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With a week left until Wicked: For Good hits theaters, Cynthia Erivo is setting the record straight on why some think her performances are political statements.
Appearing on the cover of GQ‘s Men of the Year issue, Erivo said that her performances in Wicked, The Color Purple and every other project she works on are inherently political simply because she is a Black, queer woman, not necessarily because she chooses political roles.
“I think inevitably, because I’m in this body with this skin, in this time, everything I do will be political,” she says. “I’ve been told so many times that I pick controversial roles, and I’m like, ‘Why? Why are the roles I pick controversial?’ I just pick a thing that I feel like I want. If I was a different person, in a different body, in a different skin, it wouldn’t be controversial.”
The near-EGOT did point out, however, that she is interested in “f–king with the narrative” of audience expectations, especially when it comes to her sexuality and gender. “I’m fascinated with the interplay between masculinity and femininity, and where we place it and how we use it,” she said. “Because I truly believe we all have both in us — and I think it’s so sexy when we can access both.”
Erivo received a wave of backlash earlier this year when she was cast as Jesus Christ in a Hollywood Bowl production of Jesus Christ Superstar, with some on the religious right calling her casting “blasphemy.” In an interview with Billboard in June, Erivo laughed off the criticism, saying, “you can’t please everyone.”
Elsewhere in her new interview, Erivo got real when speaking about the anti-LGBTQ+ political environment of 2025, saying that “who I love and who you love” have “nothing to do with each other,” and she doesn’t understand why people feel a need to “be involved in people’s business.”
“It is about love. If people really, actually allow themselves to love, actually love, this wouldn’t be happening,” she explained. “We would want everyone to have it, wherever they could get it. Because you’d actually know what it feels like. And so when you know what it feels like, you’d want it for anyone else. Get it however you can get it, please.”
As he gears up to release his new EP Appaloosa on Friday (Nov. 14), country singer Orville Peck broke down the current phase of his career in the latest episode of Billboard‘s Takes Us Out.
Peck sat down with Billboard’s Tetris Kelly at Los Angeles’ Beachwood Café, where the pair chowed down on comfort food and took a look at the state of Peck’s career today. “[I’ve been] going back to my roots, in terms of just diving into the creativity and the artistry and the references that I grew up loving,” Peck says. “[Appaloosa]’s also got a very constant air through it in terms of lyrics, of just kind of being unconcerned with what things should sound like or look like. I’m really just making music for myself again.”
The singer, who spent the last few years rising through the ranks of country music and becoming a breakout star in his own right, says that his work with friends and former collaborators such as Noah Cyrus and Willie Nelson only further helped bolster his confidence about his own artistic output. But he points to one country superstar as his dream collaborator.
“I mean, I always say Dolly [Parton], I would love to work with Dolly,” he says. “I got Willie Nelson, he was really neck-and-neck with her, so she is the last one on my absolute bucket list that I would die to work with.”
As a disruptive force in the country space, and one who has often advocated for greater diversity and equity within the genre, Peck points out that he’s happy to see some progress finally being made for the genre he calls home. “I feel better about it. I think there’s a lot more people now feeling like they can make country music and not be within the sort of homogenized idea of what country ‘needs’ to be,” he says. “That’s amazing, not just for queer people, but for black people, for brown people, there’s a lot more artists who feel validated to be a part of that.”
But, he points out that country is “tricky” when it comes to progress, and says that the work is far from over. “There is some attachment to country with the culture of country,” he says. “In some ways we’re making a lot of progress, and then in some ways, that progress is making some people want to stand firm in their gatekeeping of country. It’s a constant conversation.”
He points to the recent rule change at the Recording Academy, dividing the previously existing best country album category into two separate lanes for “traditional” and “contemporary” country albums, as an example of his point.
“I actually think it makes sense, personally,” he says. “I think in the last 10-15 years, there has been more of a split between radio-pop country, which tends to be more about a certain type of culture than a sound. And then I think there’s the other side of country that is a more traditional, referenced type of country that’s more about the songwriting … that feels like it’s more open culturally to anyone who wants to express themselves in that.”
During the new interview, Peck also chats about his time playing the Emcee in Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club on Broadway, his favorite song off of his new album and the “diet illegal” activities he and his friends got into growing up. Watch the full episode of Takes Us Out above.
