Carlile steps into Grammys spotlight
‘She represents a real woman’
UBy Chris Willman
nless Drake or Kendrick Lamar is living in humbler means than we imagined, it’s a safe bet that Brandi Carlile is the only musician nominated for six or more Grammys this year who calls a log cabin home. You can find her on a hillside 40 minutes outside Seattle, where she resides with her wife and two young daughters at the end of a dirt road that Siri finds highly suspect. Inside, her Rhodesian ridgeback, Chase, naps inches away from the wood-burning stove that is the house’s sole heat source. There’s no sign of Grammy glory anywhere, save for a unicorn-stickered banner made by her 4-year-old, Evangeline, that reads, “Six nominations! Are you kidding me with this? Congrats!”
With her collection “By the Way, I Forgive You” up for album of the year – and its leadoff single, “The Joke,” in the running in the record and song categories – Carlile is the only artist besides Drake and Lamar to be nominated in all three top categories. Maybe more significant is that the 37-year-old singer is the most nominated female artist in what the Grammys would very much like to unofficially position as the Year of the Woman. Why? Because the world’s most prestigious music awards show faced calamitous charges of sexism surrounding the 2018 telecast. In a gradual career build since her 2005 major-label debut, no one presents a better case study in stepping up than Carlile.
Inclusion
Settling under a blanket on a back porch overlooking a misty valley riddled with game trails, Carlile considers issues of inclusion that the Recording Academy now seems to have gotten right. “LGBTQ culture is really well represented,” she says. Another LGBT heroine, Janelle Monae, is competing in the album category, and a historic three trans women have nominations.
Now Carlile is gearing up for an overloaded Grammy week. In the 72 hours prior to the music industry’s biggest night, she’ll be in Los Angeles doing back-to-back appearances – performing at the MusiCares tribute to Dolly Parton on Feb 8 and Clive Davis’ annual preGrammy gala the next day.
Musically as well as sartorially, Carlile is not easily pigeonholed. Just take a look at her A-list collaborations in recent months: Sam Smith joined her for a remake of her “Party of One.” In addition to the Aretha and Dolly salutes, Carlile was a highlight of recent tributes to Joni Mitchell and the late Chris Cornell. She can sing anything, with anyone, it seems, whether she’s dueting with Kris Kristofferson on “A Case of You,” fronting the remnants of grunge forefathers Soundgarden on “Black Hole Sun” or teaming up with
Fantasia, Alessia Cara and Andra Day for “Natural Woman.”
Carlile doesn’t always go for the money note. Her classic singer-songwriter sensibility comes first, so she seesaws back and forth between a conversational, character voice and a purer upper range, looking for the cry and the crack in between. The approach served her well on 2006’s T Bone Burnett-produced breakthrough “The Story,” which captivated millions in part because of a key placement on “Grey’s Anatomy.” The rock power ballad seemed like a hard-to-top early career best until she came up with the even more anthemic “The Joke,” an ode to the marginalized that stands up for bullied, possibly androgynous kids in the first verse and refugee mothers in the second.
Linda Perry, a fellow nominee this year (and one of the few woman ever to show up in the producer category),
is thrilled that Carlile has emerged as a primary face of the Grammy telecast. “Outside the business, there’s probably a lot of people going, ‘Who’s Brandi Carlile?’” Perry says. “And I love that they’re getting to meet her.” Plus, Perry notes, “There’s a generation of kids that are LGBTQI and are starving for role models that have something to give . ... I look at her six nominations as hope – not that anything else is bad, but to me it’s like she’s Luke Skywalker, coming in and bringing balance to the Force.”
Elisabeth Moss stars in and produced a video for “Party of One,” released in December, that vividly expands on the song’s same-sex relationship drama. Moss is thrilled to see Carlile embody “a complicated woman with flaws and fears but also the strength, love and intelligence that all can exist in the same person. She represents a real woman.” (RTRS)