Brandi Carlile[1]‘s homecoming is here. The musician will release her eighth studio album Returning to Myself, her first solo LP in four years, on Oct. 24.
“I’m not my favorite person to spend my time with,” Carlile said in a statement about the LP. “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.” Still, the record’s title track, out now with an accompanying music video directed by Floria Sigismondi, settles into an expanse of solitude.
Carlile created Returning to Myself with Andrew Watt, Aaron Dessner, and Justin Vernon. Her bandmates Phil and Tim Hanseroth, SistaStrings, Josh Klinghoffer, Chad Smith, Matt Chamberlain, Dave Mackay, Rob Moose, Blake Mills, Mark Isham, and Stewart Cole also contributed to the record. The tight-knit crew of collaborators speak to the lessons the album taught Carlile about what it means to be alone.
“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,” she said. “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.”
She added: “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.”
Returning to Myself contains 10 songs and follows 2021’s In These Silent Days and Who Believes in Angels,[2] the collaborative record Carlile released with Elton John earlier this year.
Returning to Myself Track List
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”
References
- ^ Brandi Carlile (www.rollingstone.com)
- ^ Who Believes in Angels, (www.rollingstone.com)