“Returning To Myself” (Interscope/Lost Highway Records)
By Eleni P. Austin
“Is it evolving turning inward,
oh, what an easy way to be, only kneeling
at the altar of the great and mighty me”
That’s Brandi Carlile pondering the intangible on the title-track of her latest album, Returning To Myself.
Brandi’s self-titled debut arrived 20 years ago. Growing up in rural Washington state in a conservative household, she was a self-described “queer kid.” Music became her salvation, Elton John and Patsy Cline were early lodestars. She made her public singing debut at age eight, singing a Johnny Cash song.
Fast-forward 16 years and she released her self-titled debut with her trusty bandmates, Phil and Tim Hanseroth, via Sony Records. Warm and intimate, her sound was a sharp amalgam of Country, Folk and Rock, anchored by her stunning vocal prowess. Championed by critics, musicians also took notice. This included heavy-hitters like T-Bone Burnett (who produced her second long-player, 2007’s The Story), and Elton John, who sang Brandi’s praises to anyone who would listen.
She continued making music at a furious clip. Give Up The Ghost arrived in 2009, followed by Bear Creek and The Firewatcher’s Daughter in 2012 and 2015, respectively. She received her first Grammy nomination for the latter. Her true commercial breakthrough happened three years later with the release of her fifth effort, By The Way I Forgive You. The watershed recording hit #5 on the Billboard charts and topped plenty of critics’ Top 10 lists. Nominated for six Grammy Awards, it won three: Best Americana Album, Best American Roots Song and Best American Roots Performance.
In the last few years, she released In These Silent Days and in-between raising two daughters with her wife Catherine, she has produced albums for Tanya Tucker and Lucius, and she’s part of the distaff super group, The Highwaywomen. She also coaxed Joni Mitchell back onstage, performing with the singer-songwriter doyenne along with a cadre of Joni acolytes. Mid-way through 2025, she and Elton collaborated as a duo, writing and recording Who Believes In Angels. Although it’s earned critical acclaim, monster sales (it hit the Top 10 on Billboard’s Top Rock Albums and Top Rock & Alternative Album charts, which sound suspiciously like the same chart), and received a Grammy nomination for Traditional Pop Vocal Album. Despite the accolades, a certain Olive-American Bitch Goddess, deemed the album underwhelming. Now, she is back with her eighth record, Returning To Myself.
The opening three songs cover a lot of ground. The aforementioned title-track quietly kicks things into gear. Braided acoustic guitar licks dip and sway across muted pedal steel, spiky electric riffs and subdued synthesizers. Brandi adopts a Joni-fied croon that peels and trills, as slightly cryptic lyrics seem to box up her time with Joni and return to her life and career: “There’s no honor in the pilgrimage, until the soul returns, to hold another’s hand and then, and only then it learns that life is like a stone, only skipping for a time, oh it never really holds its own, it will never see the other side.” A flange-y electric guitar solo ascends on the break, and the song’s final verse speaks directly to her family: “And I was born to love you, I love you and you and you, oh returning to myself is such a lonely thing to do, returning to myself is just returning me to you, and that’s the only thing I want to do.”
Something of a power ballad (but not in an icky, bombastic Styx/Foreigner style), “Human” is anchored by a thunky beat and expansive piano. Part cautionary tale, part carpe diem, the lyrics strike a delicate balance between activism and apathy. As the arrangement gathers steam, adding plush Wurlitzer, organ, wily bass, stentorian brass, stacks of guitars and synth, Brandi unleashes her protean vocals and veers into Bonnie Tyler territory on the electrifying chorus: “And we’re only human, I don’t need to see how it ends, to tell you that we’ll never be here again, Babe, we’re only human, I just want to feel my face in the sun, I never really wanted to hurt anyone, forever only means we had a good run, we don’t need to know right now, it’s hard enough to be human, we don’t need to know right now, it’s hard enough to be human.”
“A Woman Oversees,” finds Brandi once again shifting course. Twinkly Rhodes piano brushes up against shivery synths, angular bass, whispery acoustic guitars and a barely-there beat. Her phrasing is suitably Joni-esque as lyrics attempt to parse an enigma: “One day I went overseas with a woman I know too deep, I live and breathe to hold her in, I love to hear her speak, We went to people’s parties and haunted her old town, we rambled into restaurants, tracking her old friends down.” Gospel-inflected call-and-response is achieved when Brandi double and triples her own vocals across the meandering melody. By the song’s denouement, the mystery remains: “When you’re this far north of forty, the growing’s up to you, even if you grow away from me, and I’d die to watch you bloom, I opened my eyes one at a time, when I went overseas with a woman no one really knows, but I live to hear her speak.”
The best songs here land smack in the middle of the record. “Anniversary” could sandwich nicely between America’s “Sister Golden Hair” and Olivia Newton John’s “Have You Never Been Mellow” on any early ‘70s AM radio station playlist. Sun-dappled acoustic guitars connect with fluid Mellotron, upright piano, slivery synths and a swooning string section. Stream-of-conscious lyrics seem to pack up the past: “Go ahead and pine for the pageantry of youth, claim it and dream it, all the pretty girls do, I could learn not to care, lose some weight, change my hair, what a waste of the things I’ve been through,” but ultimately, they are unable to let go: “…I feel smug when it’s powerful, when it’s wordless, mechanical, forceful when it’s angry and sad when it’s gone, sad when it’s gone.” Somehow, the gossamer arrangement takes the sting out of the lyrical equivocation.
