ELTON JOHN Goodbye Yellow Brick Road DJM/MCA, 1973 This is the first album I ever felt any individual ownership over. I got it on cassette for Christmas when I was 12 years old, after my obsession with Elton John had taken hold. The songs were alive! Each one was like a movie full of colour, drama, and humour. I had a Walkman and I would listen to it around the clock. I memorised the liner notes and lyrics, and the artwork was almost as important to me as the songs. Some mean boys noticed my fixation on it one day and brought a magnet to school to ruin my tape. Even though it wouldn’t play any more, I continued to carry that tape everywhere with me until I was grown enough to buy it again. I think this is why physical albums are so important to me.
ELTON JOHN Goodbye Yellow Brick Road DJM/MCA, 1973 This is the first album I ever felt any individual ownership over. I got it on cassette for Christmas when I was 12 years old, after my obsession with Elton John had taken hold. The songs were alive! Each one was like a movie full of colour, drama, and humour. I had a Walkman and I would listen to it around the clock. I memorised the liner notes and lyrics, and the artwork was almost as important to me as the songs. Some mean boys noticed my fixation on it one day and brought a magnet to school to ruin my tape. Even though it wouldn’t play any more, I continued to carry that tape everywhere with me until I was grown enough to buy it again. I think this is why physical albums are so important to me.
INDIGO GIRLS Swamp Ophelia EPIC, 1994 I first heard the Indigo Girls in the movie Philadelphia. I was mesmerised by their voices and I absolutely had to understand who they were and why they sang the way they did. They had a genderlessness about them that I found really beautiful. It’s amazing when you think about how many contemporary songs and vocal styles fall dead-straight along heteronormative gender roles, like singing itself is a straight mating call of some kind! The Indigo Girls were doing something otherworldly to a kid who had grown up listening to country music. The drums were tribal and unpredictable, the vocals were staggered… I was fascinated by their harmonies and how they were so different but blended so perfectly. That album was my coming of age.
VARIOUS ARTISTS Philadelphia OST EPIC SOUNDTRAX, 1993 I watched this movie alone late at night in my room and I remember feeling like I knew who my people were and whose ‘side’ I wanted to be on. And I began to grow my worldview in important new ways. The <most> memorable thing about that film, though, was the music. The way it set the scenes on fire and made me so aware of my emotions was formative – the discovery of opera in a really elegant but sad and gay context is the way I’ll always hear it now. “Streets of Philadelphia” was the first song I learned to play on piano, and right after that, I learned one of my most favorite songs of all time, “Philadelphia” by Neil Young. It’s his best song in my opinion, and not a day goes by when I don’t think of it.
JONI MITCHELL Blue REPRISE, 1971 Music was my ticket out of a very small place, into the world I wanted to live in. Blue is the best album I ever rejected. I’m not alone, though! Lots of people rejected Blue out of an aversion to vulnerability. Joni’s voice was feminine and she was saying things like, “I wanna talk to you, I want to shampoo you” – which hit me as such a girlish submission. But as soon as I was in love and learned more about who I am as a woman, I put on Blue in my Jeep one day and learned that Joni Mitchell is the most important songwriter in a thousand years, and is the reason we express ourselves the way we do in modern music. Joni changed me as a woman more than as a musician.
RADIOHEAD Pablo Honey PARLOPHONE/CAPITOL, 1993 Everybody loves The Bends but I love Pablo Honey because of how young and clunky it is. This album smells like BO. This album has acne. I love who Radiohead have become, but I love how they started too. They’re beyond reproach and Thom’s voice lives firmly within my own and always will. I feel like he’s spitting on me when he sings “Thinking About You” – it’s brutal and his feelings sound so hurt: “Those people aren’t your friends, they’re paid to kiss your feet”. The pleading in his voice on “Anyone Can Play Guitar”, the stickiness of “Creep”… it’s a perfect document of a real band figuring it out, and it was the soundtrack of me figuring it out with my band. I’m so thankful for its greasy existence.
TRACY CHAPMAN New Beginning ELEKTRA, 1995 When I first heard Tracy, my mom was driving the car. She said something to me like, “Doesn’t this sound like a man?” She was amazed – “It’s not though! This is a woman called Tracy Chapman.” I was blown away and drawn to Tracy’s voice completely. When I was 17, I went to Lilith Fair for the first time at The Gorge in Washington State. I had a job as a roofing labourer and a barista part-time, and I had the money to buy one album. I left there with New Beginning because it had “The Promise” on – and at the time, that song was either the falling-in-love song or the break-up song for every adolescent lesbian relationship in America. Tracy is the absolute boss.
U2 The Joshua Tree ISLAND, 1987 U2, Elton John, Radiohead and Indigo Girls all have this ‘our band or nothing’ feel to them – Elton still has the guys with him he met in 1969, and it sounds like it. U2 are probably the most perfect example of this alchemy in rock’n’roll today. Joshua Tree is unmatched. It’s genre-less, ageless and fucking brave. No-one can tell me otherwise! I put on this album and my face burns with jealousy about the songs and production. It’s so untouchably them: Larry on those toms, Adam settling into that sexy, pulsing bassline, The Edge raining down that ethereal simplicity with his signature delays – and then enters Bono with the most fearless and earnest voice you’ve ever heard. The result is that The Joshua Tree consumes us totally. It’s a masterpiece.
EMMYLOU HARRIS Wrecking Ball ELEKTRA, 1995 Emmylou has a voice like no-one else. It’s unaffected in really groundbreaking ways. When Emmy made Wrecking Ball, she had been seen too often as a frequent collaborator – a voice to accompany other voices, even though she was an unbelievable songwriter! My take on <Wrecking Ball> is that Daniel Lanois wanted to show the world how unique and vivid an artist Emmylou was by platforming her in a really focussed way and wrapping her in this otherworldly kind of sonic ether. But her voice is the through-line. She’s the preacher and everything else is the choir. That album pushed the whole genre forward and it was a big win for the female voice as well. Emmy didn’t need Wrecking Ball to be a way-paver, but wow, did it help us all.
Brandi Carlile’s new album Returning To Myself is released by Interscope/Lost Highway on October 24
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