Carlile’s ‘Returning to Myself’ is her most distinct album yet

Over the last handful of years, Brandi Carlile’s musical family tree has grown at a rate that would alarm dendrologists. Since releasing her last solo album in 2021, the Grammy-stacking singer-songwriter, producer and one of music’s most voracious collaborators has helped folk icon Joni Mitchell return to the stage, cut a duo album with hero-pal Elton John and produced records for numerous other artists, including fellow Washingtonian Brandy Clark.

There’s no small amount of selflessness in ensuring artists like Mitchell and Tanya Tucker receive their flowers, helping others realize their artistic visions or challenging country music’s boys club with 2019 supergroup the Highwomen. But it hasn’t been entirely altruistic.

“I really love joining up to other people, like really super going all in,” Carlile said, laughing. “One of my favorite things to do with my voice is to wrap it around another voice and watch it change; watch my vibrato sync up to another person’s vibrato and my pitch acquiesce to (theirs). It’s how I love music, through the context of harmony and collaboration. Just like anything you love, you can take that too far. And I may have just taken it a bit too far.”

After performing alongside Mitchell at the last Joni Jam concert at the Hollywood Bowl in October 2024, an awe-struck Carlile “had this literal and emotional hangover,” she said, “because I knew on some level it was the last time and that moment won’t be re-created.”

The tireless songsmith planned to unplug “for a very long time so I could figure out who I was again and reconnect to myself as an artist.” Whenever she was ready to reemerge and make her next album — which became “Returning to Myself” (out now) — Carlile intended to do so with guitar-shredding superproducer and rock legend whisperer Andrew Watt. Besides producing the most recent albums from Pearl Jam and Eddie Vedder, the 35-year-old Watt worked closely with Carlile and John on their joint “Who Believes in Angels?” LP and the two developed a siblinglike rapport.

But before checking out for that much-needed downtime, Carlile had arranged a no-stakes, get-to-know-ya hangout with Aaron Dessner of the National, an acclaimed producer best known as the indie dude who helped Taylor Swift make “Folklore” and “Evermore.”

The day after that last Joni Jam, Carlile flew to meet Dessner — at that point a friendly backstage acquaintance — at his pastoral studio in New York’s Hudson Valley, thinking maybe they’d write a song or two. For whom or what was anyone’s guess.

Left alone in Dessner’s barn and grappling with the idea of “Returning to Myself” (and the merits of solitary self-discovery altogether) after a magical run with Mitchell, Carlile wrote a poem that became the title track to her eighth studio album. A casual meetup that she viewed as tacked onto the end of a work trip accidentally became the beginning of her next record.

“When I met Aaron, it just took me by surprise,” Carlile said. “He was the right thing for me at that time. I had already decided that whenever I did make another album, I wanted to make it with Andrew Watt. ... Then I wound up out in that barn and wrote the first couple of songs, and I went back to Andrew, and I was like, ‘Would you mind making the album with Aaron Dessner? Because something happened I didn’t expect. And also, would you mind making the album right now?’”

“And (Watt) showed up for me in a really big way,” Carlile added of her primary co-producer, who touched every song but “Anniversary” — a stream of consciousness poem transformed into a chamber-folk dreamland.

Talk to Seattle musicians Carlile used to play with in her Paragon bar days or fellow stars who have come into her orbit more recently, and one thing becomes clear.

Tribune News Service