Brandi Carlile

00:00:08 Speaker 1: Pushkin, armed with only what she calls poor kid work ethic. Brandy Carlisle spent the early part of her life fighting her parents, politics, the church, and fighting to be heard while singing over belligerent drunks and crowded bars. Brandy's voice demands attention, as you might recall hearing in our episode with Jack White and Brendan Benson. Her twenty nineteen Grammy performance of her song The Joke blew even her most critical of peers away. But long before that, she was already making a name for herself on stages across the Pacific Northwest, where she was raised and now lives with her twin bandmates she simply calls the Twins, and since then she's released six albums, formed The High Woman with Marion Morris and Amanda Shires, and has just generally captured the attention of the music world. In her chat with Rick, she recounts her tumultuous passed and talked about how she's learned to pick her battles over her long career. And then there's a night she witnessed a miracle at Joni Mitchell's house. This is broken record liner notes for the Digital Age I'm justin Richmond. Just a quick note here. You can listen to all of the music mentioned in this episode on our playlist, which you can find a link to in the show notes for licensing reasons, each time a song is referenced in this episode, you'll hear this sound effect. All right, enjoyed the episode. Here's Rick Rubin and Brandy Carlisle from Shangula. I remember the first time I saw you, and I don't remember how it worked out that you were on the show that I saw you at, but I saw you at a place called the wilshirt Ebel Theater. Yeah, and you're opening for James Taylor. And I was there to see James Taylor, and I didn't know you, and I don't even think I stayed to watch James Taylor. After I saw you, I was so blown away. And I remember you got a standing ovation as an as an unknown opening act. Yeah, I remember. It was like it was it was ridiculous. It was really a ridiculous performance. And the people that had come to see it, like um from Columbia Records and stuff, they told me the next day they said, God, you know, there was no way backstage at that show. But on the stage and there was no intermission between me and James, and James came out to play his first song and the whole theater saw you walk backstage during Fire and Rain and they were like, Rick Ruman's going back there. We got to sign this girl. He sees something and when he sees something, it it's real, and you know it was real. It really. I really don't think you understand how much of an impact you made in that sense, you know, happy to be of service, had no idea, but happy to be of services, sir. But you actually saw me way earlier than that. Yeah, yeah, do you want to know? Yeah? Please? So, um, I'm writing a book and I'm not sure why I'm doing it, but there's a whole lot about you in there. Wow. Because I got asked to open for a kid, a guy called Johnny Lange in Seattle, and a guy called Brendan Mendoza was in the audience. Yeah, and I was only maybe nineteen thirty nine now, so it's a long time ago. Yeah, Brendan Mendoza. So I worked for a guy called Rick Rubin. Yeah, he was a young and our guy who worked at at American Recordings. Yeah, and he flew me to La to play for you at a swinghouse, and no recollection of that. Well, I did because it was a make or break moment in my life. That was, of course. And this is an interesting thing I've learned since I gained this notoriety for an artist, how a public person can have such an impact on another person's life without even really knowing, you know, and it's just this one of the inconsequential things. But to me, it was an enormous deal because I was being flown there to play for you, and I had got really sick, like a laryngitis, and I have this terrible paradoxical allergy to cough medicine that I didn't know about, and I took a cough medicine and I started having a neurological reaction to it. I had involuntary muscle spasms in my face and hands, and I'm sitting there trying to play my showcase for you, and I can't remember the words, and my fingers won't press down on the strings to play the chords, and I have muscle twitches in my jaw, and I just felt like my life was ending. And you interrupted my showcase and you said, is there something about you today that's making you not be yourself? And I said, yeah, I'm really sick and I think I'm having an allergic reaction to this cough medication. And you said, well, why don't you go home and get better and then come back and do this again. Wow. I was like, yeah, right, yeah, fucking right. I know I'm never going to get a chance to come back here and play for you again. And I went home, no recollection. It's unbelievable. It's a great story. I went home thinking I've blown it, and you brought me back two weeks later and I was better and I was really ready, and I played for you at Swing House and it's like, I remember what I was wearing, I remember everything. And the very first song I played for you was a song