Brandi Carlile is back with her eighth studio album and first solo project in four years. After pouring herself into collaborations with musical icons and legends, the 11x GRAMMY Award-winning and 1x Oscar-nominated songwriter is looking inward, reflecting backward and ultimately, returning home on her brand-new album, Returning To Myself, which will be out on October 24 on Interscope Records/Lost Highway for pre-order. Produced by Carlile, Andrew Watt, Aaron Dessner and Justin Vernon, the album features ten songs, including the title track, which is out now alongside the official music video, directed by Floria Sigismondi. Watch the video below.

In addition to Carlile, Watt, Dessner and Vernon, the album features her longtime bandmates Phil and Tim Hanseroth and SistaStrings (Monique and Chauntee Ross) as well as Josh Klinghoffer, Chad Smith, Matt Chamberlain, Dave Mackay, Rob Moose, Blake Mills, Mark Isham and Stewart Cole.

On “Returning To Myself,” Carlile shares, “I’m not my favorite person to spend my time with. Returning to myself is not just a lonely, but a painfully boring thing to do. So much so that I’m actually not at all interested in doing it.

I prefer to double, triple, and quadruple down on co-dependency, which I’ve come to learn that outside of 12-Step programs and junior high school relationships, isn’t really that unhealthy at all…

For me the key to learning to ‘be alone’ is not being alone at all. It’s being alone in a crowded room. It’s hearing an unexpected doorbell ring and wondering who has shown up to watch me read my book and bite my nails all day. That a guest can be a deep lean-in over a cheap bottle of wine or simply an eyebrow raise and a gesture toward the refrigerator while I play Zelda…where I totally choose myself with someone so close to me I can hear them relax. 

People want to be together in silence more than we allow in our time. It’s falling deeply in love with the car wheels on a gravel road. The possibility of the visitor. The “not being alone-ness” of it all…

Togetherness has given me everything I love about being alive. Starting with my original family in a single wide mobile home, gathered around a wood stove all the way to living with my band, haunting my wife everywhere she goes, raising my children on a tour bus, learning at the feet of Joni Mitchell, to making music with my greatest hero of all time, Elton John.

Why is it heroic to untether, when the tense work of togetherness is so much more interesting?

…because I don’t want to do it. Because I don’t want to return to myself. 

And that’s why I will.”

Returning to Myself Tracklist:

1. Returning To Myself
2. Human
3. A Woman Oversees
4. A War With Time
5. Anniversary 
6. Church & State
7. Joni
8. You Without Me
9. No One Knows Us
10. A Long Goodbye

Photo Credit: Boston Lynn Schulz