Brandi Carlile, larger than life and achingly human

The quarantine and isolation of 2020 didn’t subdue Brandi Carlile. Just the opposite. Her seventh album, “In These Silent Days,” braves the extremes of Carlile’s songwriting. She empathizes, apologizes and lays out accusations. She’s righteous and she’s self-doubting. She proffers fond lullabies and she unleashes full-throated screams. The album reaffirms her ambitions and polishes them too.

The music Carlile makes with her songwriting partners and bandmates Tim and Phil Hanseroth (on bass and guitar) harks back to the handmade sounds of 1970s rock. Songs on “In These Silent Days” pay clear tribute to Joni Mitchell (“You and Me on the Rock”) and the Who (“Broken Horses”). Yet Carlile is unmistakably a 21st-century figure: a gay married mother of two daughters who bypassed the country-music establishment to reach her own fervent audience.

From the beginning — Carlile released her debut album, “Brandi Carlile,” in 2005 — her gifts have been obvious. She writes melodies that gather drama as they unfold, carrying lyrics filled with compassion, close observation and sometimes heroic metaphors. Her voice can be limpid and confiding or fiercely torn as she strategically reveals its startling range. As early as 2007, with the title song of her second album, “The Story,” Carlile proved she could sound confessional while belting to the rafters.

“In These Silent Days” consolidates Carlile’s strengths: musical, writerly, maternal, political. It opens with her latest ballad showpiece, “Right on Time,” which pleads for a reunion and a second chance: “You might be angry now — of course you are,” Carlile admits with breathy hesitation at the beginning, before the song starts its big climb in the chorus. “It wasn’t right, but it was right on time,” Carlile declares, rising to an operatic peak and, in the final iteration, leaping up from there, perfectly poised between personal heartache and stagy flamboyance.

“Broken Horses” doesn’t wait for its buildup. It’s an imagistic, nonlinear song full of defiance — “I’m a tried and weathered woman but I won’t be tried again,” Carlile vows — and from the start, Carlile’s voice is on the verge of breaking into a shriek, riding hard-strummed guitars and rumbling drums directly out of “Who’s Next.” There are moments of respite in paused, sustained harmonies, but Carlile is all scars and fury, as elemental as she has ever been.

She neatly twists a knife in “Throwing Good After Bad,” a stately, pensive but resentful piano ballad about being left behind by someone who would always be “Addicted to the rush, the chase, the new.” And in “When You’re Wrong,” she sings to an aging friend — “The creases on your forehead run like treads on a tire” — who’s trapped in a relationship that “pulls you down while you slowly waste your days.” In Carlile’s songs, she sees human flaws clearly and unsparingly, including her own. More often than not, her music finds ways to forgive.

RICARDO NAGAOKA/THE NEW YORK TIMES Brandi Carlile’s seventh album, “In These Silent Days” (Low Country Sound/Elektra), realizes and polishes her ambitions.