called Shadow on the Wall. And I had showcased for just about every record label and everyone passed yeah, and some people didn't even wait till I was finished singing a song before they leave the room. And I finished that song and you put your hand up and you were sitting just like that, and you said, that's a really amazing song. Will you play it again? And I knew right then that I was gonna make it. I knew it. I was like, he wants me to play it again? And I played it again and ended. You said, why don't you just play it one more time? Really again? And I played it again, and I played you two more songs, and you had me played those songs again. And by the time it had ended, I'd played three songs seven or eight times. And we had a conversation. You told me you'd just seen Damien Rice. Yeah, and Johnny Cash was still alive. Yes, And you said that you thought we would know each other and worked together down the road, and a word spread about that, and you know, it was looking like I was going to sign to American for a long time. But I remember that, and I remember what happened. I remember I was moving from one label to another. You were in total chaos at the moment, yeah, moving from one label to another. And I remember that at the new label, whereas my new distributor was going to be Warner Brothers. And I said, this is the first act that we're going to do. And I remember the Warner Brothers people didn't didn't get it and didn't like it. And I remember I couldn't believe it. It's like she's incredible. She's incredible. No one got it. You were the first one Rick to ever get it. You're the first one to ever say play that again. And so I'll never forget it. And you know that James Taylor's show that you were at, it made me look so cool. Everybody talked about it for here. Sure that the James Taylor was after the Swing House. Yeah, yeah, I don't remember the Swing House, but I definitely remember the James Taylor because I just couldn't believe what I was seeing. Well, your life was much different than my life was at the time, wasn't it. You know, No, I trust you one. I'm not questioning what you're saying. I'm just telling you I don't remember it. Yeah, I bet it was. You were so beloved and just popular and such an inspiration to me. Yeah, incredible, And you brought me back, you gave me a second chance. And at the James Taylor show also, Columbia Records was there, and that's when I got my deal with Columbia Records and made my first album, Amazing. And then I remember when I was at Columbia for a little while, we worked together on Give Up the Ghost whatever, Yeah, whatever album you're working on at the time, and I remember it was fun. It was fun. Yeah. Yeah, that's still my favorite album actually beautiful, Yeah, beautiful, I love it. It It was a big emotional hard time for me in my life. I don't like who I was really at that time, but um, I liked the album. Yeah, I remember. I just remember the power in the vocals was off the chart, like yeah, because you had me singing into a sm seven right, is that what they're called microphone? Yeah, And every other microphone i'd ever sang into, I would distort, so the engineer or the producer would ask me to sing differently. I end up doing a little mic control. Yeah, and it messed with my performance emotionally. So I never sounded on an album like I did Live and Tell that album because we use the same mike you would use live, because you sounded good live, Yeah, And you just seems like it would be obvious now it seems like it would be obvious, but apparently it's only obvious to you. So since then, how many albums have you made seven seven as an artist? Yes, and the last one was maybe You're most well received of the bat, which is unusual in today's world because normally first couple of albums tend to do really good and then people fade away and you've only kind of continued to build over the seven albums. Yeah, yeah, because of that. But some of it has to do with just sort of like a cultural undertone, like where we are in the world right now and the perspective that the album was written from. I think it gave people comfort in a way that it resonated sort of beyond I think me as an artist and more into the sort of culturals that gust of like, I wonder if that's true. I think you're selling yourself short, do you think? I don't know. I think it belongs to the moment, but maybe maybe yes, it belongs to the moment, and yes, the moment plays a role. But the reason people like it is because you're great. And that's the real reason. Thank you. I will receive that. I think, weren't it great? And it was right in the moment, it wouldn't matter at all and nobody would notice. It's because it's great, So thank you. Tell me about your situation growing up well, Seattle, Seattle, just outside of Seattle. I started out living in the airport town outside of Seattle seatach Burian area. We moved out to a single white trailer in the middle of the country when I started fifth grade, and up until that point we were only allowed to listen