Brandi Carlile joins Southern Craft Radio with Joy Williams on Apple Music Country to talk about her new memoir ‘Broken Horses.’ Tune into the episode tomorrow at 12pm PT / 2pm CT / 3pm ET or on-demand here.
Brandi Carlile on writing her memoir Broken Horses
“I think that a part of me always feels like there’s something that I’m not telling people and that that must be why I’m allowed to be here, you know what I mean? And I don’t know if that’s just some personality problem I have or whatever, but I kind of felt like writing the book might cure that, that inadequacy, that imposter syndrome thing that I have, like, “Hey, if I just tell the truth, if I just say it all right here in one place, it’s there, it’s documented, no one can tell me that I didn’t tell them, and here it all is.” I know that’s supposed to feel like a total relief, and I do feel a lot lighter, but, at the same time, it’s also very daunting and strange to answer questions like the ones I’m answering this week as opposed to the rest of my career about whether or not the words come first or the music comes first.”
Brandi Carlile recalls writing her first song
“My brother had won this toy nylon string guitar at a fair somewhere and promptly broke all the strings on it, and it had the two slow strings. I used to take the string off my dad’s hunting bow, his longbow, and tie it around the guitar like a guitar strap, like all kids do… And I would just pretend like I could play the guitar, and I went in the bathroom mirror one day and I just took my thumb and slid them down the strings over and over again in this cowboy pattern, this … and just wrote lyrics about being a cowboy and riding off into the sunset and fall asleep in my saddle. And then I realized that I was very clearly a composer.”
Brandi Carlile on her struggles with motherhood and why she wrote “The Mother”
“But it was hard for me because I wasn’t pregnant, and I kind of wanted to be, and I knew I couldn’t, and I had this baby coming, and I’m not good with babies, and I’m not sure I like them at all, even still. And I have to sign this birth certificate that says I’m the father, and I’m going to these birthing classes and I’m having to put diapers on baby dolls backwards and get laughed at with all the other dads that can’t wear the BabyBjörn because they don’t know how to put that on. There was a lot of heteronormative, sorry about that word, but heteronormative templating that I was squeezed into, even by my own friends. And nobody did anything wrong, but I was just like, “What am I in this? Because I don’t feel like a mom, I don’t feel like a mother.” And then the baby’s born and I don’t know how to hold her, and she just cries and she just wants to go back to her mom. But even saying that, “She wants to go back to her mom,” it’s like it rolls right off my tongue. And so I knew I needed to do something that would outlive that feeling, and that’s when I wrote the song because at the end of every verse it says, “I am the mother of Evangeline. I am the mother,” it’s just reminding myself, like a mantra.”
Brandi Carlile on the impact of Broken Horses
“If I see it anywhere, it’s in these faith-based discussions, because it’s the thing that keeps coming up, and it’s actually … I mean I don’t go into it more in the book than anything else, but these traumatized queers are all wanting to talk about this and reach out, and I think it’s really good. It’s good for queer people, it’s good for LGBTQIA people that have been traumatized by faith, but also it’s good for people of faith because they can be so stigmatized by traumatized people. And if the traumatized people can work through some of that trauma, there could be a come-together moment where we could understand what it is about the C-word that is so triggering to so many people and why, if that could be honored, I mean I don’t even know that we always need the C-word anymore. But that’s been one thing that I have seen that’s been a byproduct of this, just in the last week that it’s been out, and I’ve thought to myself, “Wow, okay. If I’ve ever been effective in this way, it’s here.” I’m not trying to recruit anyone or calling anyone into some faith center, but if we could even get comfortable living amongst one another in that way.”
Brandi Carlile on “The Joke”
“ ‘The Joke’ was like ‘Hallelujah’ for me, Leonard Cohen song, it’s something that I wrote like a bazillion verses to, I had so much in my head about ‘The Joke,’ and I settled on the last two, I combined and Frankensteined lines together so I could get everybody in there I wanted to, the boy was tugging on the shirt, and the woman carrying the baby on her back across the desert, and the little girls with the She Can Do It signs. It’s a promise and the fulfillment of a promise to where I do believe that there will come a time when all of those who made light of your life or the things that marginalized you or push you out to the fringe will not have the last laugh. And that’s not in a vengeful sense, it’s supposed to be celebratory, and I feel that way every time I sing it. That’s why there’s those big notes, those big cut-loose notes in it where you can just scream them and hope they come out okay.”