Co-producer Aaron Dessner is completely responsible for the melody for “A War With Time,” Brandi provided the lyrics. The song is powered by rippling guitars, Pointillist piano, buoyant bass, variegated synths and a percolating beat. The conversational opening verse folds into the cosmic exhale of a chorus that seems mired in ambivalence: “I’m living a war with time, I could still reach out and touch you and I wish I didn’t know the things I know, I’m standing in an open door, none of it was overrated and I’m never gonna want to let you go, but I want you to go, don’t even ask me, just go.” The beat kicks into a martial cadence, echoing the graceful arc of Bruce Hornsby’s breakout single, “That’s Just The Way It Is,” and adds a bit of urgency.
This record seems to find Brandi still reeling from her Joni experience of those last few years. Both the title cut and “A Woman Oversees” are rife with Joni-isms, but the song that has her most explicitly under her spell is (surprise!) “Joni.” A tart homage to the prickly Goddess of song, the lyrics are peppered with inside jokes. The arrangement manages to emulate Joni’s idiosyncratic time signatures, pastoral Jaco bass lines, her glorious chords of inquiry, on down to a swirly sax solo from Mark Isham that echoes the late Wayne Shorter’s honeyed tone. The affectionate lyrics are the album’s best, perhaps because they’re rooted in existential experience: “I knew a wild woman, she threw a party on her grave, she went there tapping her cane and drinking champagne, she’s a wild woman and she makes me feel so tame, I can take her in a foot race, but I can’t take her anywhere, she laughs at all the pop stars and doesn’t even care if they her, she’s a game of solitaire.” The fluttery instrumentation perfectly cocoons the knowing chorus: “Tell ‘em that story one more time Joan, I won’t look away, let me leave you in laughter, let me go get you a plate, when I tell you ‘I love you,’ and you tell me ‘okay,’ I know you believe me, and that’s love in your way.”
“Church & State” is the album’s most ambitious number. Brandi takes a gamble and it truly pays off. Slashing guitars ride roughshod atop insistent Mellotron, kinetic piano, synths and shaker, urgent bass and a driving back-beat. Timely and topical, lyrics intersect the personal and political. Spurred by the 2024 Presidential election, it’s a call to action that even quotes Thomas Jefferson and the First Amendment: “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between Church and State,” The instrumentation and arrangement simply rages, drilling down on the Founding Fathers’ assertion that this country isn’t an Autocracy or a Theocracy, but a Democracy. Guitars sting and stutter, uncoiling jaggy riffs and spiky licks. To characterize this sonic maelstrom as U2-y is an understatement. It’s very heart beats with a “Bullet The Blue Sky” exigency.
Other interesting tracks include “No One Knows Us,” which cloaks lyrics that reach out to a troubled friend: “Hey, can you get out of bed today, do you need anything from me, I’m anywhere, anywhere I need to be, even I had a dream last night, we were squatters in fight or flight, bonfires and Christmas lights, I miss those nights too,” in an arrangement that shapeshifts from intimate and acoustic to an anthemic Rocker.
“You Without Me” was one of the bright spots on the album Brandi did with Elton. The spare arrangement into a low-key groove that’s usually reserved for artists like Phoebe Bridgers or Elliott Smith. Jittery keys are matched by thrumming bass lines and quicksilver guitars. The lyrics pin-point that moment when a child begins to assert some independence and voice their own opinions: “As predictable as time and age, but comforting in some straight way, time makes every one of us an absolute cliché, but when I met you face-to-face, none of it was true, so who am I if I’m not you?/There you are, my morning star, I wondered when you’d show, give me just a quick thumbs-up, a wink before you go, I never heard that voice before today, I remind myself to breathe, I’m ever just a thought away, if you ever need me, you’re gonna live a lot of life, you’re gonna see a lot of years, God willing, just you without me.”
The record closes with the restless farewell of “A Long Goodbye.” Hushed, and lush instrumentation weds rippling guitars, and a wash of synthesizers to a click-clack beat. Heartfelt lyrics seem to address long-lost friends and former paramours: “What I wouldn’t give to hold you in those days and still, what if we hadn’t broken up over Jagged Little Pill, we don’t curse the miles of age that it takes to see this through, yeah, I probably had to lose those years, to be found by you I know I had to lose my way, to be found by you.” There’s even a sly reference to her friends and mentors, the indigo girls as she says so long: “Let the wind blow all night, it’s only life after all, it’s a blink of an eye, it’s a long goodbye, it’s a long goodbye, it’s a long goodbye.” It’s a poignant finish to a potent record.
Brandi co-produced the record, along with Andrew Watt, Aaron Dessner and Justin Vernon (a.k.a. Bon Iver). Along with Phil and Tim Hanseroth, she surrounded herself with a wolfpack of pickers and players included former and forever Red Hot Chili Peppers Josh Klinghoffer and Chad Smith, as well as SistaStrings, ex-New Bohemian Matt Chamberlin, David Mackay, Stewart Cole and Rob Moose. Superstar assists were courtesy Justin Vernon, Aaron Dessner, Andrew Watt, Blake Mills, Jazz legend Mark Isham and Sir Elton John.
Returning To Myself feels deeply personal and offers up an intriguing musical mosaic, but at the same time, it’s a bit of a hodge-podge. Joni Mitchell’s influence casts a huge shadow, as Brandi attempts to reclaim her voice. This one is interesting and likable, and it takes some chances. But ultimately, it just misses the mark.