to like classic country and western music. It's what my mother sang and her father and big country music family. Where were they from Oklahoma and the well they went up north, so Oklahoma. Both sides of the family were actually from Oklahoma, and some of them just migrated around, you know, the country. My great grandparents lived in an RV. They just toured around following bluegrass festivals, the really small ones, you know. So it was always a musical family. Yeah, yeah, a musical family without us really even knowing where a musical family, we thought all families or musical families. So everybody played, everybody played something or supported it in some way. And then my mother side of the family went from there to up north between Fargo and Minneapolis, plays called Wobin northern Minnesota. They started the whole it's not Southern, it's Western thing about country music and moved west and so country music was our family's thing, and I got out to the country for the first time and started to feel weird, started to feel weird and gay, and I picked up a fifth grade book report on a kid called Ryan White who died of AIDS in nineteen ninety one. He was a hemophiliac and when he was diagnosed with HIV, the church tried to politicize him and get him to speak out against gay men and imply that it was disease it was created by by gay men. And in the book he was befriended by a guy called Elton John. And I saw this book report as a departure from my family in a weird way their politics. Something was starting to become clear about my sexuality because I was eleven and this guy, Elton John, seemed really special to me. So I went to the King County Library and I checked out two CDs, Tumbleweed Connection and the one here and There that had Skyline Pigeon on it because he's sang it at this kid's funeral. And I loved that boy and wrote this big book report on him. And I checked out a biography by Philip Norman, and I got into David Bowie via Elton John, and also Queen became fascinated with Freddie Mercury George Michael, You Two and the Beatles all in this on this biography that I had read, and I started dressing different, talking different, arguing politics with my dad, and started liking a different kind of music and started standing out and becoming an artist. And it was hard. It was hard on my parents spiritually, politically was hard because we were poor and I was already weird enough at school. But that's when I started to take a turn away from just playing the spoons and singing at family jams to really wanting to be an artist. And then when did you start singing? What was your first professional experience singing? We had these auditions at this place called the Northwest Grand Ole Opry, where my mom's dad was the kind of patriarch family yodeling, very glamorous, amazing man. He'd died really young, of Luke Garret's as he's actually he was only fifty, and with the money he left, which was not much, it was just enough for my mom to buy a little PA system, and she decided to start doing music for real because he was gone and she wanted to do something to heel herself, and she started doing auditions and she took me with her to an audition at a place called the Northwest grand Ole Opry and I got to audition too, and we both made it. And the first song I sang was Tennessee Flat Top Box by Johnny Cash. Second one was San Antonio Stroll by Tenny Tucker. And I started singing on Friday and Saturday nights, rehearsals on Wednesdays. How old are you it this time? Eight? Did that till I was like thirteen or fourteen. It's also sanging bars and contests and anywhere I could sing, And I sang full time. And when I was fourteen, I started singing background vocals for an Elvis impersonator, learning how to play guitar around fifteen or sixteen, and writing songs. I started my own bands, and by the time I was twenty, I came to LA played for you. You were ready. Well, I don't think I was ready, actually, but I was. I was one of the steps for sure. Well. The fact that you did all of the fact that you played in front of audiences for so long is something so few new musicians have. Yes, you know, it's it's very few and far between the ec people who've done years of playing in front of people before we get to see them, and there's a there's an experience that comes. There's a level of expertise from that experience that you can't create any other way. By doing it, you can't get you can't get years of practice without years no And the main thing you can't get is you can't get over your tet television understanding that just because you're performing, an audience should listen to you. That's the worst part. That's the most soul destroying thing for a new artist that doesn't have busking or bar experience is that they don't understand that you actually have to earn the other person's attention and it can be really hard work. And sometimes they can be assholes, and sometimes they can be drunk, or they can be walking past you to work, and you have to figure out what it is that's going to