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Outernet London is set to elevate the stories of transgender people from across the U.K. with a new photography exhibition.
“Trans Is Human,” created by trans-rights activists Jake and Hannah Graf MBE, will take over the venue’s large-scale screens on Nov. 17. The free installation will be soundtracked by Yungblud’s “Hello, Heaven, Hello” from the rocker’s recent U.K. chart-topping LP Idols.
The exhibition features portraits of 13 trans people from across the U.K., photographed by Mariano Vivanco. Each image will be accompanied by personal stories exploring themes of identity and resilience.
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Among those highlighted will be Amanda, a refugee and the first Miss Trans Global Uganda; Sarah, who overcame sight loss to support LGBTQ+ people with disabilities while running marathons; and Leo, a speaker and life coach with dyskinetic cerebral palsy.
“The idea for ‘Trans Is Human’ came about following years and years of misinformation and the demonization of the U.K.’s trans community that left us almost entirely dehumanized,” said Jake and Hannah in a press release. “Working with Mariano to allow these very human people to soar was an absolute pleasure and thrill.”
They continued: “Now, at such a pivotal moment for the U.K. trans community, as we face the possible loss of many of our most basic human rights, ‘Trans Is Human’ is more vital than ever. We are supremely grateful to the Outernet team and Yungblud for elevating the campaign and helping to remind the world that trans people are human too.”
Yungblud added: “I’m honored that ‘Hello Heaven, Hello’ will be a part of this exhibition. ‘Trans Is Human’ is all about celebrating truth, identity and the beauty of being yourself, unapologetically. That’s something I’ve always tried to celebrate in everything I do. I’m buzzing to play even a small part in telling these powerful stories.”
Outernet London opened in late 2022, and the following year, was ranked the capital’s most visited attraction by Association of Leading Visitor Attractions, bringing in 6.25 million visitors before hitting its first anniversary. Located near Tottenham Court Road station, its four-story, 360-degree screen surface is the first of its kind in the U.K., while Outernet is also home to two live music venues: The Lower Third and HERE.
Scott Neal, Outernet Creative Director, Culture and Lifestyle said in a statement: “The work being done around trans and broader LGBTQ+ equality is far from over. A recent YouGov poll showed 84% of trans people in Britain feel unsafe in public spaces. ‘Trans Is Human’ showcases the humanity behind individual trans stories to highlight that gender identity is just a part of a person’s story.
“At Outernet, equality, fairness and safety are values we live by every single day,” he concluded. “We thank Hannah and Jake for creating this piece and we’re proud to display it for everyone.”
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Plenty of drag queens can sing, and plenty of drag queens who can’t sing have released songs anyway. So when an alumnus of RuPaul’s Drag Race makes a foray into the world of recorded music, you can be forgiven for greeting it with a shrug.
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Which is part of the reason why season 16 breakout Plasma is making her debut a live album. She wants you to know that when she’s teasing out those melancholic money notes or whizzing through a difficult-to-untangle patter song, there’s no studio trickery and it isn’t the tenth take — it’s just her honest-to-goddess voice doing what it does best.
As Drag Race viewers know, Plasma is a Broadway baby through and through, a Gay White Way devotee whose humor and style draws on legends like Barbra Streisand and Bernadette Peters. While Plasma’s decision to make her debut LP a live record is an impressively risky one, the fact that it consists mainly of Broadway faves isn’t a shock — but smartly, the 26-year-old from Texas has peppered in a few surprises.
When I attended the Joe’s Pub show where Is Miss Thing On? (Live from Joe’s Pub) was recorded on July 28, there were two tunes I didn’t recognize: “A Schloon for the Gumpert” and “80 or Above.” The former is a song Streisand trotted out at her famous A Happening in Central Park show in 1968 but wasn’t included on the live album’s track list; the latter, however, is neither a Broadway classic nor an obscurity — it’s a new tune written by Plasma herself. But damned if it doesn’t sound like it could be a long-lost gem from some old musical forgotten over the decades.
