Ask Brandi Carlile to name who’s on her bucket list of potential collaborators and an unnervingly long pause follows.
“I don’t even know how to answer it,” the multi-Grammy Award winner finally admits.
It’s not insecurity or a lack of imagination that makes her draw a blank. When you’ve almost single-handedly brought Joni Mitchell back to rapturous live performances after a brain aneurysm left the ‘70s icon unable to speak or walk and Elton John requests to make an album with you (2025’s “Who Believes in Angels?”), the list of untapped heroes dwindles.
Not to mention that forming a country music supergroup, The Highwomen, alongside Maren Morris, Natalie Hemby and Amanda Shires as a female-driven spiritual companion to The Highwaymen and producing albums for golden-voiced women like Tanya Tucker, Brandy Clark and Lucius, puts the 45-year-old in a category where she’s the one in demand.
After some reflection, Carlile picks one duet she’s willing to throw out into the universe in hopes of a cosmic reply. “I would like Alanis Morissette to sing ‘Uninvited’ with me,” she says over the phone, fresh from soundcheck at the Mohegan Sun in Connecticut.
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The unhinged, haunting song found on the 1998 “City of Angels” soundtrack has been a staple of Carlile’s “Human Tour” since the beginning of the year. (She relishes stepping “into the power” of the song, the mother of two says, before crediting her wife and manager Catherine with the idea.) But when her performance last month at the Newport Folk Festival went viral, it seemed to awaken some dormant, primal yearning in the hearts of those algorithmically bombarded with the four-minute, 55-second video.
Propelled by the song’s fixation on obsessive love (at once both alluring and repugnant), it’s intoning melody and the caterwauling of SistaStrings’ violin/cello combo stabbing into Carlile’s savage howl, a flurry of commenters relished in the exorcism of their pent-up rage while others pledged fidelity to the guitar slinger outfitted in a baby blue sateen floral blazer and tie — especially straight cis women.
When apprised of the memes highlighting this effect, Carlile lets out a full-throated laugh. “It’s so nice to see my teenage dream coming true — my teenage dream of straight women falling for me,” she deadpans.
“They might think they are falling for me or are attracted to me, but what they’re attracted to is me being able to transcend the expectation of the feminine in that moment,” she explains. “I think what everybody really wants to do is scream ‘I need a moment to deliberate,’ and watching me do it is like something they want to do themselves. They’re just attracted to how much they want to do that.”
So, c’mon Alanis, what are you waiting for?
Carlile has no intention of disappointing fans waiting to cathartically belt out “Uninvited” back at her when the band, including twins Tim and Phil Hanseroth (her musical partners since her 2005 debut), comes to Ravinia on Aug. 26. “It feels like it’s in the set list for a while,” she says.
Carlile’s upcoming project involves another cover song that just might have fans drowning in tears instead of screaming their lungs out. As part of a deluxe version of “Returning to Myself” dubbed the “sad gay version,” due out Sept. 25, she takes on Billy Joel’s 1990 lament “And So It Goes.”
“Oh, that song is devastating. It’s devastating,” she says, drawing out the syllables of the second “devastating” to punctuate the depth of the tune’s hopeless lyrics. It’s a perfect vehicle for the way the creak in Carlile’s voice acts like a bludgeon to the heart.
Joel “sings it really stoic. He’s got no emotion in his voice and that is actually even a little bit sadder because it shows someone hurt him,” she says. “But when I’m singing it, I’m definitely like in my feelings.”
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Everyone wallowing in those big feelings is exactly what Carlile hopes for this release. (“You’re gonna be like, ‘What a drama queen,’” she jokes about hearing it.) Her team at Interscope/Lost Highway were surprised at the request to rerecord the album’s already weighty 10 tracks. The record label “goes, ‘How could you make it any sadder or gayer?’ And I was like, ‘Hold my beer,’” she recalls.
Carlile wants these versions to live alongside Johnny Cash’s myth-making rendition of “Hurt,” R.E.M’s “Everybody Hurts” and Robyn’s anthem “Dancing On My Own.”
“It’s an album made just for the objective of being sad,” she explains. “It’s not stripped down. It’s not about making the songs smaller. It’s not even about making them slower. It’s about making them exist in the genre sad gay. And it’s sort of for everybody. You don’t even have to be gay to wanna hear music like that.”
Carlile couldn’t rush the process because she’d hear the “inauthenticity” in her vocals if she wasn’t in the right headspace. “I am the worst actor,” she admits. Setting the mood didn’t require any accoutrements beyond a piano and just closing her eyes. Carlile describes it as “just disappearing into myself.”
Trying to keep up with Carlile’s 2026 is an exhausting task — and there are still pages on the calendar to go. In addition to chugging along on the “Human Tour” in support of 2025’s “Returning to Myself,” Carlile secured a spot on Time’s Women of the Year list and was inducted into the Austin City Limits Hall of Fame by Bonnie Raitt. She threw out the first pitch for her hometown Seattle Mariners and attended the Academy Awards to celebrate “Come See Me in the Good Light,” a documentary feature nominee that follows the final months of poet Andrea Gibson’s life. (Carlile teamed up with Sara Bareilles on a song for the film.) She also hosted the seventh edition of her Girls Just Wanna Weekend destination festival in Mexico with The Chicks and Sam Smith.
But three moments from the busy year stand out for Carlile: turning her tour stop in Minneapolis into a live-streaming event that raised $750,000 for Advocates for Human Rights in the wake of ICE raids in that city, singing “America the Beautiful” before kickoff at Super Bowl LX, and reprising that stirring, acoustic rendition at the base of the Statue of Liberty on the Fourth of July as part of Disney’s 24-hour broadcast honoring America’s 250th birthday.
“That was a huge deal and a really high honor. I appreciated getting the opportunity to bring my perspective to that song.” Carlile recounts. “Those kinds of acknowledgements that there is a form of hopeful patriotism and a belief in our country’s trajectory as having not arrived — that’s a perspective that I think is needed and wanted by a whole lot of people that aren’t getting a voice about it.”
Janine Schaults is a freelance writer.
If you go
Brandi Carlile (with guest I’m With Her) at 7 p.m. Aug. 26 at Ravinia Festival, 201 Ravinia Park Road, Highland Park; tickets from $98 at www.ravinia.org
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