make them stop, put down the beer for even twenty seconds, or stop where they're going and take out a buck and throw it in your guitar case. Like to any kid, anybody that's just starting out music, I so strongly recommend busking. If you can't get a gig in a bar, bust, try to figure out what it is that you do with your voice, or with your words or your body that makes someone stop. I would say that it goes for everything, even beyond music. It's like the idea that we're just naturally going to be accepted. Yeah, as great doesn't really happen, like you need to go out and prove it. Yeah, that's real life. Yeah. So what were some of the methods you would use to get people to stop and pay attention. I figured out early on that for me it was volume and dynamics. Sometimes if I couldn't get a bar to quiet down, I would stop playing my guitar and start screaming, or I would mute my guitar and start whispering. Yeah. Um, just depended on how they were reacting, you know, and I would just try and give them what I thought they needed. And it became it came with trying to learn to be a musical EmPATH, reading a room, trying to give the people what they want. And you know, as I've gotten older, I've started to understand that it's not a glitzye or a silly thing to be an entertainer. You know, It's there's artistry in it, absolutely, Yeah, It's just more of a performance it's a different kind of art, but it's it's all art. It's all it's all making something beautiful and sharing it with people. Yeah, we'll be right back with Rick and Brandy Carlyle. After the break. We're back with Rick and Brandy Carlyle. Here's Brandy singing a song from her latest album, By the Way I Forgive You. This song is called The Mother. It's about It's about my daughter, Evangeline, and it's about my path into um motherhood and how twisted and rocky bumpy it was, and how even long after she was here, I wasn't sure I made the right decision. Wow. And it's hard for people to admit that they feel that way. But I wanted to write a song about it because once I did admit it, it's like it opened me up to falling in love with her in my own time. And it's a complicated thing. Gay domesticities is a complicated and sort of new thing, and there's not a lot of pioneering books about it. So I wrote this song beautiful. Tell me about your songwriting process. Is there any would you say it follows any typical methods or different every time? It's really changed as I've gotten older, I write a lot less songs now. Sometimes it's scary. Sometimes I will write like one every two years, really, and it feels like it's going away, but it never does. And if I always just trust that it won't go away, then it comes back. Do you think it's because you're on the road so much? No, I think it's because I've I've transformed as an artist to be something other than a songwriter, than just a songwriter. It's kind of like an element of who I think I am now. But I'm just as happy to sing songs that the twins have written, particularly because we live together. You know, we all live together now on the same property, and we're married to each other's siblings, and we have babies that all go to school and meet up every morning at the same bus stop, and so much has changed in the last twenty years. But when they write a song and they and they bring it through to me, and it's about our friend taking his own life, or it's about you know, one of our dad's in rehab, I know what it's about, and it could have been written by me, And so I still get choked up and I get a lump in my throat when I'm singing, and it feels like it came from my soul because we're waking up and looking out the same windows every day. So I don't need to be writing a song really to feel moved by interpreting one. But when I do, I'm much much more spiritually open about having an influence than I was when I was younger, and it's always comes from a more honest place, which is interesting because I think because I've never had any commercial success per se, I'm not chasing it, yes, which is super healthy. Thank god it really worked out, because had something really exploded early on and then there was always this sort of trying to get back to that place, it would have undermined the whole thing. Yeah, you're right, I really feel like that. I've observed that now, and I don't want it. I've never wanted it. It's not really what I'm not cut out for that, you know. And You've had a great life doing what you do on your own terms. Yeah, you sing the songs you want to sing, You sing them the way you want to sing, exactly. And I live with my brothers, and I've got my wife, and I've got my babies and I've got all the things I want, you know, I've got a four wheeler in a fishing boat, and I'm fine. I can remember. I won't say the name of the artist, but a very well known pop star who's a big fani Ors. I don't know if you know. I don't know if you know her, but she told me she was so blown away by you, and she made music that was very manufactured pop, and it was like, I was surprised