Ahead of its release on Friday (Nov. 7) via Joy Machine Records, Plasma hopped on a Zoom with Billboard to talk about the advice from her family (both biological and drag) that influenced this album, how she landed Tony and Grammy winner J. Harrison Ghee for a duet, and which post-Covid Broadway show gave us “one of the most pivotal performances in American theater history.”
Why did you decide to make your debut album a live album, as opposed to a studio LP where you can do multiple takes and fix mistakes?
The primary inspiration was from my dad, actually. He raised me listening to Michael Bublé Meets Madison Square Garden and Adele’s Live From SoHo sessions, and all the greats who recorded live in the mid-century up until now.
When it came up that I wanted to record a debut album, my dad said, “Well, you could do it in the studio and feel perfect about it — but as we’ve always taught you, perfect is the enemy of great, and you are great in front of a live audience, because you are always better when you are performing, instead of sitting in a silent room worrying about the way you sound. So do it, don’t leave anything out. Don’t leave any stone unturned. Do it live, do it bold. Do it bravely, and don’t look back.” My dad’s very wise.
That’s great advice. Another marvelous live album you mentioned during your Joe’s Pub show is Barbra Streisand’s Live at the Bon Soir, which she recorded in 1962 but didn’t release until 2022. It’s so good, I can’t believe she didn’t release that back in the day.
I can’t either. And I found out very recently that the day after she recorded her last session at the Bon Soir, she did a cabaret series at the bar in the West Village called the Duplex in their upstairs cabaret space. That is genuinely, literally, the first bar in New York City that gave me a weekly show and it was in the upstairs space. So the Barbra connection deepens and deepens. That is the album that truly inspired this live album.
How did you pick the songs? Obviously there are Broadway faves, but there’s also some random, obscure stuff, even one I wasn’t familiar with.
Good! That is the goal. I’m actually wearing a t-shirt from an off-Broadway show called The Big Gay Jamboree, which is a very niche hit. I realized in my adult homosexual life that an obscure, niche reference gets me a lot of street cred with a tiny group of people that I respect, so the niche reference really guides my hand a lot in my work. I had a live show last year, right on the heels of my run on Drag Race, called All That Plazz. It was a diaristic approach of my life as it stood a year and a half-ish ago. I took that as a blueprint, and I whittled out the kinks or the things that didn’t really feel relevant anymore, or the things I didn’t identify with as personally, and I filled them in with things that felt really personal.
“Cry Me a River” [ed. note: the Arthur Hamilton song from the ‘50s, not the Justin Timberlake single] has always been one of my favorite songs. I’m also a Scorpio, so “Cry Me a River” is a bit of a vengeance anthem, which I love. “More” from Dick Tracy — I never sung that live until Joe’s Pub, but that was one of the first songs I lip synced to when I started doing drag in New York. I like to lure people in with songs that they will know, and then keep them sat with niche references that they’ve either forgotten about or they’ve never known existed. Uncovering that is how I fell in love with mid-century music, as well as people introducing me to music that no one hears anymore.
I love that you did “More.” It’s a fantastic song that kind of disappeared, because it’s on a Madonna album, I’m Breathless, that most people don’t return to.
I actually didn’t even know what it was from, or that Madonna had done it, for years — because I was obsessed with Ruthie Henshall’s version from Putting It Together, the Sondheim review on Broadway with Carol Burnett. That’s the one I lip synced to, and she’s just a powerhouse. Then when I learned that it was a Madonna song, I was like, “Well, I’ve already heard it sung correctly, so I don’t need to go back now.”
Look, I love Madonna, and her version is great, but I get that it’s certainly not like doing a Barbra song where you’re thinking, “How am I ever gonna match that range?”
Oh, my God, yeah. She has a cup of hot tea on the stage because she wants one. I have a cup of hot tea on stage because I have to do it. I have to treat my voice correctly if I’m gonna sing Barbra’s stuff.
That leads to one of the things I wanted to ask. Of the songs in that setlist, what’s the easiest one to sing for you, and what is the most challenging one?
God, that night, “More” was my biggest challenge. I went into it new, and I love the song, and I’ve known the song, but it is literally a key change minefield. Thank you, Stephen Sondheim. It’s also fast and it’s patter-y and it has some particular vocabulary that you have to really enunciate because it’s theatrical, so you want to make sure everyone is hearing the words. Whereas on something like “Misty” or “Cry Me a River,” you’re gooey, floaty, lovely.
