Of course, Brandi Carlile needs to get back to herself. She’s been busy since her last solo album, 2021’s masterpiece In These Silent Days. Carlile has produced albums, hosted festivals, helped revitalize Joni Mitchell’s career, collaborated with Elton John, and more. In her latest record, Returning to Myself, she immediately proposes the value of taking time to re-center. For Carlile, though, that doesn’t mean the typical sorts of “finding yourself” or “self-care”; it involves quite a bit of looking around and closely examining both relationships and the state of the world.
The opening title track explains the endeavor. Looking inward begins with big theological questions: “Is there some freewheeling watcher / Shooting marbles in the sky?” she sings to open the proceedings. From there, she questions the whole process she’s undertaking. Turning inward and staying there, she determines, would be “easy”, but the point is to rebuild yourself to turn back outward and reconnect. Only that stance allows her to “be the gospel without words”. Ultimately, she knows, “returning to myself is just returning me to you”, which is the point of it.
Even the journey, as far as the album goes, can’t be done solo, and Brandi Carlile, along with her usual partners Phil and Tim Hanserot, brings in a strong set of collaborators, including producers Aaron Dessner, Andrew Watt, and Justin Vernon. Returning to Myself, in particular, like the intersection of Dessner and Watt’s sensibilities, with some bright indie-folk sounds from Dessner and the broader sensibilities of Watt, with whom Carlile collaborated on her Elton John project, “Who Believes in Angels?“
The sound suits her well, allowing her to explore new spaces (her steady vision and Dessner’s stubbornness yielding success). She has spoken of Emmylou Harris‘s Wrecking Ball being a guide for this album, but the sound veers more toward 1970s singer-songwriters like Carole King, without ever straying too far from genre strictures.
Returning to Myself mostly stays subdued, fitting for the material, but Carlile does rock out, most notably on the explicitly U2-inspired “Church & State”. It’s also the most political track, even including a reading from Thomas Jefferson’s famous letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, which calls for a “wall of separation between Church and State”. The song is strong on its own, and it works better than expected in the context of a reflective, folkier album, mainly because it maintains Carlile’s persistent desire to reach outward, connecting and hoping as she can.
Otherwise, Brandi Carlile mostly sticks to the personal. “A Woman Oversees” considers the struggle of oversharing in a relationship. “You Without Me” explores the emotions that arise when separating from your children as they grow up. It’s a good cut and fits the album’s meditations, but it’s taken straight from Who Believes in Angels? (where, to be fair, it fits less well). “No One Knows Us” (which benefits from Dessner’s touch) wonderfully explores the value of long-term relationships, the kind where only the people involved truly understand the history and connection. The riveting track builds artfully, earning its emotional weight.
Carlile’s one stumble comes with “Joni”, which feels both out of place and, despite Carlile’s friendship with Mitchell, out of character. In the song, Carlile pays tribute to her predecessor, filling the lyric with accurate personal details and light jokes. The music derives from Mitchell’s own sense, making it one of Carlile’s most unusually structured pieces, built with a fluid sense of time-keeping. It moves too far into pastiche, meandering as Carlile gets her homage out, but breaking the cadence of the rest of the record.
Even that’s a minor error because it’s a pretty and revealing track. It doesn’t hit like other tracks, though, notably a pair of songs that help provide the mental landscape for the record. Both “Human” and “A Long Goodbye” use the brevity of life to reflect on various topics. The former, a carefully constructed song that builds to a dramatic finish, weighs the need to do something good in the world against the need to take care of ourselves. “Baby, you’re gonna have a heart attack / And they won’t thank you, they don’t make awards for that,” Carlile sings. The solution, if there is one, might be as simple as feeling the sun and looking at those around us with kindness.
Closer “A Long Goodbye” explores the tenuousness of life in search of gratitude, yet without relinquishing the dark awareness that underlies it all. With a nod to the Indigo Girls, Carlile learns to take things more lightly even as she appreciates the profound nature of her relationships. When everything could change in an instant, you need to live as if you’re perpetually saying a long goodbye, appreciating every bit of it. Brandi Carlile has returned to herself, but that doesn’t mean isolation; it means taking her own awareness into community, knowing what to treasure and making sure to speak it.