Brandi Carlile

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Brandi Carlile

American singer-songwriter

Also known as: Brandi Marie Carlile

Written by Laura Payne

Fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Last Updated: Jun 27, 2025 • Article History

Quick Facts

In full:: Brandi Marie Carlile

Born:: June 1, 1981, Ravensdale, Washington, U.S. (age 44)

Awards And Honors:: Grammy Award (2023); Grammy Award (2019)

Notable Works:: “Bear Creek”; “Brandi Carlile”; “By the Way, I Forgive You”; “Give Up the Ghost”; “In These Silent Days”; “The Firewatcher’s Daughter”; “The Story”

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Brandi Carlile (born June 1, 1981, Ravensdale, Washington, U.S.) is an American musician and singer-songwriter known for her powerful voice and distinctive blend of folk, rock, country, and Americana music. In addition to her rise to fame in music, she has been widely recognized for her storytelling, advocacy for LGBTQ rights, and her role in revitalizing the Americana music genre.

Early life

Carlile is the eldest of three children and was raised in Ravensdale, Washington, a rural and isolated community outside Seattle. Having few friends or neighbors close by, she entertained herself by hiking and camping in the nearby woods and by singing. Many of Carlile’s family members were musical, including her mother, grandparents, and great-grandparents, who all were singers and greatly influenced her early musical development. At age 8, she sang the Tammy Wynette song “Stand By Your Man” with her mother on the radio, and, as part of another performance, she sang “Tennessee Flat Top Box” by Johnny Cash, also with her mother.

When Carlile was a teenager, she revealed to her classmates that she was a lesbian. Carlile’s family moved frequently during this time, and her father’s alcoholism was at its worst. In high school, when she learned that they would be moving to a location where she would have to enroll in a different school in the middle of her sophomore year, both she and her brother, Jay, dropped out on the same day. The two had been part of a band. Her decision to quit school allowed her to focus on music.

Fighting Machinists

At age 17, Carlile taught herself to play the guitar. She began busking in downtown Seattle and took any gigs she could find. She learned about harmony and rhythm during a stint performing as a backup singer for a friend’s father who was an Elvis Presley impersonator. A turning point came when she was cutting demos in a recording studio and heard the Fighting Machinists, a local rock band featuring twin brothers Tim and Phil Hanseroth, in another room at the studio. She and the brothers bonded quickly, recognizing a shared passion for songwriting and performing.

After the Fighting Machinists broke up, Carlile collaborated with the Hanseroth brothers and recruited them to play with her. They cowrote some of her songs and influenced her sound. Their first performance as a group was in 2000, and, within a couple of years, they were touring with and opening shows for artists such as Dave Matthews, India.Arie, and Shawn Colvin.

Rise to fame

Studio Albums

Brandi Carlile (2005)
The Story (2007)
Give Up the Ghost (2009)
Bear Creek (2012)
The Firewatcher’s Daughter (2015)
By the Way, I Forgive You (2018)
In These Silent Days (2021)
Who Believes in Angels? (2025)

In 2004 Carlile secured a contract with Columbia Records, and they released her self-titled debut album the following year. The album, with 8 of its 10 songs written or cowritten by Carlile, received glowing praise and earned her a spot on Rolling Stone’s list of “10 Artists to Watch in 2005.” To support the album’s release, Carlile went on tour. She headlined several concerts and performed as an opening act for artists such as Ray LaMontagne, Tori Amos, and Chris Isaak.

Carlile’s second album, The Story (2007), was produced by Grammy Award-winning songwriter and record producer T Bone Burnett and received critical acclaim. It was recorded on two-inch audiotape, a medium known for retaining authenticity in sound. The Hanseroth brothers again contributed significantly to the songwriting and feature on guitar and bass on the album’s tracks. Carlile’s next album, Give Up the Ghost (2009), showcases a duet with Elton John. The album peaked at number 26 on the Billboard 200 chart, making it Carlile’s first album to break through the Billboard Top 40.

In November 2010 Carlile collaborated with the Seattle Symphony, performing two sold-out shows that were recorded and released as Live at Benaroya Hall with the Seattle Symphony (2011). She returned to the studio to record Bear Creek (2012), an album named for the converted turn-of-the-century barn where it was recorded. The album reached number 10 on the Billboard 200 chart.

In 2016 Carlile earned her first Grammy nomination for The Firewatcher’s Daughter (2015). The album, which climbed to number nine on the Billboard 200 chart, included arena-style rock songs, such as “Blood Muscle Skin & Bone” and the foot-stomping “The Things I Regret,” alongside the more-delicate harmonized arrangements of “The Eye.”

Carlile reached a new level of critical success with the album By the Way, I Forgive You (2018), which was nominated for six Grammy Awards in 2019. It ultimately was recognized with three Grammys: best Americana album, best American roots song for “The Joke,” and best American roots performance, again for “The Joke.” The album peaked at number five on the charts.

Later albums and memoir

Carlile’s later albums include In These Silent Days (2021), which debuted at number one on the Billboard Top Rock and Americana/Folk charts. In 2022 Carlile again received multiple Grammy nominations, including song of the year for “Right on Time” (off In These Silent Days), which also was nominated for record of the year and best pop solo performance. The same year, Carlile recorded an acoustic version of the album, which was released as a compilation with the original as In These Silent Days In The Canyon Haze. The re-release garnered her seven Grammy nominations and three wins in 2023, including best Americana album, as well as best rock song and best rock performance for the single “Broken Horses.”

