Exclusive: Brandi Carlile Talks Songwriting, Perspective, and New Album

For years now, Zane Lowe has been one of the standards in music journalism and interviews. And in his latest conversation for Apple Music, Lowe goes in-depth with Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter, Brandi Carlile, ahead of her new LP, In These Silent Days, out Friday (October 1).

American Songwriter sharing a special exclusive clip from the interview, which airs in full today (September 29) at 10 am PST/1 pm EST on Apple Music 1. In the clip, Carlile talks about evolving as a songwriter and, particularly so, due to writing her recent memoir, Broken Horses, which came out in April of this year.

Composing the memoir, Carlile says, gave her great fodder for her songwriting and reminded her of plenty of personal stories, which she drew from and used to create the forthcoming LP.

Sitting by a campfire with Lowe, Carlile says, “Anybody that has the time or the tenacity or any hankering for self-exploration at all, that could sit down and write their story, to chronologically sort of view your life from beginning to end, starting from an early event and trying to smell things and taste things and remember fragments of your experience, and it’s a mining of yourself that you do. I try not to self indulge to the point of ridiculousness, but writing that book gave me this really linear understanding of, ‘Here’s how I started and here’s how I am, and these are the things in between that made it so,’ and it was such clarity. It was fodder for days for a new album.”

For her previous records, like, By the Way, I Forgive You (2018), Carlile says, she would write songs but, at the time, she would only half-know what she’d made. It wasn’t until she went out on the road, played the new tunes, and bounced them off an audience that she could know their meanings. But, Carlile notes, upon writing the new book she could “mine” herself for the songs, instead of knowing their meanings only in retrospect.

She says, “I would write songs and finish these songs, record these songs, and be playing them on the road before I’d realized what I’d written the song about. And it was so clear, as soon as I saw into this snow globe, I realized, ‘Oh, well, yeah, of course.’ But this was the first time, I think because I’d written the book, that I knew what I was writing the songs about while I was writing them. And so, I had so much more to pull from, so much more sensory material, than this abstract half-truth.”

Catch the full episode with Brandi Carlile today (Sept. 29) at 10 am PST / 1 pm EST on Apple Music 1 here.

Check out the new song from Carlile’s new record below.

And Carlile performing with Pearl Jam over the weekend here.

Photos courtesy Apple Music