{"id":6245,"date":"2025-10-27T11:09:22","date_gmt":"2025-10-27T11:09:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/brandi-carlile-my-life-in-music-151848\/"},"modified":"2025-10-27T11:09:22","modified_gmt":"2025-10-27T11:09:22","slug":"brandi-carlile-my-life-in-music-151848","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/brandi-carlile-my-life-in-music-151848\/","title":{"rendered":"Brandi Carlile \u2013 My Life In Music"},"content":{"rendered":"
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ELTON JOHN
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
DJM\/MCA, 1973<\/strong>
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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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ELTON JOHN
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
DJM\/MCA, 1973<\/strong>
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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

INDIGO GIRLS
Swamp Ophelia
EPIC, 1994<\/strong>
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\u2019s 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\u2026 I was fascinated by their harmonies and how they were so different but blended so perfectly. That album was my coming of age.<\/p>\n

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Philadelphia OST
EPIC SOUNDTRAX, 1993<\/strong>
I watched this movie alone late at night in my room and I remember feeling like I knew who my people were and whose \u2018side\u2019 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 \u2013 the discovery of opera in a really elegant but sad and gay context is the way I\u2019ll always hear it now. \u201cStreets of Philadelphia\u201d 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, \u201cPhiladelphia\u201d by Neil Young. It\u2019s his best song in my opinion, and not a day goes by when I don\u2019t think of it.<\/p>\n

JONI MITCHELL
Blue
REPRISE, 1971<\/strong>
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\u2019m not alone, though! Lots of people rejected Blue out of an aversion to vulnerability. Joni\u2019s voice was feminine and she was saying things like, \u201cI wanna talk to you, I want to shampoo you\u201d \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

RADIOHEAD
Pablo Honey
PARLOPHONE\/CAPITOL, 1993<\/strong>
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\u2019re beyond reproach and Thom\u2019s voice lives firmly within my own and always will. I feel like he\u2019s spitting on me when he sings \u201cThinking About You\u201d \u2013 it\u2019s brutal and his feelings sound so hurt: \u201cThose people aren\u2019t your friends, they\u2019re paid to kiss your feet<\/em>\u201d. The pleading in his voice on \u201cAnyone Can Play Guitar\u201d, the stickiness of \u201cCreep\u201d\u2026 it\u2019s a perfect document of a real band figuring it out, and it was the soundtrack of me figuring it out with my band. I\u2019m so thankful for its greasy existence.<\/p>\n

TRACY CHAPMAN
New Beginning
ELEKTRA, 1995<\/strong>
When I first heard Tracy, my mom was driving the car. She said something to me like, \u201cDoesn\u2019t this sound like a man?\u201d She was amazed \u2013 \u201cIt\u2019s not though! This is a woman called Tracy Chapman.\u201d I was blown away and drawn to Tracy\u2019s 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 \u201cThe Promise\u201d on \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

U2
The Joshua Tree
ISLAND, 1987<\/strong>
U2, Elton John, Radiohead and Indigo Girls all have this \u2018our band or nothing\u2019 feel to them \u2013 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\u2019n\u2019roll today. Joshua Tree is unmatched. It\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u2013 and then enters Bono with the most fearless and earnest voice you\u2019ve ever heard. The result is that The Joshua Tree consumes us totally. It\u2019s a masterpiece.<\/p>\n

EMMYLOU HARRIS
Wrecking Ball
ELEKTRA, 1995<\/strong>
Emmylou has a voice like no-one else. It\u2019s unaffected in really groundbreaking ways. When Emmy made Wrecking Ball, she had been seen too often as a frequent collaborator \u2013 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\u2019s 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\u2019t need Wrecking Ball to be a way-paver, but wow, did it help us all.<\/p>\n

Brandi Carlile\u2019s new album Returning To Myself is released by Interscope\/Lost Highway on October 24<\/em><\/p>\n

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