Interrogating Brandi Carlile: I Knew ‘that Wasn’t Me’ Was Our ‘let It Be’
This is the year of Brandi Carlile. Her new CD, Bear Creek, opened high on the music charts. Her tour is a nightly revelation. She just got engaged. It’s been a long time since she sold some of her guitars to buy microphones for “The Twins,” Tim and Phil Hanseroth, the guitarists who stand lean and tall behind her on stage.
Brandi Carlile has a powerful voice — she’s up there with Janis Joplin and Melissa Etheridge — but she’s just as powerful when the tempo slows and the lyrics turn intimate. On the Bear Creek CD, there’s a song like that: “That Wasn’t Me.” It’s about addiction and recovery, about not being as bad as you are on your worst day, about acceptance.
To hear “That Wasn’t Me” is to be marked by it the song haunts you. I’m far from the only one who feels that way, and who wants to know more about the song and its author. And you know how it is: ask one question and, before you know it, you’ve asked fifteen.
Jesse Kornbluth: Lots to love on the new CD, but when I wrote about Bear Creek, the song that jumped out at me and pretty much everyone who’s heard it is “That Wasn’t Me” — hard not to have a good cry over it. So let’s start there. When you write a song like “That Wasn’t Me,” are you in command of the process, or are you channeling?
JK: When you write a song like that, do you immediately know what you’ve got?
JK: Have you always had this access to gut feeling? Or was there a catalytic moment that triggered this ability to write what we feel?
The Beatles And The British Invasion
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“They were doing things nobody was doing. Their chords were outrageous, just outrageous, and their harmonies made it all valid. You could only do that with other musicians. Even if you’re playing your own chords you had to have other people playing with you. That was obvious. And it started me thinking about other people.”
Bob Dylan reflecting on how the Beatles influenced his decision to record with an electric backing band
Beginning in 1964 and lasting until roughly 1966, a wave of British groups, including , , , , , and amongst others, dominated the U.S. music charts. These groups were all heavily influenced by American , , and musical genres they had been introduced to via homegrown British rock ‘n’ roll singers, imported American , and the music of the craze. These UK groups, known collectively as the , reintroduced American youth culture to the broad potential of rock and as a creative medium and to the wealth of musical culture to be found within the United States.
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Electric Twelve-String Guitar in Folk Music
Ron Elliott of The Beau Brummels on the origins of the band’s folk-flavored sound
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