This singer-songwriter, only 28, is such a commanding presence that it may come as a surprise to learn that “Brandi Carlile” is much more of a band than a solo act. The child of a Grand Ole Opry–loving family in rural Washington state, Carlile was playing around Seattle circa 2003 when she met the twins Tim and Phil Hanseroth, guitarist and bassist for the hard-rock outfit the Fighting Machinists. After that band got signed and dropped by Interscope and called it quits, the brothers found themselves starting a trio with Carlile and focusing on acoustic instruments for the first time. The three musicians began writing together, creating a songwriting partnership in which they share credit for all songs, regardless of who contributes what. And that collaboration has been fundamental to Carlile’s music ever since, onstage and in the studio, as well as in the writing woodshed. Though Carlile and the Hanseroths often tour with a drummer and a full acoustic-electric arsenal, their music retains its connection to the string trio sound. Instead of the boom-chuck you might expect from a musician raised on country, Carlile plays hard-rocking rhythm and soft fingerstyle patterns on an array of archtops, parlor-size flattops, and electrics. The guitars most often heard on Give Up the Ghost are funky old Gibson and Harmony archtops recorded acoustically.
On the phone during a recent tour stop in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she has family roots, Carlile talked about her collaborative process as a songwriter, guitarist, and singer.
What was the musical atmosphere like in your home growing up?
CARLILE Music was a constant in my house with my parents. My grandparents and great uncles and aunts on my mother’s side were all really involved in country-and-western music, bluegrass, and Grand Ole Opry culture. It was a fixture through my whole childhood. It wasn’t just the music, it was the whole culture—it was the clothes that we wore and the way that we interacted with each other. We were a Lawrence Welk, Hee Haw family. So there were a lot of family jam sessions with upright ragtime piano, dobro, banjo, acoustic guitar, spoons—those were the main instruments. When I was seven or eight years old, my mom got involved in community theater, and that’s when we started singing onstage as a family.
Did these experiences give you a sense of music as a social rather than commercial activity?
CARLILE Yeah. I didn’t make the distinction between my grandfather when he sang “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” and Willie Nelson. It was one and the same to me. When I was really young I didn’t realize that people were famous for music.
Were you aware that many country singers didn’t write their own songs?
CARLILE I was aware of it. I thought there were people who write songs and people who sing songs. When I first started learning about Elton John and his collaboration with [lyricist] Bernie Taupin, and the concept of writing and performing your own music, it was like a lightbulb went off in my head.
Your mention of ragtime piano made me think immediately think of Elton John’s piano part on “Caroline.” It has that feel.
CARLILE It totally does. My great grandma, Florentine, played honky-tonk piano. Tumbleweed Connection and Here and There were the first Elton John records I ever got from the library, and Tumbleweed Connection is absolutely filled with that kind of piano. It’s like a southern Civil War record.
Your song combines that ragtimey piano with a kind of Cajun two-step rhythm in the drums.
CARLILE Yes. It’s weird because it was written on a ukulele. All the instrumentation was built on top of that. When I was working on the song with Phil [Hanseroth], all I could think about was Elton John’s piano playing on “Amoreena” and some of his funkier ragtime parts, like on “Elderberry Wine” and Don’t Shoot Me. And that was before we ever asked him to play on the record.
Do piano and guitar bring out different qualities in your writing or performing?
CARLILE Certainly writing. Performing, I get very nervous [about playing] the piano live, so I feed off of that. My writing changes drastically when I play piano because I find myself with less rhythmic boundaries. I may write a song just playing chords without any rhythm at all. When I play guitar, because actually I’m a guitar player, I sit down and start playing a riff. I don’t do that on piano—I start with a sound.
Many people who play both instruments understand theoretically what they’re playing on piano more clearly, just because of the layout of the keys. Is that the case for you?
CARLILE Not at all. I’m a terrible piano player. I don’t even know what the first chord in “Before It Breaks” is. I have no idea. I couldn’t pick up a guitar and play that song. I just know it’s got two black keys in it.
In terms of songwriting, you’ve said that on Give Up the Ghost you wanted to get beyond chronicling the life of a touring musician. What were you hoping to capture instead?
CARLILE I really wanted to not stay in the moment. I’ve been made aware of the fact that it takes a band their whole lives to write their first record, and then they’ve got a matter of months to write their second. Nothing happens between the time they put their first record out and the time they put their second record out, and it’s boring. On your first record you have so many life experiences to draw from—coming of age and love and loss and heartache and all of these firsts—and it’s really hard to write an album of seconds. So I wanted to transcend what is happening right now in the moment, on our tour bus, on the road, and not make an album full of highway songs, because I just think there are enough of them in the world.
So we did a lot of songwriting exercises where we took a good hard look at things in our past that we hadn’t made peace with and ventured into the vastness of the future. We kept dream journals and wrote from a place of consciousness.
Did you set particular songwriting assignments for yourself?
CARLILE It was more about what we were setting out not to do than what we were setting out to do. It pushed us, because it’s really easy to sit in a room and write about the things that you see in front of you. I could describe for you in detail where I am right now, but where I was yesterday is so much more interesting in a song—or where I might be tomorrow. Those possibilities are endless, you know? That basically is to say that your subconscious is a lot more honest with you than your environment is. I just think it makes for more interesting stories.
How does your cowriting relationship work with Tim and Phil?
CARLILE We definitely operate as a trio. And when we do write separately, which is often—I’ll write a song and they’ll learn it, or they’ll write a song and I’ll learn it—we still treat it like an equal partnership. So everything we do is completely equal with publishing and recognition and money and all those things, because we decided a long time ago, before we ever got a record deal, that would always be in the best interest of the song. That way anybody’s contributions to the music could only be for the purpose of making the music better, instead of having a stake in it.