that she liked you because the music she made was so different. And she said, well, if I could do what I want, I would do what Brandy does. But I can't. I'm in this machine and I have to sing this garbage. And literally it was like, Wow, that's what I want to do. She's doing it. I don't get to do that. I just get to make these pop records. Yeah, there's a time I felt that way about her, whoever she is. Yeah, you know, if I could do what I want, I would be famous, and I would I would be rich, and I wouldn't be so tired, and I wouldn't be taking steroids and I wouldn't be living in this van, you know. But now I'm just I'm just so glad that that that that never happened to me. And it's no insult because I love a rock star like anybody else loves a rock star. God. I mean, I think fame is a beautiful thing. It's just not my thing. It's also the path that suits us often finds us. You know, we may be looking for something else, we find the path we belong on and U and it feels good, like, you know, like to some degree, it's like we're we're characters in this movie and we have ideas of what we want the next scene to be, but we don't get to control that. And do you think sometimes when we think we're manifesting it, that maybe we're just innately knowing it's ahead of us. It could be, it would be I don't know, it could be it could be one way. And whether whether it's us manifesting it or whether it's a premonition of what's to come doesn't matter. Yeah, you know, either way, it's cool to have that feeling of like, oh, I feel like this is going to happen. A minute it happens. It makes the experience of living more fun, like like you get to feel like, why, wow, I'm really in this I'm in this life, yeah, and I'm open to it. Yeah. So the twists and turns. You know, it's hard sometimes when the thing that comes up is something that is really painful. That's the first thing I thought when I said that too. Yeah, Yeah, it's hard when the thing that comes up is really painful to to know. Wow, like watching it in the movie and Wow, our hero just got into trouble and that's you know, I wonder how he's going to get out of this, do you know what I mean? Like like to be able to remove ourselves from the emotion in it and be trusting that the universe is on our side. Yeah. I mean the big thing for me is I just made the decision in my um very like right around the time I turned thirty, in my early thirties, to stop being in fights, you know, not to stop standing up for myself, yeah, but to stop being in fights is actually much more proactive. I don't want to say aggressive, because it's not aggressive, but it's it's much stronger to stop being in fights. Were what were some of the things that you might have fought over in the past, Oh, God, you name it. Man. I've been fighting since I was a little kid, just fighting in the schoolyard, fighting people, fighting in relationships, fighting God, fighting the church, fighting over politics, fighting over music, fighting producers. You know, every record I made ended in me falling out with the producer all every time. And what do you think the what do you think was underneath it? Poor kid work, ethic, a damage and chaos and also passion, you know, and like also a little bit of it is being gay and kind of growing up in the church and like having to fight for your actual eternity, you know, and just the dignity of showing up every day and being who you are when no one wants you to. And you take that into places that are inappropriate, but it was appropriate in those scenarios, you know. And it just took falling in love and Saturn return to kind of making rise above myself little bit and see it beautiful. So tell me how was the last album that he made different than the ones that came before it? I mean I was different. We made this album with Dave Cobb and Shooter Jennings, and Shooter Jennings is like a spirit animal person that is like in my life to just remind me not to judge people remind me not to be uptight. And Dave Cobb was a person that scared me, and I felt like his his talent was intimidating, and his audacity was intimidating, and his guileless authority was intimidating. And I had only made two made two self produced records, and I wasn't really planning on going into the studio with a with an influential producer. And I was trying to put together an album for war Child to benefit refugee kids, kids mostly from Syria and camps and I back in Jordan and I called I got Dolly Parton to do my song the story incredible. It was so cool, man. But she wanted us to record a track, and I had no idea really what to do, and I had to kind of admit my limitations. And I thought about Dave Cobb because I was getting ready to drive through Nashville, and I just knew that he had a handle on it. And so I called him up and I was like, do you have time to do this? And he's like, no, I have absolutely zero time, but I will do this in the middle of the night for you. Because my wife is a refugee and so we pulled our bus into our c studios in the middle of the