Brandi Carlile is the latest artist to enlist the National's Aaron Dessner and Bon Iver's Justin Vernon in the studio. Along with returning collaborator Andrew Watt and Carlile herself, Dessner and Vernon coproduced the singer-songwriter's upcoming album Returning To Myself. It arrives in October and its lead single, which is also the title track, is out now.
Carlile has a lot to say about the new album, which follows up her February collab album with Elton John. She writes in a press release:
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. 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.
Ex-Red Hot Chili Pepper Josh Klinghoffer and current Red Hot Chili Pepper Chad Smith play on the album, along with Blake Mills, Matt Chamberlain, Dave Mackay, Rob Moose, Mark Isham, and Stewart Cole. Watch the "Returning To Myself" video below.
TRACKLSIT:
01 "Returning To Myself"
02 "Human"
03 "A Woman Oversees"
04 "A War With Time"
05 "Anniversary"
06 "Church & State"
07 "Joni"
08 "You Without Me"
09 "No One Knows Us"
10 "A Long Goodbye"
Returning To Myself is out 10/24 on Interscope/Lost Highway.