“Cry Me a River” is one of those songs that I could sing if I had just gotten vocal fold surgery. For some reason, the older I get, the more I can put that song on vocal autopilot and listen to the words again and find new meaning in them. It just falls out of my mouth, and then by the end, I’m screaming, and I realize, “Oh, sorry that was really loud.” That one is the easiest, just because it comes naturally. I’m having an organic artistic response. [Laughs.] God, how pretentious.
You open with “Let Me Entertain You” from Gypsy. Did you see the latest Broadway staging of it with Audra McDonald, and what did you think of it?
I adored it. In the album, I talk about how jazz and mid-century music is largely accredited to, or it should be more accredited to, people of color. Because jazz, of course, has its roots in New Orleans and in the Black community. I think we think of jazz and we think of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, but we don’t think about Eartha Kitt and we don’t think about Carmen McRae or Sarah Vaughan or this plethora of Black artists who gave us the gift that, in my world, keeps on giving.
Seeing a production like Gypsy, which is written in a time of oppression but always talking about the white plight of show business, and then having it come under new direction and new vision from George C. Wolfe about Black people fighting even just for minimal visibility, and then still being robbed of it. And then, of course, the spiritual connection of Audra losing the Tony after one of the most pivotal performances in American theater history on the Tonys. Seriously, it feels like we’ve seen one of the first post-Covid truly monumental theater-making attempts with Audra’s Gypsy. And, of course, Joy Woods is a sensation.
Speaking of Tonys, you had J. Harrison Ghee come up for a duet during the show, which was beautiful. How did that come about?
Like all great queer connections, we met at a bar. I met J. a couple times, but the one that really stuck was we met at my friend Blacc Cherry’s Drag Race viewing party at Dive 106 earlier this spring. After that, we ran into each other at the Smash Broadway opening night red carpet. I grew up idolizing Tony Award winners and the Broadway theater excellence that implies. And when I met J., I still felt very much at home and very friendly and very communicative and also sisterly. There’s a lot of kiki energy, there’s a lot of “yes and” energy that you couldn’t quantify in a theater improv class. You could only quantify it by being human adults who have lived a little bit of the queer experience in New York City.
I asked them out of the blue. I was like, “How can I, as a white cisgender man, a twink, celebrate Black artistry through a jazz medium and also not invite a true, gifted informant of Black artistry–Black queer, non-binary artistry—into the room with me?” J. is also so generous. They have their Tony and their Grammy, and then cut to them gluing down my lace on the back of my neck that I didn’t know was there.
That’s a pro.
That’s a pro, that’s an empath. That’s generous. That’s someone who you want in the room with you.
During the show, you performed one song you had written, “80 or Above.” I don’t mean to sound backhanded, but it was surprisingly good. Usually when someone is singing a bunch of classics and then is like, “Here’s one I wrote myself,” you’re thinking, “OK, here we go,” but I was impressed. I could even imagine other singers singing it. What’s your songwriting process like?
Thank you so much. First of all, that’s very flattering. I will also tell you that I had reservations about writing music, because I’ve also sat in rooms where people will say, “You guys, the next song is a song that I wrote,” and it’s just like, oh my god, clench your napkin in your fist — because you’re gonna have to get through three minutes of someone’s passion project. And I will not name names.
I don’t even know what my songwriting process is. I read a lot of poetry in high school. I started back when I had a more regular journaling practice. I find myself writing in rhyme structure — maybe it’s just because I’m dramatic as hell and I’m a secret Shakespearean-hearted dramatic goon. I was feeling silly one day and started writing things out. And I was like, “what if I wrote this little song, and what if I came up with a melody that sounds like it came out of the Anita O’Day songbook?” And did something funny and kitschy and campy, but also poignant? As long as I came up with a melody that wasn’t irritating or TikTok, AI-generated, then I could be comfortable putting it out there, as long as it didn’t interrupt the flow of my grander show.