night and he played Wichita Lineman in the Ghetto, and then we recorded the story for Dolly Parton. I left there totally mind blown, thinking I never wanted to work with Dave Cobb, but that I was really impressed and shoot, her and I were going to work together. And we got to talking about it and he said, I think you should give Dave a second thought. He's my brother and he loves you, and we should really think about this. So I was like, ready for a radical change in my life. The twins are ready for radical change in their lives. And we went in and everything was set up. We didn't get sounds or anything. We got lunch, sat in the corner. We listened to some records and he said, so, what do you want to play and we're like, well, we'll play you this song, you know, and we just played it for him, but he recorded and he's like, well we got our first track, and I was like, wow, this is this is different? You know, how does it even sound? I got sounds where you got here, don't worry about it. And the whole record was that way done in two weeks, bursting into tears the whole time, emotional breakdowns, dig and deep mining of the soul new way that we had never done it before, and I knew, I knew it was different. What's interesting about that is it sounds like by him taking care of the production and everything else, you got to really dive into being the artist and not having to wear multiple hats and completely be in the music. Now you're right, Yeah, now I want to do it again. Yeah, it makes sense, I understand. Yeah, there's there's also a psyche what we talked about earlier, the idea that sometimes it's helpful to have someone outside who really likes you. You know, it's really helpful. Yeah that was big. That was really big. And he just made me feel like he really liked my voice. Yeah, you know, I have been in the studio with a lot of people that didn't like my voice. Yeah. And of course there's affectation, and of course there's lots of reasons for that, but I just think that, like that's part of making music that isn't manufactured. Is that part of like growing as an artist, I think is developing and shedding affectation. Yes, you can't strip a young person at the affectation. They have to decide to shed the affectation and got it could take a long time. Yeah, you know, it took me a long time. It happens naturally, and it only it happens when it wants to happen. It's not anything can be forced. If you pull off the affectation. Before it comes off, we don't really know what's underneath. That's so true. I've never heard it said that way before, but that's exactly why you can't do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it comes from the person not knowing who they are yet. So this is the the crutch or the training wheels till I get to be who I am. I'm gonna I'm going to go through this vehicle. Yeah. The last time I saw you play was with the Avid Brothers at Madison Square Garden, right, which was incredible. It was an incredible night both seeing both seeing you and them. There was a place where I used to see, you know, big concerts when I was a little kid. Was a real thrill for me. Man. I love those boys. Aren't they great? I Mean it's more than that. I just feel like we just the world just needs them in a big, big way. And I need them. And yeah, did you know Scott painted me for the cover of my album by the way, if you give you I did not, but that makes now that you say it, Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah he did. And this is how gay I am. I have such a crush on Scott. I think Scott is one of the most beautiful people I've ever met. And I went to his house by myself in North Carolina to set for him and be painted. And I had to rent my very first card I never rented a car all of myself. And I went out there and I spent the entire day with Scott inside of a box that he created out of a sheet and some cardboard, and the little light coming in at the top, and he was like this close to my face all day, and I was thinking, I feel nothing around this gorgeous specimen, a specimen of a man. Like this is how gay I actually, because he's so handsome, and I was so nervous to be like he's of course married father, I'm married and a mother, but I just love him. But he's one of those people where he is as beautiful of a person as he is to look at, like he's just more more beautiful because of exactly that. Yeah, it's we see him beautiful because it's his soul shining through. You're exactly right. Yeah, and Seth is the same way. Amazing, amazing fellas and their parents and their wives and their kids. It's all the same thing. There's a big love light shining out in North Carolina because of them. Yeah. I always feel like any chance I get to be around them improves my life. Yeah, absolutely absolutely. A friend of mine made the documentary May at Last, Jed Appatow. Yeah, a lot of it here, a lot of it here. And he's a he works in comedy, and most of the people that we know in the comedy world tend to be dysfunctional. It's the nature of the reason