Over the course of her 20-year career, singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile has received plenty of the highest honors a musician can get. She’s won six Grammys, joined a country supergroup, the Highwomen, worked with legends Tanya Tucker, T-Bone Burnett, and Joni Mitchell, started her own music festival, and became a New York Times bestseller with her 2021 memoir, Broken Horses. Still, one of her biggest dreams, a spot as a musical guest on Saturday Night Live, has eluded her—until this Saturday, that is, when she’ll take the stage to perform songs from her new album In These Silent Days, alongside host Jason Sudeikis.
“Every time an album comes out and I don’t get to do Saturday Night Live, I’m always so sad,” Carlile said in a recent phone interview. “But here I am, right? And I can’t imagine a better time to play it. I feel really, really ready. I feel like I have the right songs, the right amount of confidence, the right amount of chill, like I can do this without freaking out and screwing it up, like I would’ve in my twenties.”
For Carlile, the night is also an opportunity to celebrate something a bit more fundamental: the return of live music after the ravages of the pandemic. In advance of her big night, she spoke to Vanity Fair about her sense of humor, how she kept sane during her quarantine, and what she’s learned by taking on any gig she can.
Vanity Fair: Are you looking forward to Saturday?
Brandi Carlile: Oh yeah, completely. Put me in, coach. I’m ready.
What was your initial reaction when you found out you would be on the show?
My wife filmed me finding out—she had a hunch because [my publicists] were both calling me at the same time. So she started filming me when I answered the phone, and I just screamed. I’ve been waiting a really, really long time to do something like this. I love SNL! I’ve always wanted to play on it, and it’s just really exciting!
In your memoir, some of the highest praise you have for people is when they have an inappropriate sense of humor. So would you say that you have an inappropriate sense of humor?
Oh yeah, absolutely. I’ve got a warped, sick, dark sense of humor that not everybody gets all the time and you know, I’ll take the good with the bad for that.
What are you going to wear? Are you going to go glam or more earthy?
I’m going to go glam for clothing, hair, and makeup. But then the performance is going to be like a barroom. It’s going to be plugging a guitar into an amp and playing rock and roll music with no bells and whistles. The reason why I always say bar and busking is that when you’re in a scenario like that, it’s very important to get through to people. To use what you know how to do, use your tools, use the mechanism that you’ve cultivated for all this time to pull people in and make them listen to you. Because it’s hard in a bar—they’re always drinking or they’re there for something else. There’s always that challenge before you. I think that that’s what fuels me as a live performer. And I love that I have that fire in my belly any time I get a chance to be on the ol’ TV.
Does it feel especially nice to be doing this after live music is coming back? How did the pandemic affect your thinking about your career?
We were wondering if it would ever be the same again, so I kept really busy. I just made myself stay busy, writing music for the album, finishing the book, working on promoting the book, but also hands in the dirt stuff, like planning a garden and building a deck and spending all my time with the twins [bandmates Phil and Tim Hanseroth], keeping our bond strong even if we couldn’t be on the road. I just put my head down and I did my job because I know how to work. That’s one thing I know how to do, and it keeps me sane.
The same fears that crept into everybody else’s heart’s crept into mine too. When the pandemic is gone, am I still going to be where I was? Am I going to still have an opportunity to do this job in that way? Or am I going back to square one? And to know that I didn’t is euphoric and I’m ready to celebrate hard this week.
You’re doing the third edition of your festival in Mexico, Girls Just Wanna Weekend, in 2022. Are you excited? It seems to have attracted a lot of committed fans!
Well, obviously! It’s, like, the greatest party of the year. We are basically just throwing down and selling the festival out every year. No lineup needs to get announced—people know it’s going to be great. The message is that they know it’s going to be great because it’s women headlining their own festival and taking their careers and the presentation of their art into their own hands. We’re hoping that it’s sending messages loud and clear back home. And you can really see it changing in festival lineups in the ways that things are happening in the U.S. for so many reasons. But Girls Just Wanna Weekend is just a drop in the bucket of all the voices lending themselves to asking the industry to empower women.
Over the past couple of years, festival lineups have finally started to become more gender-balanced, and it makes you realize how easy it could have been to change them all along. It’s nice to see so many people just be able to say, We can do this. It’s not a big deal, and people want it.
It is very easy to do. People want it and they will stay, and I’ve seen that over and over again. I freaking love Chris Stapleton, and just recently he was going to play in Napa Valley, but he got sick. He canceled and at the last minute asked the Highwomen to fill in. And that crowd, and they stayed for a band that only ever had one show and it was women. And I have to say like the Highwomen held it down. It was really, really cool. And it was neat to see that chance given to women to sort of redeem that night.
And it’s nice to have that vote of confidence! That’s one thing that I’ve always really respected about Chris Stapleton. He chooses openers based on his taste and because of that he’s always put way more of a spotlight on women in country than the industry necessarily does on its own.
When it wasn’t even being talked about, he was definitely one of the first people on that base. Then the women in that penultimate spot get to take all those fans home with them, and then a really big part of that fan base becomes their fan base, and that’s how you get to grow. And that’s exactly how I got to where I am—just opening for people, all different artists, men and women, gay and straight, all different sizes of artists, and all different sizes of venues for the last 15 to 20 years. And I’ve taken all these people with me!
I was on Twitter during a long plane ride yesterday, and somebody did a tweet that was really funny. It said something like, “Did you discover Brandi Carlile on Grey’s Anatomy in the early 2000s or are you normal?” I was laughing so hard. But when I retweeted it, all these people started replying with where they found me, and it was so diverse. It was all different kinds of people from all different walks of life, and made me realize how many miles are under my belt. How long I’ve been on the road and how many people I’ve opened for. They were just from all different walks of life, all ages, all regions. I was just cracking up, looking at all the ways that people had found our music and that they stayed with us for all these years. From seeing me open for Marc Broussard in Ann Arbor in 2006 or whatever.
I think I might have been one of the people who found out about you on Grey’s Anatomy too.
People were reminding me of all this weird shit! That movie The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, or the Amy Grant show, Three Wishes. When I played out in rural Pennsylvania for a football team, just random stuff. It just made me realize that we really paid some dues.
It seems like a hilarious testament to the virtue of saying yes so long as you can stick to your ideals and beliefs, and seeing where that can take you, right?
Yeah, and respecting your art. Saying no when your art is being threatened, but always being willing to be a worker and show up at work. It doesn’t matter if it’s a wedding or on TV or if it’s any of these scenarios. Even if there’s peanuts on the floor and you’re playing for four hours, you’re getting somewhere.
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