The fact that you can hear other people sing it means a great deal to me. I really am proud of it, and I’d like to write more. I ever were to record more music, I’d want to do a studio album, because I’ve done the live album, toss, toss [fake tosses hair]. I’d like to do something that’s half-original, half-niche covers, so that the line between things you know I wrote and things you don’t know at all is blurred.
What are your hopes for this album when it comes out? What do you want to do next?
I’d love for every Broadway producer in town to listen to it. It’s a great, big audition for something else. In the theater world, we say every audition is an audition for something else, or every interaction is an audition. At the same time, I am trying to identify myself post-reality TV as a real human with autonomous thoughts and control over my own narrative. I’m trying to position myself for opportunities that come beyond reality TV, for people who are equipped to take on narrative roles and theatrical roles and musical roles.
I would love to collaborate with other jazz artists. I’d love to be on Broadway. I’d love to sing live more. I’d love to blur the line between Plasma and Taylor, which is my legal name. I want to have the full breadth of what is possible for a queer person in 2025 available to me. The whole reason why you listen to a live album is because it doesn’t sound like the studio album, because someone is trying something in real time that is dangerous. If you mess up, everyone will see it, and that’s vulnerable, and it’s scary.
One of my dear friends is Privilege, a drag artist in Brooklyn. The night before I left for Drag Race, they gave me a little totem to take with me and they said, “I just want to encourage you to feel whatever fear you feel, and then do it scared.”
More great advice!
I don’t know a single queer person who’s not scared right now. I’d rather do something scared than rest on technological improvement or the gloss of legitimacy helping me out. I am who I am, and I rest on the laurels that I can present to you in real time and nothing else. And so that’s my priority, to live as authentically and unashamedly as possible.
Anything else you want to add, about the album or your life?
[Jokingly] Well, I’m still single and I’m still drinking too much, so that original song has never hit harder. No, I would encourage Drag Race fans to broaden the scope of what they perceive as possible from a Drag Race alumnus. I would also encourage music fans and theater fans to broaden their perspectives beyond Kinky Boots and La Cage aux Folles into what queer artists are capable of telling.
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As you put the final touches on your Halloween costumes for tonight, why not listen to some new music from your favorite queer artists? Billboard Pride is proud to present the latest edition of Queer Jams of the Week, our roundup of some of the best new music releases from LGBTQ+ artists.
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From Tyler the Creator’s latest track to Reneé Rap’s victory lap, check out just a few of our favorite releases from this week below:
Tyler, the Creator, “MOTHER”
With his deluxe edition of Chromakopia, Tyler, the Creator only added one new song — but it’s a track that he called the “grounding piece” to the album. Throughout “Mother,” a nearly-5-minute track filled with sonic and lyrical switch-ups, Tyler manages not only to flex his dexterity as an artist, but the true excellence of his writing. Dedicated to his mom Bonita Smith and the various lessons she taught him growing up, “Mother” sounds like Tyler’s entire Chromakopia run bundled into one glorious, messy, all-encompassing new track.
Reneé Rapp, “Lucky”
For her next trick, Reneé Rapp is turning a one-off song for the soundtrack of Now You See Me: Now You Don’t into a genuine pop-rock banger. “Lucky,” featuring credits from pop songwriting royalty like Ryan Tedder and Omer Fedi, sees Rapp strutting out a victory lap from her Bite Me era with a cheeky new single. As she flexes her accolades and taunts her haters, the singer comes to a simple conclusion with the track’s bridge: “Okay, got my way/ It’s almost like I’m Reneé.”
Orville Peck, “Drift Away”
After taking a light detour by starring in a Broadway show, Orville Peck is back in his full cowboy glory on “Drift Away,” the first single off his upcoming new album Appaloosa. Lamenting the state of life in a post-pandemic world, Peck offers an alternative to the dismay and disconnection of modernity with a dreamy, escapist country melody that offers to make like the title and simply float off into the distance.
Cat Burns, How to Be Human
She may be in the midst of a lying streak on The Celebrity Traitors in the UK, but Cat Burns is nothing but radically honest on her latest album How to Be Human. Throughout the magnificent new record, the singer-songwriter recounts in often excruciating detail how she got through a particularly trying period of her life. With raw lyrics, inventive production and Burns’ best vocal performance to date, How to Be Human is a must-listen for any music fans out there.