She collaborated with Elton John again for Who Believes in Angels?, released in 2025. Featuring tracks written by Carlile, John, and John’s longtime creative partner Bernie Taupin, the album offers a mix of rockers, ballads, and gospel-infused tunes.

In 2021 Carlile published her memoir, Broken Horses, in which she shares her experiences growing up with a father with alcohol use disorder and her feelings about sexuality, faith, and the importance of music in her life. The book debuted at number one on The New York Times best-seller list.

Laura Payne

country music

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Study the settlement of the American South and the evolution of music in the region from gospel to country

For Students

country music summary

country music

Also known as: country and western, hillbilly music

Written and fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Article History

Also called:: country and western

Key People:: Taylor Swift; Elvis Presley; Waylon Jennings; Dolly Parton; Sturgill Simpson

Related Topics:: outlaw music; country rock; bluegrass; Western swing; honky-tonk

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Country singer Parker McCollum's dreams all came true. A new self-titled album brought new ones • June 25, 2025, 9:01 AM ET (AP)

country music, style of American popular music that originated in rural areas of the South and West in the early 20th century. The term country and western music (later shortened to country music) was adopted by the recording industry in 1949 to replace the derogatory label hillbilly music.

Ultimately, country music’s roots lie in the ballads, folk songs, and popular songs of the English, Scots, and Irish settlers of the Appalachians and other parts of the South. In the early 1920s the traditional string-band music of the Southern mountain regions began to be commercially recorded, with Fiddlin’ John Carson garnering the genre’s first hit record in 1923. The vigour and realism of the rural songs, many lyrics of which were rather impersonal narratives of tragedies pointing to a stern Calvinist moral, stood in marked contrast to the often mawkish sentimentality of much of the popular music of the day.

More important than recordings for the growth of country music was broadcast radio. Small radio stations appeared in the larger Southern and Midwestern cities in the 1920s, and many devoted part of their airtime to live or recorded music suited to white rural audiences. Two regular programs of great influence were the “National Barn Dance” from Chicago, begun in 1924, and the “Grand Ole Opry” from Nashville, begun in 1925. The immediate popularity of such programs encouraged more recordings and the appearance of talented musicians from the hills at radio and record studios. Among these were the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers, whose performances strongly influenced later musicians. These early recordings were of ballads and country dance tunes and featured the fiddle and guitar as lead instruments over a rhythmic foundation of guitar or banjo. Other instruments occasionally used included Appalachian dulcimer, harmonica, and mandolin; vocals were done either by a single voice or in high close harmony.

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With the migration of many Southern rural whites to industrial cities during the Great Depression and World War II, country music was carried into new areas and exposed to new influences, such as blues and gospel music. The nostalgic bias of country music, with its lyrics about grinding poverty, orphaned children, bereft lovers, and lonely workers far from home, held special appeal during a time of wide-scale population shifts.

During the 1930s a number of “singing cowboy” film stars, of whom Gene Autry was the best known, took country music and with suitably altered lyrics made it into a synthetic and adventitious “western” music. A second and more substantive variant of country music arose in the 1930s in the Texas-Oklahoma region, where the music of rural whites was exposed to the swing jazz of black orchestras. In response, a Western swing style evolved in the hands of Bob Wills and others and came to feature steel and amplified guitars and a strong dance rhythm. An even more important variant was honky-tonk, a country style that emerged in the 1940s with such figures as Ernest Tubb and Hank Williams. Honky-tonk’s fiddle–steel-guitar combination and its bitter, maudlin lyrics about rural whites adrift in the big city were widely adopted by other country musicians.

The same period saw a concerted effort to recover some of country music’s root values. Mandolin player Bill Monroe and his string band, the Blue Grass Boys, discarded more recently adopted rhythms and instruments and brought back the lead fiddle and high harmony singing. His banjoist, Earl Scruggs, developed a brilliant three-finger picking style that brought the instrument into a lead position. Their music, with its driving, syncopated rhythms and instrumental virtuosity, took the name “bluegrass” from Monroe’s band.

But commercialization proved a much stronger influence as country music became popular in all sections of the United States after World War II. In 1942 Roy Acuff, one of the most important country singers, co-organized in Nashville the first publishing house for country music. Hank Williams’ meteoric rise to fame in the late 1940s helped establish Nashville as the undisputed centre of country music, with large recording studios and the Grand Ole Opry as its chief performing venue. In the 1950s and ’60s country music became a huge commercial enterprise, with such leading performers as Tex Ritter, Johnny Cash, Tammy Wynette, Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, and Charley Pride. Popular singers often recorded songs in a Nashville style, while many country music recordings employed lush orchestral backgrounds.

The 1970s saw the growth of the “outlaw” music of prominent Nashville expatriates Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. The gap between country and the mainstream of pop music continued to narrow in that decade and the next as electric guitars replaced more traditional instruments and country music became more acceptable to a national urban audience. Country retained its vitality into the late 20th century with such diverse performers as Dolly Parton, Randy Travis, Garth Brooks, Reba McEntire, Emmylou Harris, and Lyle Lovett. Its popularity continued unabated into the 21st century, exemplified by performers Kenny Chesney, Brad Paisley, Alan Jackson, Blake Shelton, Carrie Underwood, Miranda Lambert, the Zac Brown Band, and Chris Stapleton, among others. Despite its embrace of other popular styles, country music retained an unmistakable character as one of the few truly indigenous American musical styles.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaThis article was most recently revised and updated by Amy McKenna.