there was something to be said for a further message being driven home says Carlile.
“We realised that having the men in our lives in a supportive role, underneath us, actually said a lot to the rest of the world,” she says. “And it says a lot to other men.”
Can you believe and trust when that belief can be spat back in your face? Can you say, as Carlile once sang, “you can't take back what you have done/You gotta keep your heart young”? The answer may be give peace – and love and understanding - a chance.
The essence of Carlile’s Grammy winning 2017 album, By The Way I Forgive You, was as it says on the tin, forgiveness. Which sounds wholesome, good and something no one would object to, right? Except of course that it’s not always something that is easy to explain or understand once you get past the Hallmark moment.
Some people resist forgiveness because they think it means allowing someone to get away with doing harm. Some people dive into it because they think it will heal them to do it, as many self-help books like to say.
Some of us though, see either of those choices as maybe a little too easy, too simplistic. So, Brandi Carlile, what does forgiveness mean to you?
“Well, there’s another interpretation which is even more disturbing,” she says, pointing at the “little problem with sanctimony and patronising” that the US has, that expectation of being forgiven.
“I’m not preaching when I talk about [forgiveness]. It’s something even I struggle with on a daily basis: forgiving others, forgiving things in my past, forgiving the things that I know are about to happen in my future like losing a parent and struggles with our health. And also forgiving myself: I do Catholic guilt in a big way.”
Ah, now we’re talking. Catholic guilt – mother’s milk to some of us. But we’re not yet any closer to a definition, if there is one readily available.
Remember, as we saw earlier in this interview, we’re talking someone whose existence as a lesbian was long judged anathema in the musical, let alone social and political circles, she worked in. Someone who secretly married her partner, Catherine – with whom she has two daughters - before the law was changed in the USA to recognise that union.
“It’s just a radical, ugly, global concept and that word here has become a very white, middle-class, Judaeo-Christian, “#blessed” word and I’m fascinated by the divide between how radical the concept actually is and how homogenised our understanding of it is,” says Carlile, who then reveals a rather radical, you might even say brave, approach to the hoary concept.
“I’ve asked for it before people knew what I did was wrong. That seemed more important than what I was asking for: me letting them know that I know I have hurt them. That can do healing, that can do things for people’s souls that they might not even know they needed. And I know I need it.
“I need that kind of acknowledgement from other people. As soon as I know somebody knows they’ve wronged me and that they wish they hadn’t, it’s like it never happened. I think I admire them more than if I had never been hurt.”
This isn’t idle thought or even flaky self-actualisation but something learned before even understanding it. Something that is as simple as faith. So, does faith still play an important role for her?
“Oh yeah, a very, very important role. I’m the rejected progressive reformist student of the Bible as a historical document. You could call me Christian but I don’t really need that word.”
When Carlile says rejected, it is quite literal: as a teenager she was refused baptism by her local minister, in front of the congregation, because she had already come out.
“I had my swimsuit on under my clothes, they’d invited my family and friends – everyone,” she told The Guardian last year “That’s when they decided to make an example of me. I’d been on a lot of stages in my life, but that was an irreversibly damaging public humiliation.”
She has said that that rejection has never left her mind, which raises this thought, does she not belong to things now because it means that she won’t be rejected, choosing to build a belief system around herself and her life?
“No I still go back to the well, and I’m proud to and happy to.” Carlile says. “I react to that initial rejection all the time in my life, it’s probably one of my greatest gifts and platforms. But people who are rejected by the basic tenets of faith, and let’s say for the sake of discussion it’s the Christian faith, tend to be closer to understanding it than people who aren’t.
“I’ve really been fascinated by that juxtaposition most of my adult life and it has made me a person of an even stronger and more poignant faith. I’m practising and I’ve been able to bring that to my children and it’s an important part of my life.”
And that includes, yes, forgiveness.
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