MIKA, “Modern Times”
As life in our current era gets more complicated and chaotic, pop singer MIKA is here to try and make a little sense out of “Modern Times.” On his first single in two years, MIKA takes an avant garde, dance-pop approach to the constantly-moving changes of the world today, all while constructing the kind of soaring melodies that made him a star in the first place. With new production flourishes bolstering his already well-established vocal talent, MIKA makes his comeback feel all the more glorious with “Modern Times.”
Check out all of our picks on Billboard’s Queer Jams of the Week playlist below:
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If Ashley Padilla has anything to say about it, Brandi Carlile will host this weekend’s Saturday Night Live instead of Miles Teller.
In just-released promos for this weekend’s episode, Padilla brings up her brand-new haircut — and she explodes on Teller for not noticing. “I got a haircut, and you haven’t said anything about it!” Padilla yells at the Top Gun: Maverick actor. “Yeah, sorry, I think I didn’t notice, Ashley, because we’ve never met before,” Teller responds.
But guess who did notice? Eleven-time Grammy-winning singer/songwriter Brandi Carlile. “I noticed. The second I saw you, I knew you had that new-haircut glow,” Carlile says. “Thank you, Brandi Carlile! You’re the host now,” Padilla says matter-of-factly, to which Carlile celebrates with a “Yesssss.”
“She’s joking, right?” Teller asks. But Dismukes assures the actor she’s dead serious. “I hope you can sing,” she threatens, and Teller gives a shrug: “I can sing.” (We know that at least Keith Urban agrees: Back in 2016, the country star invited Teller onstage to duet on The Temptations’ “My Girl” during an Albuquerque, New Mexico, concert.)
Watch all the new promos below:
Saturday’s episode will mark Carlile’s fourth time as a musical guest on SNL — and her second time this year. She joined Elton John on the stage back in April to perform songs from their joint album Who Believes in Angels? This time around, she’s promoting her just-released solo album Returning to Myself.
This will be Teller’s second hosting gig after he made his debut in 2022. He’s hitting the show ahead of the premiere of his sci-fi rom-com Eternity, co-starring Elizabeth Olsen and Callum Turner, which arrives Nov. 26 in theaters.
Saturday Night Live airs at 11:30 p.m. ET/8:30 p.m. PT on NBC and streams on Peacock. (See all the options to watch SNL here.)
Trending on Billboard As a longtime ally for the LGBTQ+ community, Hilary Duff knows how important her new music is for her queer fan base. In an interview with Variety published on Monday (Oct. 27), Duff spoke about her upcoming return to music after the announcement that she had signed to Atlantic Records in September. […]
Trending on Billboard At this point, Hailey Bieber is used to seeing insults about her online, but in a new interview, she pointed out there’s one particular brand of disparaging comment that she just doesn’t understand. Appearing on Owen Thiele’s In Your Dreams podcast on Friday (Oct. 24), Bieber began talking about rude comments shared […]
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Brandi Carlile thinks she might have an problem with co-dependency.
She may well be the most decorated Americana artist in recent memory; she’s won 11 Grammys over the course of the last six years (among a whopping 26 career nominations) alongside a pair of Children’s and Family Emmy Awards and an Oscar nomination. She routinely sells out arenas and has been heralded by many as a singular live performer. She’s even sent four of her eight albums to the top ten of the Billboard 200.
But even still, the 44-year-old singer-songwriter says that she’s long felt a sense of “inadequecy” when it comes to both her everyday life and her career, thanks to what she deems a reliance on the companionship of others. It’s not hard to see why she might feel that way — Carlile is one of the most sought-after collaborators, with featured appearances on songs from modern pop stars like Miley Cyrus and Sam Smith, to musical legends like Elton John and Joni Mitchell.
“That’s kind of permeated my personality since I was a little girl. I don’t want to spend the night with myself, I don’t want to go have a meal with myself, I would never watch a movie by myself,” she tells Billboard on a video call. “My aversion to aloneness makes me feel a bit unevolved. Is my tendency to be with, to be in service to, to walk with other people really me being unevolved? Or is it just who I am? I guess I’m still pulling it apart.”
