‘Joni Mitchell is wild. She’ll drink you under the table’

When Brandi Carlile was 12 years old, living in a mobile home in an isolated community 50 miles outside of Seattle, she begged her parents for a piano.

He had fallen in love with his mother’s Elton John albums and wanted to play with them.

But when he took his tiny Casio keyboard out of the Toys R Us box, he had to face an uncomfortable truth.

“I wasn’t talented enough,” he laughs.

Instead, he turned on Bruce Springsteen’s Streets Of Philadelphia, turned the keyboard’s “synth strings” setting, and pressed two keys.

“Hold them throughout the poem,” he recalls. “Anyone can do this, but this is the foundation of my career.”

Fast forward 32 years and Elton John is one of his best friends. In January, they released a collaborative album, Who Believes In Angels, which topped the UK charts (Carlile significantly contributed more than two notes).

The musician was also responsible for Joni Mitchell’s musical rehabilitation, enabling the 81-year-old to return to the stage following her fatal brain haemorrhage.

And she’s spent the last six years duetting with some of pop’s biggest stars, from Miley Cyrus to Noah Kahan, while curating Mexico’s annual Girls Just Wanna festival.

All of these opportunities stemmed from a single performance at the 2019 Grammys, where Carlile delivered a chilling version of The Joke, an anthemic ballad for the oppressed.

“I had played this song hundreds of times, but I could never quite get to that last note,” he admits now.

“But I really wanted to do it right at the Grammys. So I practiced and practiced and practiced for days leading up to the show. And when I hit the mark, I could barely finish the song. I wanted to jump up and down.”

He wasn’t the only one. Jaws dropped. Eyes bulged. A star was born.

Before she even left the stage, Carlile’s phone was blowing up with messages from people “so famous I can’t understand it.”

“Suddenly a river of opportunity flowed into my life, and I didn’t know how long it would last, so I said yes to everything,” he recalls.

Looking back, he thinks that his eagerness to seize these opportunities was a reaction to his childhood.

Growing up in rural America, Carlile knew he was gay but had never “met” another gay person in his life.

His sexuality changed his relationship with his mother.

“Even though he thought he would have any kind of relationship with me, he couldn’t,” Carlile says.

“I didn’t want to wear makeup or learn how to shave my legs or have long hair, and he was like, ‘What am I going to do with this kid?’ he asked.

They eventually bonded over music; They even staged a sort of unofficial tribute to mother-daughter group The Judds.

But even after Carlile married and had two children with British charity executive Catherine Shepherd, the sense of otherness remained. So when opportunity came knocking, he felt compelled to chase it.

“I think it could be the homosexuality thing, it could be that kind of coyote thing, something like, ‘Consider the reward. You’re included now, you might not be included tomorrow. Accept everything, do anything, achieve, assimilate,'” he says.

Then, as suddenly as it had come, the instinct disappeared.

Last October, he flew from a show with Joni Mitchell to a recording session with Aaron Dessner, co-founder of the rock band The National and a key collaborator of Taylor Swift.

When he landed in New York, he was hungover and overwhelmed with emotions. Instinctively, he knew that the comeback concerts he and Joni had planned had achieved their goal.

“I couldn’t bear the thought of sitting next to him and not listening to Both Sides Now again,” he says. “I had the best seat in the house.”

Dessner showed Carlile a few pieces he was working on and then left him to work in his barn. Tired, he went upstairs, got into bed, and wrote a poem that reflected his mood.

“It’s such a lonely thing to come back to myself / But it’s the only thing to do.”

After chasing opportunities for six years, it was time to turn inward.

“I knew I was at the end of something,” he says, adding: “Yes, the phone may stop now, but I don’t want to miss my children’s childhood.”

The poem became the title track and north star of his new album, which grapples with the passage of time and the subtlety of human connection.

When Dessner began playing atmospheric synth chords in the studio, he unlocked memories of his first musical experiments on the Casio keyboard.

“I felt like I was 13 or 14 again, and it made me write things differently,” he says. “I had a huge lump in my throat the whole time. I was embarrassed to sing the songs in front of everyone because I thought I was going to cry, and I did.”

The audience might need a box of tissues, too.

When Carlile played Without Me at Glastonbury this summer, there were a few misty eyes as people digested the story of a parent coming to terms with her child’s independence.

“I started seeing those moments, and it breaks my soul,” says the singer, whose eldest daughter, Evangeline, is 11. “But you’re also driven by pride.”

His daughters also inspired one of the angrier songs on the record. Church and State oppose the growing influence of conservative religious ideology on US politics.

The video, recorded live on election night in 2024, addresses Carlile’s fear that the Supreme Court could overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 case that recognized same-sex marriage.

This came to light after a dinner conversation in which Evangeline suggested that the family could take Carlile’s boat and “go to Canada” if same-sex marriage was banned.

“I don’t want to go to Canada,” the youngest, Elijah, protested.

“And Evangeline immediately snapped and said: ‘Elijah, it’s better than having a mother or no mother.’

“I was so embarrassed that I couldn’t explain it better. They thought they would be orphaned if something like this happened.

“Then I became enraged that something so archaic and antiquated could even be a possibility in the country I lived in, let alone be on the legal horizon.”

Carlile says the album’s other guiding light was Mitchell, whose strict quality control was “the reason I wrote a lot less songs.”

He pays a loving yet unabashed tribute to the singer with the song simply titled Joni.

“Doesn’t suffer fools, doesn’t make tea and doesn’t bandage bruised egos,” sings Carlile over a carefully picked guitar.

“She’s a wild woman,” the star laughs. “He’s 83 years old and he’ll drink you under the table.

“He loves Cadillac margaritas and plain Black Jack. He’s unpredictable, untamable, unknowable at times, and that’s amazing.”

It was probably nerve-wracking to have Mitchell play the song?

“Oh, I was shaking,” he laughs. “She was sitting at her desk in her bedroom, wearing butterfly clips in her hair like Joni Mitchell did, and was frowning and listening to the song, not reacting at all.

“But after the last chorus, a big smile spread across his face. Then, after making me wait a minute, he nodded and said, ‘This is great.'”

But one lyric caused some friction.

“When I tell you I love you, you tell me ‘Okay’… That’s your kind of love.“

“When you hear you call me a jerk!” Carlile laughs, “because she knew exactly what I meant, and you’re not supposed to understand Joni Mitchell. She doesn’t want to be understood.”

As you might expect, Carlile is full of similarly starry anecdotes.

He remembers seeing Paul McCartney at the side of the stage on the Glastonbury set (“that was the top five moments”); and spills the beans on Dolly Parton’s tattoos (“I haven’t seen it, but I know people who have. It can be really tough and it can curse.”)

So what would this lonely kid, warming his hands around the wood stove and struggling to play Elton John songs, think about his rise to the highest echelons of music?

“I have more love for that girl now than I ever did back then,” he reflects.

“Would love to know that it happened and that you made it. Because I’ve gone beyond what I expected it to be and I’m not sure what to do with it.”

The first draft of his answer, Returning to Myself, shows that the possibilities are endless.

With new confidence and a new direction, Carlile enters uncharted territory: herself.