00:00And it haunts me to this day. I still think about that.
00:03Hey, this is Brandi Carlile and I am speaking with The London Standard.
00:07The record in three words is reflective, honest and guileless.
00:13My new album is called Returning to Myself because I think I spent a pretty significant amount of time
00:21a kind of away from myself and I just sort of woke up one day
00:26and knew that I needed to take a close look at why I was doing that.
00:30What I found is that returning to myself wasn't really necessary,
00:35but that maybe taking a risk and doing something significant with my art
00:41that wasn't attached to other people or to another artist was necessary.
00:48My best day in the studio was toward the end of the project when Justin Vernon came by
00:54and I played every song. Aaron Dessner and Andrew Watt were there
01:02and Justin came as a guest wearing an Emmylou Harris t-shirt.
01:05And I had been just obsessing over Wrecking Ball throughout the course of the whole process,
01:11so I thought that was a sign.
01:13And then this thing can happen toward the end of when you're making an album where
01:16you can feel like you're done and you can feel like there are certain things that you're accepting
01:21or that are passing the sort of emotional test for you as an artist.
01:25But then as soon as somebody sits down that's like new and you respect them
01:28and you play that album back, it's not how they react,
01:31but it's the way you feel while you're playing certain moments and certain songs
01:35and you feel your face get hot and you know that that needs to be revisited.
01:40And Justin stayed all night.
01:42I remember we got some beers and some tequila and we worked till three o'clock in the morning
01:48and Justin played on like almost everything.
01:51And when he left, I felt that the album was done.
01:56So many artists have changed my life for so many different reasons.
02:00So many different parts of my life have been changed by certain artists,
02:03but I would have to say fundamentally, it would be Elton John.
02:07Well, Elton John and Bernie Taupin are the reason why I make songs and music and play an instrument.
02:15Rocking and rolling.
02:19I love Jack Black.
02:21I love Tenacious D and I have seen and heard everything they've ever done.
02:25And there was this sort of obscure Jack Black, Tenacious D film called The Pick of Destiny.
02:31And I thought it was so funny.
02:34I memorized like every word of this, of this film.
02:39The deal is they got to practice these rock moves to win the Battle of the Bands.
02:43One's called The Rock Slide where they would like slide across the ground
02:46and the other one was called The Cock Push Up.
02:52They're supposed to lay on their front and push themselves up with nothing but, you know.
02:56I forgot that I wasn't an 18 year old boy and that my whole audience wasn't,
03:01hadn't seen The Pick of Destiny.
03:02I like went to kind of jump off the drum riser, which in and of itself should be embarrassing,
03:08but whatever, I'm in my 20s.
03:10And I kind of like buckled, like my knees went.
03:14And I thought it was funny, you know.
03:17So I got on the microphone and I said to all of these people who had never seen The Pick of Destiny,
03:21unbeknownst to me, and I said, well, now that you've seen my rock slide, you should see my cock push ups.
03:31Silence.
03:34To absolute silence.
03:36And it haunts me to this day.
03:38I still think about that.
03:40Anyway, I told Jack Black about that recently when we did SNL together and he was so embarrassed for me.
03:48And the next day he brought me the tie-dye shirt that he wore in The Pick of Destiny.
03:55Something no one knows about Brandi Carlisle, I have a whole other life that is very involved,
04:03almost as dedicated and sort of singular and tunnel-visioned as my music,
04:08which is that I'm an avid, avid fisherwoman.
04:10I love every kind of fishing, but I am a boat captain, and I have about a 40-foot aluminum
04:16fishing boat called the Captain Fantastic after Elton.
04:20And so I spend a lot of time in the Straits of Onda Fuca and off of the Salish Sea,
04:27fishing for halibut, lingcod, rockfish and salmon.
04:30The most miraculous, biggest fish I ever caught, which was a king salmon on the Kenai Peninsula
04:36in Alaska that was 43 pounds out of the Kenai River.
04:40And I'll see you in the next one.
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