The project will be available this fall
Brandi Carlile is back with her eighth studio album and first solo project in four years. After pouring herself into collaborations with musical icons and legends, the 11-time Grammy Award-winning songwriter is looking inward, reflecting backward, and ultimately, returning home on her new album, Returning To Myself, out October 24th on Interscope Records/Lost Highway. Produced by Carlile, Andrew Watt, Aaron Dessner, and Justin Vernon, the album features ten songs, including the title track, available now, with the official video directed by Floria Sigismondi.
“I’m not my favorite person to spend my time with. Returning to myself is not just a lonely, but a painfully boring thing to do. So much so that I’m actually not at all interested in doing it,” Carlile shares. “I prefer to double, triple, and quadruple down on co-dependency, which I’ve come to learn that outside of 12-Step programs and junior high school relationships, isn’t really that unhealthy at all…
“For me, the key to learning to ‘be alone’ is not being alone at all. It’s being alone in a crowded room. It’s hearing an unexpected doorbell ring and wondering who has shown up to watch me read my book and bite my nails all day. That a guest can be a deep lean-in over a cheap bottle of wine or simply an eyebrow raise and a gesture toward the refrigerator while I play Zelda…where I totally choose myself with someone so close to me I can hear them relax.
“People want to be together in silence more than we allow in our time. It’s falling deeply in love with the car wheels on a gravel road. The possibility of the visitor. The ‘not being alone-ness’ of it all…
“Togetherness has given me everything I love about being alive. Starting with my original family in a single wide mobile home, gathered around a wood stove all the way to living with my band, haunting my wife everywhere she goes, raising my children on a tour bus, learning at the feet of Joni Mitchell, to making music with my greatest hero of all time, Elton John.
“Why is it heroic to untether, when the tense work of togetherness is so much more interesting?
“…because I don’t want to do it. Because I don’t want to return to myself.
“And that’s why I will.”
In addition to Carlile, Watt, Dessner, and Vernon, the album features her longtime bandmates Phil and Tim Hanseroth and SistaStrings (Monique and Chauntee Ross) as well as Josh Klinghoffer, Chad Smith, Matt Chamberlain, Dave Mackay, Rob Moose, Blake Mills, Mark Isham, and Stewart Cole.
Carlile and her band will perform three sold-out nights at Colorado’s legendary Red Rocks Amphitheatre this weekend. Additional tour dates to be announced.
1. Returning To Myself
2. Human
3. A Woman Oversees
4. A War With Time
5. Anniversary
6. Church & State
7. Joni
8. You Without Me
9. No One Knows Us
10. A Long Goodbye
