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Brandi Carlile’s story is a celebration of human imperfection.
The 27-year-old folk rocker, who will bring her alternately rowdy and mellow tunes to the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center on Saturday night, prefers to record “live to tape” when she’s in the studio, meaning her bandmates all play at once, instead of individually, in order to gel as a unit—even if it means the recordings aren’t as crisp.
She leaves in all of the vocal scoops, audible aspirations and hitches in her voice when she’s screaming on raucous tracks that other musicians would excise with fancy editing equipment, because those tiny glitches (Ms. Carlile might prefer “natural sounds”) lend her final tracks an immediacy and authenticity that underscore her lyrics of imperfect love and time’s inexorable march.
It might be technically flawed, but it’s emotionally honest.
“The sound is more classic. It’s like the music I grew up listening to,” she said in a telephone interview last week, naming bluegrass and country music records her parents used to play around her childhood home in Ravensdale, Washington, about 30 miles from Seattle. The method, she said, “makes you accept your imperfections.”
Whatever musical imperfections Ms. Carlile might have, they sound a lot like assets in the context of her earthy ballads that ring with rootsiness. And Ms. Carlile, who has unfussy chestnut hair and a slight gap between her front teeth, isn’t the only one who thinks so.
In 2005, prior to the release of her debut album, Rolling Stone named her one of the year’s top artists to watch, and two years later her second album, “The Story” (released by Sony), reached the top 50 on the Billboard chart within two weeks of its release and her songs received more than 1 million plays on her Myspace page within a month—despite the fact that her melodies aren’t tailored for radio play.
Her “imperfections” have led to performances on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” and “The Late Show with Conan O’Brien,” and an international tour kicking off this week that includes the East End and winds around to Portugal and Norway.
She’s currently working on her long-awaited third album, which she says should be out this summer. One of her idols, Elton John, has agreed to collaborate on one track, and Ms. Carlile said they just have to hammer out a time to get into the studio together.
Musically, Ms. Carlile is a descendent of the likes of Fiona Apple and the Indigo Girls (with whom Ms. Carlile has recorded multiple times, on one of their albums and her second, “The Story”). She has the toughness of Meredith Brooks, but her emotions are rarer, and the prettiness of Nora Jones but her words are more urgent. She’s part of a new generation of female singer-songwriters—including Missy Higgins, Kim Taylor and KT Tunstall—whose driving, melancholic songs seem to show up with regularity on popular TV dramas like “Friday Night Lights” and “Grey’s Anatomy.”
In fact, three of Ms. Carlile’s songs have played on “Grey’s,” including the title track of “The Story,” which also was released on the third volume of the show’s original soundtrack.
“That had a really big commercial impact. It helped the record a lot,” Ms. Carlile said. “We weren’t expecting it or asking for it.” She said she was flattered to contribute. “That TV show is known for having its finger on the pulse of what’s new and popular.”
Ms. Carlile’s story has taken her far from Ravensdale, where one of her earliest paid gigs ($25 per night) was as a backup singer for an Elvis impersonator. “It taught me a lot about harmony and vocal layering,” she explained. “I learned how to be a great front person watching someone try to be the King every night.”
But she still lives in Washington and still embraces the values she was raised with. Her environmentalism led her to turn down an offer from GM to use one of her songs in a commercial last summer, until the company explained that the purpose of the ad was to tout environmental advances. She agreed to do the ad if she could work with an advertising executive to help shape its message, and she donated the money she earned to environmental groups.
“I had to do a lot of soul searching and a lot of thinking about the greater good,” she said.
Ms. Carlile has created the Looking Out Foundation to support various charities, mostly environmental. She said she donates $1 per concert ticket to the foundation, which has granted money to such organizations as Reverb, Common Ground Church, Honor the Earth and Captain Planet Foundation, according to her website.
“I feel a responsibility as an artist, as a person with a voice that reaches an audience, to educate and take a responsibility for the environment,” she said.
Ms. Carlile doesn’t use music to tell activist stories, although she extols the instructive nature of a lonely walk through the woods and uses organic imagery to sketch out her main theme of time’s corrosive power: “These days we go to waste like wine/That’s turned to turpentine.”
Instead, many of her songs describe some kind of longing for the past, however imperfect. Of a relationship gone sour, she writes: “If love is not enough/Then stay with me because/The heartache can wait.”
For someone as young as she is, Ms. Carlile seems to have an overabundance of stories to tell and emotions to investigate with music—tales she said she picked up on the road. “Traveling has been a surprise,” she said without resentment of the transient life of a musician. “It’s surprising every day. But it’s such a way of life; I don’t know who I would be without it.”
Nor would she have an outlet for her stories without music. As she puts it in the final lyrics of “The Story”: “These stories don’t mean anything/When you’ve got no one to tell them to/It’s true/I was made for you.”
In the song, she’s speaking to a lover, but she might as well be serenading her audience.
Brandi Carlile will perform at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center on Saturday, March 28, at 8 p.m. Tickets are $35, $45, or $55, available by calling the PAC box office at 288-1500; stopping at the Arts Center at 76 Main Street in Westhampton Beach, or visiting www. whbpac.org.
on Mar 24, 2009