Sitting attentively in her record label\u2019s London offices, short blonde hair in a flamboyant flick and her natural, friendly smile lighting the room, this 44-year-old US country-rock star with 11 Grammys<\/a> to her name \u2013 and the crystalline voice to justify every one \u2013 looks like the world\u2019s unlikeliest lot rat. To UK audiences only recently discovering her via this year\u2019s No 1 collaboration album with Elton John, Who Believes in Angels?,<\/a> she might seem more like an instant, overnight Americana star; a bolt of rich emotion from the heartland-sky blue. Being embraced in Britain, the homeland of both her beloved Elton<\/a> (her primary musical inspiration since the age of 11) and her wife Catherine, feels a little like a homecoming. \u201cIt feels very much like it\u2019s been a missing fragment, a missing piece of my life,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd I love this feeling of being discovered. I don\u2019t think everybody gets that in their forties again.\u201d She beams broadly. \u201cI get it twice, seriously?\u201d <\/p>\n For Carlile is, in fact, a long-gestating talent 20 years into a successful US career (she shifted half a million copies of her 2007 breakthrough album The Story alone), and no stranger to the long, hard road to redemption. \u201cI understand poverty really well, having lived in and out of it,\u201d she says, citing her upbringing in a secluded house in the countryside outside Seattle. \u201cSometimes deep nature, the rural environment can conceal quite a lot of chaos. It\u2019s something I feed off of for every song ever. Every single thing that I create with art has to do with my upbringing and how crazy it was.\u201d Still, the smile endures. \u201cBut there was something really magical and wild about the way that I was raised,\u201d she continues. \u201cAnd my parents, as complicated as they were, are equally as magical and wise. There\u2019s a lot of twisted beauty in the wreckage that I was raised in.\u201d<\/p>\n Such open and unguarded reflections on her past are the bedrock of her new, eighth solo album, Returning to Myself, a collection of intimate life stories and ruminations steeped in the \u201cotherworldly\u201d textures of co-producer Aaron Dessner<\/a> of The National and Taylor Swift co-writing fame<\/a> (there\u2019s also a guest spot from Bon Iver\u2019s Justin Vernon). Carlile refers to the record as a \u201cmid-forties f***ing \u2018a-ha!\u2019 moment\u201d, her more centring version of a midlife crisis. \u201cI have reached a place where I\u2019ve stopped being embarrassed of my younger self,\u201d she admits. \u201cI don\u2019t mind old songs or old pictures or home videos [anymore]. Everything feels like it\u2019s all been leading up to this moment, like it\u2019s all part of the story.\u201d<\/p>\n The album is that story in microcosm, its key beats almost playing in reverse. It begins with a title track based on a poem she wrote last October, \u201cutterly alone\u201d and suffering from \u201cthis incredible emotional and actual hangover\u201d in the barn-house guest room of Dessner\u2019s remote upstate New York home. She was there to begin undefined writing sessions, the day after her show at the Hollywood Bowl as part of a jam band alongside Joni Mitchell, Elton, Meryl Streep, Annie Lennox, and more \u2013 the culmination of a six-year journey to bring Mitchell back to music, following a 2015 brain aneurysm which left her unable to play or perform. \u201cI was approaching a crash and burn,\u201d she says. \u201cI knew I needed time off to recover from that, because it was all-consuming and very existentially complicated for me.\u201d<\/p>\n Returning to Myself then, travels backwards through marital monotony (\u201cAnniversary\u201d, inspired by a time when Carlile was \u201cstruggling to find my footing\u201d in her marriage) and youthful foreign flings (\u201cA Woman Oversees\u201d). And it ends, on \u201cA Long Goodbye\u201d, with the 17-year-old ingenue \u2013 already singing since the age of eight, writing songs from 15 and performing around Seattle with her long-time musical partners Phil and Tim Hanseroth from 16 \u2013 leaving home on her first ever flight to chase her musical dreams across America. \u201cI was really poor,\u201d she says, \u201creally determined and really hopeful and idealistic about what the world was like.\u201d <\/p>\n open image in gallery<\/p>\n Brandi Carlile: \u2018I was really poor, really determined and hopeful and idealistic about what the world was like\u2019 (Collier Schorr)<\/p>\n The world would ultimately prove overwhelmingly kind. Her showstopping voice wasn\u2019t god-given, but by the time ofThe Story she\u2019d \u201cwilled it\u201d to be incredible: \u201cI had these big notes built into it because I had all of this show-off energy where I wanted to get onstage and create these fireworks shows with my voice.\u201d And come the 2019 Grammys, America sat up. She sang her anthem for the unloved and illegal in Trump\u2019s America, \u201cThe Joke\u201d (a key track in her standing as activist, ally and fundraiser for humanitarian causes, racial justice and LGBTQ+ issues), typhooning the song\u2019s heart-stopping high notes into a golden microphone.<\/p>\n Stateside, it was her \u201cSomeone Like You\u201d moment, unleashing a \u201cfire-hose of opportunity\u201d that she constantly feared would eventually fade. \u201cFor six or seven years now I\u2019ve felt, well, one day the phone won\u2019t ring and I\u2019ve said yes to everything and everyone and shown up and shown up.\u201d As a result, she scattered herself into too many pieces; Returning to Myself is something of a re-grounding exercise, of reminding herself who she is, four minutes at a time.<\/p>\n Elton was pivotal. He and Carlile had been friends for some time. She guested on his 2021 album The Lockdown Sessions and co-wrote the theme to his 2024 documentary Never Too Late. But working together on a full album was challenging: Carlile\u2019s undercurrent of lifelong hero worship ran headlong into the iPad-smashing, lyric sheet-shredding realities of batting creative heads with one of pop\u2019s most volatile superstars.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was stormy,\u201d Carlile grins. \u201cIt contained multitudes. But ultimately, it was totally life-affirming, and it centred me into myself in probably the way that began the process that led to this album because I really had to hold on to myself in that situation. There were moments of bliss, which can only come from having worked for something your whole life, and then have the person that\u2019s the reason you do it look at you and say \u2018you\u2019re really good\u2019. Those moments far outweighed the trials and tribulations of watching someone at the level of Beethoven compose music.\u201d <\/p>\n open image in gallery<\/p>\n \u2018It was stormy\u2019: Brandi Carlile on working with her idol Elton John (ITV)<\/p>\n![\"Brandi](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Brandi-Carlile-1_Credit_-Collier-Schorr.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\u2018It](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/an_evening_with_elton_john_and_brandi_carlile_01.jpg\")
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![\"Annie](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/ELTON_JOHN-BERNIE_TAUPIN-PREMIO_GERSHWIN_15070.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Returning](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/02102025_An_Evening_With_Brandi_Carlile_Chloe_Hashemi_CH1_4661-CR3.jpg\")
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