you find yourself in comedy comes out of dysfunction. And I was laughing with Judge because he was saying what a great experience it was making this and how great it was to be around those people, And I said, you know, most of the people we know are insane. This is what like, we don't know any like nice people. They are the only nice people I know. That's what it feels here. It's like there, you can't believe that anyone is like this, Yeah, but they are. It's real. Yeah. And you keep thinking you're waiting for the road to get pulled. You're like, when I turn my back, you're gonna do something weird. But they don't know. No, it's an incredible family. I don't know how it happened. I remember I asked their dad when I met their dad the first time, I said, how did what did you do for these people to exist like this in the world? And he said, I back him. I back him no matter what. I back him. If somebody came and told me that one of the boys killed somebody, I would say, I guess somebody needed some killing. That is profound. Yeah, that's some parenting advice right there. Unconditional love. Wow. We'll be right back with the rest of Rick's interview with Brandy Carlisle. We're back with Brandy Carlisle. The night before this interview, Brandy performed Joni Mitchell's classic album Blue and Its Entirety at LA's Disney Concert Hall. She talked to Rick about how she first discovered Joni Mitchell's music. I was really late to the game on Joni Mitchell, and there's a whole thing about it that I won't go into. But when I did, like Deep Dive, I made up for lost time in a really big way. And I became upset with the album Blue. I learned the entire thing. It was like my life. And then I got into Court and Spark. So eight and a half, almost nine years ago, skipped over for the Roses, went straight to Courton Spark, and then went back to Song for Siegel, all the way into Ladies of the Canyon, Blue for the Roses, Courton Spark, Kissing of Summer Line, says Gyri, which is now my favorite Joni Mitchell album, all the way up to Shine. So her seventy fifth birthday party, which is almost a year ago to the day, they asked a lot of really cool people to come and tribute her by singing songs. And I wanted to do it so bad. I begged and begged and begged, and they wouldn't let me do it, and they told me no, and it was full, and I just kept writing letters, and I kept digging to find out other people that were connected to it, and then writing them letters. And you know, Mom and Dad said no. So I was asking all the aunties and uncles and basically because Chris Christofferson got asked to do a case of you. And I've been helping Chris a little bit on stage with his memory and his ability to kind of deliver a live performance that's not his own, like his own lyrics. He can do it with a teleprompter, but outside of that he struggles with simple things like microphone placement, plugging in his guitar and stuff. So I've been kind of, like his wife says, like she can help him to the edge of the stage, but after that, you know. So I stepped in a bunch of times to be with Chris because he's still so special. And so he got asked to do a case of you, so I was able to help him do that, and then they gave me down to you from Court and Spark. So I did it and I found it really transformative. And I brought this picture to have signed by Jonie and it was my wife, Katherine's, like her one job to get it signed, and she didn't do it. She was a PA for Paul McCartney for like ten years, so she's good at reading a room. You know. She just knew it wasn't appropriate. But I was so moved by the night. I said, I'm going to cover the entire Joni Mitchell Blue album at Disney Hall in La a year from now. And she said all right, and she called Jonie's assistant and she said, we'll kind of get this picture signed for Brandy for Christmas is a surprise. And they said, yeah, I'm bringing by the house and and uh, you know, come on up and we'll get we'll get it signed. And so Katherine went by the house, but Joonie invited her in and wound up sitting at the table with her and having a long talk about nature in Canada and they had they kind of had a friendship thing, and Jonie said, well, you know, anytime you're you and your wife want to get together and grab it bye to eat, you know we can't. And after the Grammys, Jonie reached out and she took me outs dinner and Katherine and we had this amazing dinner. She ordered all of our food for us. It was like really special and she said at the end of that, she didn't say much, but at the end of it she said, you know, I don't do music anymore. And before you start feeling sorry for me and getting weird about it. I'm a painter. I'm not sad, but it does bother me that I have these instruments setting around that are so beautiful and no one plays them. So if you want to get a few young people together, some people together, you want to come over my house and play some music one night, let's do a jam. And I was like, all right, so we did. The very first night, me and Hosier went over