Brandi Carlile’s ‘Returning to Myself’ Is a Bravura Turn: Album Review

Brandi Carlile begins her new album with a verse raising the issue of mortality, and the question of what a godly design for these fleeting lives might be, if any at all. “Is there some freewheeling watcher / Shooting marbles in the sky?” she asks as the title track starts to unfold. “Holding your years between their fingers / Watching it burn ‘til the fire dies.” No, fans don’t have to listen long to learn: The themes are not going to be especially trivial on “Returning to Myself,” her eighth and possibly most moving solo release.

If you had to boil the record down, you might get away with summarizing it this way: Even bigger picture, slightly smaller sound. This much is guaranteed for most any listener: You will spend a good amount of time following lyrical prompts to think about what you’re doing on the planet, in a carpe diem kind of way. You will also spend a decent amount of the album thinking about Joni Mitchell, because Carlile has picked up and set so many musical Easter eggs from her famous friend’s distinctive vocal and playing styles — and also, yes, because there is a song on the record called “Joni”! (In which every line is about Joni Mitchell!) Also, you will be lulled, to a certain extent, because “Returning to Myself” goes fairly gentle on your mind and ears, except for the outlier, “Church & State,” which rocks with more intensity than just about anything she’s done.

Putting an exception like that aside, anyhow, this is a singer/songwriter record in the classic sense. “Returning to Myself” in this case involves sort of returning to the 1970s, a little bit, when you’d put on an LP by a finger-picking sage and fully expect, however foolishly, that it could change your life. Who knows — this one might, in tiny increments, one acoustic guitar lick or exhortation to live fully at a time.

Carlile has cited Emmylou Harris’ “Wrecking Ball” as an inspiration for how she approached this album — talking about how the collaborative nature of it changed the course of Harris’ career, for starters. By inference, Andrew Watt, her principal co-producer on the project, is Daniel Lanois in this scenario. And maybe this is the first time in history those two guys have ever been compared: However versatile he might actually be, Watt is probably most famous for making big, bombastic rock records, and Lanois… is not. But there is some pleasing difference-splitting going on here, as sound goes. Watt turns out here to be good with touches that we maybe haven’t heard so much on his Ozzy or Peal Jam records, like the sound of fingers lightly brushing against strings as a hand goes up and down a guitar neck, right from the opening bars of the title song, When other instruments gradually drop in over the course of that track, they’re kept at the kind of etheareal distance that a Lanois could approve of. And then, sure, ultimately, Watt is going to go big before he goes home. Neither he nor Carlile are going to let the generally quieter nature of this album stand in the way of some of the grandly anthemic moments we’d expect from either of them.

There are other big-name producer/writer collaborators on the album, too, though they don’t get the same screen time that Watt does. Aaron Dessner is more limited in his contributions, but they really set the tone for “Returning to Myself” in a way that just counting up the number of tracks he worked on doesn’t fully get at. Carlile was at Dessner’s woodsy New England retreat when she wrote the poem that became the album’s first song and its title track; even though that one ended up being a Watt co-production in the studio, his spiritual impact leaves a mark, at least. And on the five out of 10 tracks that Dessner did co-produce or co-write, his stamp is present to varying degrees. Most notably, you hear it in the acoustic riffing he provided as a bed for Brandi to top-line over in “War With Time.” That one is pure “Folklore”-meets-Brandi-Carlile, and no one should complain about that.

But the really interesting mongrel on this album, as production styles go, is “No One Knows Us,” the penultimate track, which is a true marriage of recognizable sensibilities, starting off sounding like a piece of Dessner acoustic minimalism and winding up sounding like a Watt jam, without too much apparent stitching as it makes those changes. But you also don’t really think too much about the Frankensteinian aspects of marrying Watt and Dessner signature styles when Carlile is distractingly delivering one of her most matter-of-fact-tear-jerking lyrics ever.

It’s fun to go on about what the respective co-producers brought to the project — and we haven’t even gotten yet to Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, who gets a shared producer credit on one track (and also is part of the band on three more). But in the end, even with the novelty of some notably different sonic touches, no one will consider this “a producer’s album.” Carlile has never seemed not fully in control of her music, and her sensibility-ceding is only going to go so far, even with a trio of cherished newbies aboard. She continues to have the most commanding voice in contemporary popular music, for anyone interested in the intersection of prowess and the nuances of phrasing and emotion. And the material she writes for that voice is both tricky and hooky; poetic and conversational; and — the overarching thing — searingly honest. Every great voice should have a writer this remarkable living in the same house.

“Returning to Myself,” the song, is framed as a debate Carlile is having with herself… and not really one that’s so much about the existence of God as the opening verse would suggest. It was written at a moment when she had decided to take time off from working with Joni to spend some time alone, standing on her own two feet… but also, apparently, chafing at the idea of reflective solitude as some kind of ideal. Ultimately, she finds some value in both alone time and community — but she’s not wishy-washy about it to not finally render a judgment about which side she prefers to err on. “I love you and you and you,” she sings in her best falsetto, and I think she’s singing to her fans and friends, not the Holy Trinity (though I couldkn’t rule it out). Anyway, it’s the kind of inner dialogue, with weight given to two sides of a philosophical issue, that we don’t often see in a pop song.

