Brandi Carlile: women’s prisons, feminism and country music

Singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile thrives in situations others might call ‘high pressure’.

Brandi Carlile. Picture: Danny Clinch

Wearing a grey coat and a red beanie, Brandi Carlile carries an acoustic guitar into a prison for women near her home in Seattle, Washington.

On the way in, the black case is opened and the acoustic instrument inside is inspected on a couple of occasions by security staff keen to ensure she’s not trying to smuggle in anything other than music, stories and a rare spot of Christmas cheer for a captive ­audience.

It’s near the end of 2017 when the singer-songwriter elects to spend a couple of hours behind bars at the Washington Correction Centre For Women. There, just as she’s done each Christmas for a decade or so, she speaks with and performs for people society tends to either condemn, forget about, or depersonalise within a larger crowd of offenders.

At the time, Carlile had released five albums and steadily built an international audience around her songwriting, which includes elements of folk, country and rock all wrapped in her remarkably gymnastic vocal ability. For her, a regular concert involves tickets, allocated seats, beautification, amplification and the lights going down just before she makes her way to the stage.

In prison, none of that is true: her soundcheck involves sitting atop a cafeteria table pushed against a wall and tuning her instrument before running through a brief warm-up routine. This is no place for a rowdy Folsom Prison Blues, either, although Carlile and her band have been known to run through a rocking rendition of the Johnny Cash classic.

Instead, a few dozen women in uniforms file into the brightly lit room and politely take a seat wherever they’re most comfortable, with the front row and back row both equally prized.

As a repeat visitor to an impromptu musical venue where guitar chords and vocal melodies are rarely heard, Carlile continues to be fascinated by the idea that the inside of a prison is one of the most free places she can be as an artist. For her, it’s a place to sing about universal issues of faith, doubt, forgiveness, addiction and reconciliation: important, constant themes that play on the minds of women with nothing but time on their hands.

Carlile chooses this occasion to air an unreleased song from her forthcoming sixth album. “I have a little three-year old daughter – any of you guys got kids?” she asks, and after being met with a few nods, she continues. “Absolute monsters. I’ve got another one on the way, Elijah – back there in my wife’s belly,” she says, pointing to the woman sitting at the rear of the room.

“I always thought that it’d be really easy for me to be a mum, and I’d know exactly what to do – but I didn’t know anything what to do,” the singer says. “So I thought to myself, I’m going to write a song that’s the truth about that, instead of all the really beautiful, normal things about motherhood. I’m going to write a song about how it’s complicated.”

“This song is called The Mother,” she says, before finger-picking her guitar strings and singing:

Welcome to the end of being alone inside your mind

You’re tethered to another and you’re worried all the time

You always knew the melody

But you never heard it rhyme …

When asked about this performance, Carlile tells Review: “I have to really be careful with my own emotions and helping myself understand, while I’m doing that [song] that it can’t be about me and the way I feel: I have to be in a position of service while I’m there, and to not get too choked up in imagining myself in that situation. Because it’s easy to do – to see yourself behind a wall and not being allowed to be with your children, and to cuddle your children.”

She’s fair and she is quiet, Lord, she doesn’t look like me

She made me love the morning, she’s a holiday at sea

The New York streets are as busy as they always used to be

But I am the mother of Evangeline …

Already a brutally honest, funny and moving account of first-time parenthood, The Mother takes on an additional emotional weight in that locale. Yet part of what attracted Carlile to these regular Christmas performances – which she found her way into through her Looking Out Foundation, which funds causes and organisations that often go unnoticed — was the intriguing notion of walking into a place and being with people who were not allowed to put on a veneer of any kind.

Of the differences between those performances and her regular audience, she says, “They’re night and day – there’s no amplification and I can’t put on any makeup or wear fancy clothes. I basically sit on the cafeteria table with my guitar and take requests, and have conversations. It’s much more of a visit than anything – but it’s important to me, and I think on some level it’s important to the women that are incarcerated, too.”

Walking into that environment, guitar case in hand, does she feel like a different sort of musician than the one who gets dressed up to sing at a headline show in a theatre – or in a crowded Madison Square Garden in New York City, as she did for the first time in September last year?

“I feel much more like myself: so much more like a mother and a friend, and a person that realises that I’m one very small step away from being exactly where they are,” Carlile replies. “We all are one bad decision – one long night, one complicated misunderstanding – away. There’s nothing about many of those people that makes them extraordinary, to the rest of us who aren’t incarcerated. I like to just be on their level.”

If there’s one similarity between a ticketed concert and her prison performances, it’s the way they both tend to end: with the audience on its feet, smiling and applauding.

It’s just that, for the women inside, the fact this talented musician bothered to make the effort to be there is rare and unforgettable. By way of thanks, the prisoners in Washington present her with a Christmas wreath. The beaming singer accepts the festive gift, and announces her plans to proudly display it from her front door – all the way through to April.

When Review connects with Carlile in mid-February, she’s at home in Seattle between touring commitments, including an upcoming Australian visit in April. Since it’s almost two years to the day since the release of her sixth studio album, By the Way, I Forgive You, how does she reflect on that work?

“I look back on that process with a lot of affection and humility,” she replies. “It was all about dismantling everything I thought I knew, and learning again – and realising that that’s going to be a process I repeat throughout my life many times. Not only should I be OK with that, but that’s a fantastic way to grow into yourself.”

In time, album No 6 would see the singer-songwriter and her long-time band – twins Tim and Phil Hanseroth on guitar and bass, respectively – cresting a fresh wave of success and adulation topped by three wins from six nominations at the 2019 Grammy Awards, including best Americana album, best American roots song and best American roots performance.