to Joonie's house and we had dinner. It was like Mexican food, sat outside and Joanie, like annadvertently tells the stories of her songs without telling us. She's telling the stories of her songs. So if you know Jony, you know the story. And it's really amazing. You know, She's talk about some turbulent flight she was sawing, and I was like, man, turn this bird around, and you know, like what she's talking about. If you know Blue, you know. So that was fascinating part of the night. And then we kind of migrated into the living room around some instruments and I played a song. I played a song of mine called Cannonball, and then Andrew Hosier played a song and we're in the middle of these songs and like apropos of nothing. Shaka Khan walks in, and Joanie always has a plan, that's the thing about her. She wanted to, you know, surprise us and throw us for a loop and show us how it was done. So she invited some people we didn't know about. So Shaka Khan walks in. She starts throwing a fourth part at harmony on top of the Crosbie stills a Nash song I was singing, and middle of that one, Herbie Hancock walks in and he sits down at a piano and we are just hyperventilating, Me and Andrew beside ourselves, and the twins and my wife and Joni's got this big, knowing, mischievous grin on her face. And Herbie starts hovering on a chord, you know, and he's like, what are the kids? And do you know how are we gonna how are we gonna do this jam? We don't know what he's doing. It's just really diminished and there's all these things happening, and he's playing, and everybody gets real quiet because we didn't know what was going to happen. And out of the middle of the room we hear summertime and the living is easy. And it's Joni who's just opened her mouth and saying for the first time since her aneurysm seven years ago. Herbie burst into tears. Everybody burst into tears, and Joni sat there grinning that mischievous grin, and Shaka goes, the fish are jumping in the cotton is high, and Joy goes, the fish are jumping and the cotton is high. And the next thing you know, Jonny's singing again. And she sang for an hour and didn't stop. And so we've been going over there and jamming and Joni's been singing, and that's that's how it goes. So beautiful. You growing up, you didn't listen to Joni. What was the what happened that got you into it? Well, Tibo and Burnette played Blue for me when I was making the story, so that would have been two thousand and five, two thousand and six, and her voice was so high and she got to the line that said, um, I want to renew you, I want to shampoo you, and I hated it. It was so heterosexual and submissive. It just bothered me. It was like, oh, this is this is not tough, this is some other thing. This is feminine, and and I wrote it off. And then all these years later, I met my wife and we we were holed up in a cabin together in northern Michigan and listening to music, and she brought Damien Rice and she brought Blue and she put on Blue and I laughed and I said, you always, I don't even really like Jony Mix. She actually and she got like deadly silent, and she was like, I don't actually know you like I thought I did. If you can't get your head around Joni Mitchell. And I was like, well, it's just that I like tough singers and she's just not tough, and I hate the lyric. I want to renew you, I want to shampoo you. And she goes, really, she's not tough, like because she sounds like a feminine woman. And I was like, well, it's a lot more than that, and she goes, do you know what little Green is about? And I said no, and she told me and she put on little Green and I broke down. I just completely broke down. And it changed not just the way I looked at Joni Mitchell, but the way I looked at women and femininity and toughness and how intertwined they really are. And so it put me in touch with my femininity in a new way. And so when I dove into Jonie, I did a deep dive because I realized that I wasn't just fundamentally wrong about Joni Mitchell. I was fundamentally wrong about what I thought it meant to be. Tough, beautiful story. It's amazing how small revelations can change our perception in great ways that you wouldn't expect. You wouldn't expect you not liking a lyric in a song to frame the way you see the world, and just through that one breaking through that one change opened up you open up yourself to a whole different way of seeing the world in myself and it really did amazing. Yeah, I'll never be the same writer after that either. Beautiful cool. Thanks for coming all right, Coop. Thank you to Brandy Carlyle for stopping buy Shanghala I'm playing for Rick. Her latest album with the Grammy Award winning By the Way I Forgive You is out now. You should to check it out along with the rest of our favorite Brandy songs at broken record podcast dot com. Broken Record is produced with help from Jason Gambrell, Mi La Belle, Leah Rose, Matt Laboza, and Martin Gonzalez for Pushkin Industries. Our theme musics by Kenny Beats. I'm justin Richmond. Thanks for listening.