The word “forgiveness” carries a lot of weight. As Brandi Carlile sees it, the word hasn’t been done much justice. As experienced by the singer-songwriter, who released By the Way, I Forgive You in February, forgiveness has been used as a way to judge people — as a way to “love the sinner and hate the sin,” and as a tool of evangelical oppression.
“And ‘forgiveness,’ I think, is the most unjust word to have done that to, you know?” says Carlile. “It’s made that word, I think, mean something it was just never, ever meant to mean. I wanted to try and reinvent it, at least from my personal perspective — to make it synonymous with kind of an embracing or an accepting of how hard life and relationships can be, without being confused with complacency.”
Carlile didn’t set out to write an album focused on the F-word, but alas, that’s what came out when she sat down to write with her bandmates Tim and Phil Hanseroth (nicknamed “the Twins”). And it’s done quite well: Carlile is nominated in three of the six categories in this year’s Americana Awards — Artist of the Year, Album of the Year for By the Way, I Forgive You and Song of the Year for the album’s lead single “The Joke.” Ahead of the awards ceremony Sept. 12 at the Ryman, the Scene spoke with Carlile about the album, queer motherhood and success, among other topics.
In a lot of ways, your latest album is an emotional roller coaster. It’s painful and earnest and honest, and also joyful in places. It’s the human experience packed into one album, birth and death and all places in between. Was that intentional, or just what came out when writing it?
It just became a cyclical process of writing songs with particular depth for this album. We wrote other songs too, that didn’t have quite as much depth, you know. They were more about fun and rock ’n’ roll and stuff, but we recorded them and then they just stuck out wrong in a sequence.
The song “Sugartooth” is particularly brutal — especially if someone listening has had a family member or friend struggling with addiction.
Absolutely. And that’s pretty much anyone these days. You know, the Twins and I have been writing together for coming up on 18 years now. And we share a property, we live together. Phil’s married to my sister, so their kids are my niece and nephews. It’s every holiday we’re together. Every hospital visit we’re together, and so we kind of wake up every day looking out the same windows. And that was a song that was about a friend that we all loved, and struggled with a drug addiction and didn’t end up making it out.
Music critics love to say, “This was the breakthrough moment for this person, this is when they made it.” I’m always interested in when an artist felt that moment for themselves.
In the life of an artist, there’s so much rejection and criticism of the depths of an artist’s soul, that you have to take those little victories wherever you can find them. I can’t speak for everyone, but as an artist, as an entertainer for myself, I have always thought my entire life, since I was about 7 years old, that I was right on the verge of making it, or had just made it. So all these moments were cumulative for me. So I’m just having a really satisfying existence as, you know, an expresser of my art. I’ve always been able to be in it. I’ve never had to step out of it and wonder what I would do for a living, or how I would support myself. So you know, I guess my breakthrough moment would be, in that case, runner-up at the Black Diamond Eagles karaoke competitions, singing “Delta Dawn” — singing “Delta Dawn” up two keys.
The Americana Awards are kind of a small field — there are only six awards, and you’re nominated for three of them. Did that feel like success to you?
I think awards, since I’ve never won one in my life or anything, mean less to me than community. And having been embraced by the Americana community on this album, that feels really good to me. To be part of the scene, and to be part of a group of people that are saying something. John [Prine] is saying something. Jason [Isbell] is saying something, Margo [Price] is saying something, we’re all saying something right now. And for that reason, I’m just really happy to be part of that community, because I feel that if we don’t compete [against each other], we can move the needle.
I noticed you tend to stay above the fray on Twitter. Any reason in particular?
I try to go where the conversation isn’t toxic, and I just don’t feel like it’s that toxic yet on Instagram. I still feel pretty comfortable there. You know, I’ve seen horrible things on Twitter, and so many horrible things on even Facebook, that I’m just a little bit turned off by those two platforms right now. I think I’ll just wait it out until they clean up a little bit.
I recently became a mother, and I love the line in “The Mother” about breaking heirlooms you were never meant to keep. I just think it has this great duality. It could mean the positive and valuable traditions a family keeps — it could mean letting go of the negative traditions a family has kept. What was your intention with that lyric?
A lot of times when I’m writing I don’t start with metaphor. I usually start with tangible, and then I see the metaphor in it later. So my beloved grandmother, Grandma Carol, who was my best friend — before she died, [my daughter] Evangeline was born, so she got to kind of hold Evangeline a couple times and see Evangeline for the first nine months of her life. She didn’t like her name. She said, “I don’t like her name, I prefer to call her Angel.” Grandma Carol was a major ball-buster, man. She was a tough lady. And she worked at the clothing bank, and volunteered at the food bank. You know, even though she lived in poverty, she wouldn’t take any help and volunteered on all of her days off. She volunteered down there, and she got a little toy angel, and gave it to me to give to Evangeline. And it was heinous and dirty, and I didn’t want it. Evangeline broke it, and I knew my Grandma Carol would have wanted me to just get rid of the damn thing if I hadn’t wanted it, you know? So I knew I was never meant to keep and idolize things and objects that are given to me, and not to put human spirit on those things.
So when she broke that one, I started thinking about all the other heirlooms that she’s going to break in our nontraditional family, and I thought about the fact that we’re a queer family, and the fact that we see our faith through different lenses. I realized that there’s some pioneering involved with being a gay mother. And so “The Mother” was actually kind of born of that line.
What are you listening to?
Little Seeds by Shovels & Rope has stayed on pretty much constant rotation for me. I think it’s absolutely amazing. I’m obsessed with a singer that I stalk on Instagram called Yebba. She’s dyslexic. It’s “Abbey” spelled backwards. Her name is Abbey Smith. She’s only put out like one song, but she sings on [Instagram], and kind of like dabbles in all this different writing, and everybody’s freaking about her and saying that she’s probably the best, one of the best singers in the world. Yeah, she’s absolutely amazing. I’m also really into Maggie Rogers right now. I think she’s super cool and an amazing role model for my kids.
In an interview you did with NPR, you said of forgiveness: “It’s a really radical and ugly, difficult process that, you know, great beauty comes from.” Could you talk about that a little bit — the radical act of forgiving someone, or forgiving yourself?
I’ve bristled at overly puritanical white evangelical words. I’m always prepared for oppression as soon as I hear the word “blessed.” And I’m always prepared for oppression as soon as I hear the word “forgiveness.” Because just by virtue of the fact that the majority of the people that have used that word for the last hundred years have kind of done the opposite, and then used the word to describe a way that they love the sinner, hate the sin, and a way to kind of judge and oppress people, but also forgiving them as they oppress them. … When you look at the … content and the title of the album, By the Way, I Forgive You, it implies this sort of casual forgiveness, of letting something go without all the stuff that normally comes along with the word.