At the Grammys ceremony in Los Angeles in February last year, Carlile’s towering performance of lead single The Joke – which ends with an extraordinary vocal flourish and a swelling string section – was easily among the night’s highlights.

With its themes of self-belief and of overcoming adversity to succeed, Carlile is thrilled that The Joke has become a unifying anthem, as well as a climactic, phones-aloft singalong moment in concert.

“That song’s a real bitch to sing: you’re always dreading the last note, from the moment you start that song through to the time you finish it,” she says with a laugh. “But of any of them, it’s the one that I love the most. It means a lot to me, that song, and I love that people are reacting to it. I love singing it every night, and I’ll never get tired of singing it – just like The Story,” she says, referring to the title track to her second album, released in 2007.

There’s a line in The Mother that proved prophetic: “I’ll never hit the big time without you,” she sang to Evangeline, yet everything that came after the album’s release has been a shock of the most welcome kind. “I was completely surprised by the response that it’s received. I mean, I was set in my ways, of the way that my career plays itself out in these cycles. I didn’t ever think it would lead to where it’s at – not at 38, after all those years on the road.”

That sort of mid-career surge can throw recording artists for a loop as they attempt to analyse why one collection of songs caught fire while another barely smouldered. Does the success of an album like that prompt her to question herself as a songwriter?

“Yeah, it does, actually – but not in a bad way,” she says. “Because a person can’t do what I did on By the Way, I Forgive You the whole time, because the effect wears off.”

After a brief pause, she continues: “You know, it’s interesting: I am nowhere f..king near Joni Mitchell, but I can relate to this particular sentiment. When she writes about the events that led her to [1971 album] Blue, she mentioned that her work up until to that point was observational; anecdotal, even. She was noticing things and writing about it; imagining things and writing about it; dreaming about things and writing about it. But never experiencing feeling things, and then writing very directly about it, in a first-person, confessional way.

“And when she did that, she did it basically two more times – and then went back to writing from an observational sense. Maybe there really are only a couple of enormous revelations in the human life, you know? And during those times, you can find a way to express it; hopefully, it resonates. But when you’re not in those moments in life, you can’t force that art.

“Maybe there’s an adolescent moment, maybe there’s a midlife moment – and then maybe there’s a moment where you reach a place of wisdom much later in your life,” she says. “And maybe those are the times that whatever art you create really reflects that. But every album can’t be like [that], or you’d start forcing it. And so that kind of confessional, awkward work that is By the Way, I Forgive You – it’s still happening in me right now. And I have really no idea when it’ll stop, but I think I have another album like that up my sleeve, and then there’ll probably be a change of some kind.”

The chance to speak with an artist as confident and articulate as Carlile offers many fascinating conversational rabbit holes well worth burrowing down but for constraints of time and space. For instance, try this: she has just returned from hosting her second annual Girls Just Wanna weekend in Mexico, where she performed for superfans at a beachside resort with artists such as Sheryl Crow and Patty Griffin. “It was a really crazy, amazing, four-day party,” she says. “Everybody had a really good time, nobody got hurt, and we got a bunch of women in one place to help prove to folks back here at home, in my country, that women can sell tickets headlining festivals.”

Or this: with fellow US singer-songwriter friends Maren Morris, Natalie Hemby and Amanda Shires, Carlile is a member of a country group named The Highwomen, which released its debut album in September. “I love the album, and when it makes sense for the four of us girls to get together and sing sometimes, we’ll do it,” she says of the band, whose name is a play on the Highwaymen, the 1980s-era supergroup that featured Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson.

Or this: remarkably, Carlile has only recently returned to the world of the verbal, having been put on six weeks’ complete vocal rest after being diagnosed with a vocal cord haemorrhage in the lead-up to Christmas.

“It was a total f..king nightmare,” she says. “I hated it. I could kind of whisper and stuff, but there were some moments when I couldn’t entertain people, and it made me really feel like I was having an identity crisis. I have the gift of gab and, when I couldn’t talk, I just didn’t know who the hell I was.”

Or lastly – and perhaps most impressively – this: her earlier mention of Joni Mitchell was no passing reference point but a serious artistic kinship, if not outright obsession. In October, at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, Carlile performed Mitchell’s Blue album in its entirety for the singer-songwriter’s 75th birthday, garnering rave reviews from all and sundry – including Mitchell herself, who was so impressed she asked Carlile to do it again soon at Carnegie Hall, as well as in Mitchell’s homeland, Canada.

“It gave me a huge challenge,” she says of that tribute concert. “It made me realise I’ve got enormous room and space for growth. It challenged me as an entertainer, because it gave my confidence a throttling, knowing I was going to have to sing that in front of Joni, who’s notoriously critical and doesn’t suffer fools. There were many, many other [musical] heroes in the audience. I felt very vulnerable, and I did it anyway – so I walked away from that feeling like I could do anything.”

On that night in Los Angeles last year, Carlile’s senses were so attuned to the moment that the distance between past, present and future shrunk to zero.

Rather than waiting until afterwards to begin dissecting whether or not she’d done a good job with a frighteningly tough assignment, the singer-songwriter was empowered to discover that halfway through Blue, a little voice in her head told her that she was doing great. It was during her performance of the title track that Carlile looked out into the audience, saw Joni Mitchell smiling through the dark, and knew that she was arriving.

Brandi Carlile performs in Melbourne (April 6), Sydney (April 8) and at Byron Bay Bluesfest (April 10).