After high-profile team-ups with Joni Mitchell and Elton John, Brandi Carlile is going back to her own music on the new album Returning to Myself, which will be released Oct. 24 by Interscope/Lost Highway. The title track is out now, accompanied by a video from director Floria Sigismondi.
Returning to Myself was produced by Carlile along with The National’s Aaron Dessner, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and Andrew Watt. Among the musicians lending a hand throughout are her longtime bandmates Phil and Tim Hanseroth (also known as “the Twins”), SistaStrings, Josh Klinghoffer, Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith, Matt Chamberlain, Dave Mackay, Rob Moose, Blake Mills, Mark Isham and Stewart Cole.
“It took a lot of steady souls to free me into myself on this project, including the Twins and my band,” Carlile says on Instagram. “What a wonderful thing to be carried and yet held up so high.”
Ruminating on the album’s title, Carlile shares, “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. 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,” she continues. “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,” she concludes. “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.”
Here is the track list for Returning to Myself:
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
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