“Human,” the most clear-and-present anthem on the album, was written around the time of last year’s presidential election. It offers some still-timely advice, for those afflicted with chronic political agita: “Baby, you’re gonna have a heart attack / And they won’t thank you / They don’t make awards for that.” Carlile points out that “I don’t need to see how it ends / To know that we’ll never be here again,” in case we missed that virtal information amid the doomscrolling. Perspective is everything, when we’re all on the clock.

But lest anyone think she is taking a “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” attitude toward Trumpism, there is a song later on taking MAGA seriously — “Church & State,” a rocker that gets angry enough to actually include a spoken-word recitation of part of a Thomas Jefferson letter that introduced the title phrase into the lexicon. From a musical point of view, meanwhile, it quotes U2. Not quite as directly, mind you, but you will hear the Hanseroth twins going Irish on us with this one, especially with a bass part that is Adam Clayton-level phat.

Thankfully, the album’s emphasis on the big themes of living in the moment doesn’t mean she can’t spend a few songs bearing down on the littler aspects of relationship dysfunction. “A Woman Oversees,” one of the more overtly Joni-esque numbers here, tells a peculiar story of a moment in a relationship where you realize you’re oversharing while the other person is withholding, and the unease of reckoning with that imbalance. “Anniversary” also deals with a relationship gone wrong, but as far as I can tell, it’s actually a love song, in which the positive aspects of a partnership that works finally blot out the unhappy memories that used to come up on the anniversary date for that regrettable affair of the past. Or maybe that’s not it at all — Carlile usually couldn’t be more eager to communicate with her audience, but she does have those welcome moments of leaving things a bit more mysterious.

“Joni” may be the most talked about song on the album, for what Carlile has to say about and to her friend, and for all the musical quirks that she borrows from Mitchell for the homage. The out-of-time rhythms coming through Blake Mills’ baritone guitar parts; the Mark Isham horn solos that could be straight out of a ‘90s-era record like “Taming the Tiger”… it’s an impressive cornucopia of Mitchell-isms that couldn’t be put to better or certainly more self-conscious use. The homage is tender, but also edgy in a way that you have to imagine would impress Mitchell, with its lack of syncophantic puffery: “She doesn’t suffer fools / She won’t make cups of tea / And she doesn’t bandage bruised egos,” Carlile sings — before getting to the cool stuff that Joni Mitchell does do, like “speak in sacred language every soul could understand.” Beyond the amusing jokes, Carlile’s point seems to be that Mitchell doesn’t need to be the world’s most flagrant empath to be one of its greatest healers.

Carlile has commented that some early listeners have taken this as a “divorce album,” which it’s decidedly not. Maybe some of the confusion comes from the song “You Without Me,” or at least its title, which is not actually about the end of a love affair but the end of childhood fealty to a mother’s influence and wishes. It’s about the joy and terror of realizing that your kids are not your Mini-Mes, in other words, and not many parents will make it through this one without feeling 150% of the feels. The double-tracking that Watt and Carlile do with her voice here is a bit distracting — like maybe they thought an effect was needed to keep her solo vocal from sounding too simple or traditional — but the overwhelming sentiment nonetheless makes this one of Carlile’s most affecting compositions to date. (If it sounds familiar, this track has been carried over, without change, from the collaborative album she had out with Elton John earlier in 2025.)

As good as that parent/child anthem is, it’s the last two tracks on the album that fire most powerfully on every cylinder. Over a slightly tense Dessner guitar lick, Carlile opens with the musical question: “Hey, can you get out of bed today?” And if that alone doesn’t get you, either as someone who suffers from depression or knows someoe who does, nothing else could. She’s singing most obviously about checking in on a childhood friend who may be having some issues. But in the even greater sense, it’s a beautiful song about the connections and secrets that only two people share, no matter how many other friends they may have — and the everyday tragedy of what happens when either death or mere disconnection wipes out what was built up. It’s a hopeful heartbreaker.

The same can be said of the finale, “A Long Goodbye,” which goes even further — as the title would indicate — in repeatedly raising the spectre of death in the service of advocating for life. Carlile includes some of her most plainly autobiographical lyrics, at the beginning and end (like her first plane trip, one state over, to Idaho, as an adult, an anecdote familiar from her bestselling memoir of a few years back). But she intersperses images of others dying by accident or suicide, to say: “Yeah, we’re all just a broken heart away / From making a promise that we’re forced to keep.” In a gorgeous coda that may be the single best minute of music she’s ever put on record, Carlile makes it personal again, quoting her beloved Indigo Girls (“It’s only life after all”), Sammy Cahn (“Let it snow…”) and Raymond Chandler (the title itself) in a death-accepting, life-affirming blast of transcendence. You might have to go back to the Beatles’ “The End” to think of an album with an ending that stirs up so much emotion with its closing sense of finality as this one.

Is this Carlile’s best album? That’s hard to say. “By the Way, I Forgive You” is pretty hard to top, as one of the landmark singer/songwriter albums of the 21^st century. That one might have been more of a tour de force, and this might be more tightly focused — musically, with its tendency toward more of an acoustic guitar core, and lyrically, with its hyperfocus on cutting through the detritus that surrounds us to get to the heart of the matter. However you want to rate it, you may come back to something she sings in “A War With Time,” a plaintive memory song with an encomium that applies here: “None of it was overrated.”