Do you specialize in terms of music or lyrics, or does anything go?
CARLILE I’m in heavily on lyrics. I write lyrics and epic songs, like “Before It Breaks” or “Looking Out”—those would be my contributions. Phil is really influenced by the Beatles and the Beach Boys, and his melodies are complex and fascinating. He’s also able to write fiction, which is a difficult thing to do. Usually, when Tim comes to the table, his songs are finished, and he is able to write love songs—I’m not able to write love songs. So we all even each other out in many different ways.
As the lead singer, do you adapt their songs to fit your voice and style?
CARLILE I do sometimes, and other times I just don’t want to do anything to it. Like Phil wrote “The Story,” and I didn’t touch it.
So that song always had those dramatic octave jumps?
CARLILE It did. I could send you a version of Phil singing that would make you laugh so hard, because it’s just wildly beyond his range.
When you were recording that song, did you plan to push your voice over the edge like that?
CARLILE No. I don’t ever plan to do anything, and that’s the important part. I’ve actually got immense control over my voice and what it does, but I don’t allow myself to control my voice when I’m performing. If I’m singing in a conference room of the record label for 15 people under electric lighting, I’m probably going to put the same performance on that I’m going to put on at the Beacon Theater in New York City, because I actually have no emotional control over how I sing.
You recorded your album The Story primarily as a live band performance in the studio. Is the new record more built in layers?
CARLILE Yeah, but the foundation is very live—bass, drums, guitar, piano, and, most of the time, vocals. So the heartbeat of the song is a live band playing together in a room. But The Story was treated kind of like a concert, and we didn’t rearrange instruments and sounds and the setup. We went for an all-encompassing record project. But when we did this record, we went per song. We would work on the song sometimes for days, just trying to figure out what room the drums needed to be in, what kind of piano we needed, or who was going to play what instrument. So each song was given a certain amount of attention as its own project, its own record.
A lot of musicians believe you need to plug in to rock hard, but you take advantage of the explosive quality of acoustic instruments—in particular, archtop guitars.
CARLILE My take on acoustic instruments is that they can be so heavy, because they’re percussive and age well and they retain all of their wisdom, you know? We have a collection of old archtop guitars, and it varies from Sears and Roebuck Harmonys to Gibsons from the ’20s and ’30s. We became vintage archtop enthusiasts when we met T Bone [Burnett], and we carried that onto this record.
How do you work out your guitar parts with Tim?
CARLILE For years, Tim and I tried to form a percussive foundation so that we could have a trio with bass but without drums. That really was formative for our style of music. So a drummer has to navigate through our meter, and it’s unique. The drummer we have now [Allison Miller] has finally done it—she has found a space in between me and the twins where it works.
Is it true that when you were tracking “Dreams” you didn’t know drums were being recorded in another room?
CARLILE It is true. What a weird technique, huh? Rick Rubin had a feeling going into making this record that if drums were added, they actually had to add something. All the preproduction we did was without drums, and so he was cognizant of what drums were really going to add to the record as opposed to what they may actually take away. Per Rick’s request, we recorded every song as a band and we recorded the song acoustic, and we compared the two to make sure the band wasn’t taking away from the acoustic scenario. It seldom did—the band was almost always the right thing.
Although there are a number of sparse tracks, too.
CARLILE Oh yeah, like “Oh Dear,” “If There Was No You,” “Touching the Ground,” “I Will”—those were always acoustic songs.
The one situation where we did take the band away was “Pride and Joy.” I had been listening to Johnny Cash’s American Recordings on my drive—we drove to LA from Seattle—and I kept wanting to reference the song “Hurt,” the Nine Inch Nails cover. I was saying, “It should feel like that song; it should build in intensity. What do the drums do on that song?” And we listened to it and realized there are no drums. The drums are something that you feel even though they aren’t there. And so I wanted to try that kind of arrangement with “Pride and Joy,” and I think it worked.
You performed many of these songs before bringing them into the studio. Do you prefer to work them out live first?
CARLILE Because we’re a live band, our songs always take shape and write themselves when we’re playing live. Emotively, that’s kind of the pocket for us, in front of an audience. So there’s no better place to cultivate our songwriting than on the road, and by the time we get to the studio a song is already tried and true. It changes when you get to the studio, because you have to find another energy source. You no longer have the audience to draw from. So that’s one big gap that you have to fill.
Do the songs change onstage as well?
CARLILE Drastically. They don’t change according to the preferences of the audience—it’s about holding yourself accountable. How do you feel when you play this part of the song for an audience? Does it feel like it’s not good enough? Because it might not be, and you might not know unless somebody’s watching you.
Can you give an example of how a song changed?
CARLILE “Pride and Joy” changed so many times—the chords changed, the lyrics changed, the register that I was singing in changed, the instrumentation changed. It ended up being an acoustic song [on the record], but it started out like “Fake Plastic Trees” by Radiohead. Now, live, we play the first half like it is on the record, and then we play the second half of it completely plugged in. There are no rules.
Do you think working with the twins has made your music evolve in a way it wouldn’t have otherwise?
CARLILE Absolutely. Evolve, I think, is a good term. I’d say it’s given the music its shape. I wouldn’t be who I am if not for the twins. I’m a born collaborator with my siblings, and that has totally transferred over into my musical life. [Without this collaboration] I would obviously be playing music, but I don’t know at what level or even what genre. We have kind of evolved together.
