Brandi Carlile: Simple Authenticity (INTERVIEW)

It would be easy to be cynical about Brandi Carlile. Her story reads like a PR director’s dream – a country girl from Seattle grows up singing just like her mother, fed on Johnny Cash and Patsy Cline and eventually finding inspiration in Jeff Buckley and Radiohead. She’s photogenic, just twenty-three, and her radio-friendly songs have turned up on soundtracks for “Veronica Mars” and “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.” Just for good measure, the Boy Scout shirt she wears on the cover of her eponymous debut album makes her look a little punk.

But spend a little time with that voice, and the cynicism starts to fade. Yes, her debt to Messrs. Buckley and Yorke is obvious, but so is her passion. She can soar with bravado one moment and break with vulnerability the next, singing with an emotional resonance that simply can’t be faked. And all without losing her natural twang. Not that she’s always been happy with her sound.

“I’ve been trying to drop that twang since I was ten,” she says, catching a quick bite after soundcheck at Boston’s Opera House. “I’ve learned to embrace it.”

It’s that voice that has lead her to the brink of big time break-out success. Columbia signed her out from under several other labels and released her eponymous debut last year. Now she’s headlining bigger clubs around the country and opening up for acts like Jamie Cullum, whom she’s supporting at the Opera House, and Train. Carlile just bought a new home in Maple Valley near where she grew up, a half an hour from Seattle. She and the band start work on a new album this summer, and she says Columbia has given her free reign to choose a producer.

“They’ve been so overwhelmingly supportive of such, like, a working act, you know?” she says of Columbia. “We don’t sell millions of records and we don’t sell thousands of seats but they still treat us like we’re John Mayer. They still treat us like we’re just as important as the people that are. I don’t think that can be said for many other labels, if any.”

When asked about her rapid rise, Carlile speaks with the quiet confidence of someone who has been preparing their whole life to do precisely that. “I wasn’t necessarily surprised,” she says. “I knew that we would be able to establish a fanbase as soon as we had the financial means to go and get one. But it costs so much to drive across the country unsigned.”

Finding A Voice

Singing came naturally to Carlile. She used to sing to herself when she was alone as a child, and started gigging with her country singer mother when she was eight. She recorded her first demo, called “Room for Me,” when she was fifteen, singing harmonies with her brother. “It was just something I did, like playing Nintendo or building a fort, something simple that you do,” she says. “It was never work. When I was practicing, it was just what I wanted to do.”

She moved quickly from singer to singer, drawing inspiration from Patsy Cline and Johnny Cash before moving on to Elton John and Freddy Mercury of Queen before finding Radiohead and U2. Each stuck with her, and she says she can go song by song in her repertoire and hear who influenced each.

“I can really tell I was thinking about Thom Yorke or Freddy Mercury or when I was listening to Ray Lamontagne all the time,” she says. “I never consciously try and sound like an artist, but there are so many of them whose influence is so strong sometimes it’s hard not to.”

By the end of the nineties, she was taking any gig she could, trying to learn from every performance. She would busk at Seattle’s Pike’s Place Market, trying to figure out what made people stop and listen. “It’s hard to be a girl with an acoustic guitar,” she says. “I don’t care what anybody says. It’s difficult. You get onstage with your acoustic guitar and you’re just basically – it screams ‘go on with your conversation and your dinner.’”

Carlile had worked her way up in the local scene by the late nineties, playing the Lilith Fair’s local stage three times. But there was still something missing. Her epiphany came at the ROCKRGRL Music Conference in 2000. “The whole conference was full of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of girls with guitars who all sounded really similar to me and I sounded similar to them, and we were all playing covers and playing bars and it was just really hard to stand out,” she says.

Playing her own music was part of the solution, but she knew it was her voice that would connect with an audience. “I knew I had to start really singing and pouring from my soul and not like, try to sing like other people, sing other people’s songs,” she says. “Because it was a tired act at that time, especially in the wake of the Lilith Fair.”

So what separates Carlile from the throng of girls with guitars she saw in 2000? “I think that I don’t do anything different,” she says. “I think that it’s the same thing but I just stopped worrying so much about appearing delicate.”

On Her Way

After a lifetime of practice, things began to fall into place quickly for Carlile three years ago. That’s when she started working with the Twins, guitarist Tim Hanseroth and bassist Phil Hanseroth. The trio gelled quickly onstage and off, sharing playing and songwriting duties. They had only been working together a year and a half when Rick Rubin started showing an interest. Columbia acted quickly after seeing her open for James Taylor in 2004, calling her manager and signing her out from under any other potential suitors. “In the wake of one label being interested, then several labels were interested, then we did this show with James Taylor in L.A., and the Columbia guys were there and they made us an offer,” she says.

Carlile has been through the industry gamut or radio and in-store appearances and constant touring, but the shine hasn’t worn off yet. As she looks out at the ornate red and gold features of the Opera House glowing in the reflection of the stage lights, there is a touch of wonder in her voice. “This is officially the coolest place we’ve ever, ever, ever played,” she says.

Appropriately, she and the band launch into a cell-heavy “What Can I Say.” Her set is tight and short, but she manages to show some range. Hidden amongst the note-perfect renditions from the album like “Follow” and “Closer to You” is “Late Morning Lullaby,” a ballad with a seventies AM country vibe and a heartfelt version of Willie Nelson’s “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.”

She closes with a solo version of “Hallelujah,” Leonard Cohen by way of Jeff Buckley. It’s a moment both calculated and daring, taking on a legendary songwriter and a legendary voice at once, but the gesture is mostly lost on the teeny boppers and their parents there to see Cullum. A cell phone rings, and moments later, Carlile’s voice cracks as it rises to a falsetto section of the tune.

Carlile laughs and smiles shyly. “One more time,” she says. If the moment is broken, Carlile doesn’t notice. She is back into the falsetto with confidence, eyes shut, singing as if no one else were in the room.

 

 

 

 

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