Those thorny questions rest at the center of Carlile’s remarkable eighth solo studio album, Returning to Myself (out today via Interscope Records/Lost Highway). Written and produced alongside pop-rock maestro Andrew Watt with additional work from The National’s Aaron Dessner and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, the album tracks Carlile’s own untangling of deeply personal insecurities around ego, legacy, politics and independence. A mid-life crisis has never sounded quite this poetic.
The artist says that her new album was born, oddly, from her lack of desire to get back to creating solo albums. “Part of me really didn’t want to do it. Part of me wanted to just go back to being knee-to-knee with all my collaborators and writers and producers and friends,” she says. “It’s incredibly affirming when the people that you idolized growing up are looking at you going, ‘You’re really good, you’re very, very good.’ And that could be an addiction in and of itself — you can very easily just live in that affirmation and never take another risk.”
Those idols include John, who Carlile released an entire duets album with earlier this year, Who Believes In Angels? Carlile recalls being 11 years old living in Washington state, where “there wasn’t an inch of my bedroom wall that didn’t have an Elton John poster on it,” citing her “profound” love for John and his music.
Then there’s Mitchell, who Carlile famously brought out for her first live performance in decades at the 2022 Newport Folk Festival before going on to organize a series star-studded “Joni Jam” concerts to reintroduce the world to one of the most influential musicians of the last century. Tanya Tucker is another decorated performer who Carlile re-centered the spotlight on after decades away, by producing her lauded 2019 album While I’m Livin’ and co-starring in her 2022 documentary The Return of Tanya Tucker.
The through-line between every collaboration with one of her “superheroes,” Carlile notes, is the presence of a cause for her to take up. “Tanya was not getting her flowers — she was getting a stigma that she certainly didn’t deserve. With Joni, she had her flowers, but she didn’t know it,” she says. “Even for smaller artists, like Brandy Clark, she wasn’t being seen for the genius she is in country music … there was always some cause, and then that cause has to intersect with musical undeniability. And in that case, you know, these people are an embarrassment of riches.”
But when beginning her work on Returning to Myself, Carlile wasn’t finding a cause. She had reached the proverbial mountaintop of her professional career, and was now left to try and find some new cliff face to ascend. She remembers one particularly hard songwriting session, where she, Watt and her band were sitting in an expensive studio space creating melodically fascinating passages, and she couldn’t find any words to put to them.
“I was just in there watching money fly out the window, because I just couldn’t make the songs happen,” she says, grabbing fistfuls of her coiffed blonde hair as she recalls the stressful day. “I kept going to this little office space at the back of the studio and basically hiding from everyone. It was so destabilizing.”
In that office, Carlile noticed a purple Rhodes piano — “I think it was just there as decoration,” she offers — and sat down at it. She pulled up a poem on her phone that she had written weeks prior about wisdom and age, started putting a simple melody to it, and within 15 minutes had constructed the emotionally complicated track “A Woman Oversees.”
Writing lyrics separately from the music composition proved to be uncharted territory for Carlile — throughout her two decade career, Carlile routinely wrote her music and lyrics in concert with one another. In establishing a new precedent for the album, the singer-songwriter found that she was starting to deconstruct her own ideas about how music gets made.
“If there’s anywhere that I’m on thin ice with my ego, it’s trying to work in musical complexity where it isn’t needed. But when you have the words first and you’re now suddenly in the studio, the music has to be natural. It can’t be overthought, it can’t be intentionally complex,” she says. “I did a lot less in terms of the musical math on this album than I ever have before. I was really open to two-chord soundscapes, and I have to say, I’m finding it really emotionally fulfilling.”
Carlile is just as quick to credit Watt and Dessner’s work with her on the album for its sonic cohesion, noting that while the two had never worked together before, their collaboration on this album helped make it what it was. “I kind of Parent Trap‘d them,” she jokes. “I’m kind of culty, to the point where I’m like, ‘No, I need everyone to love each other and know each other! Will you guys come together on every song and show up in the studio and please be friends? Will you guys be friends for me?’ And they f–king did, man. It was amazing.”
When talking about Returning to Myself, Carlile keeps coming back to one other album in particular: Wrecking Ball, the 1995 magnum opus from Americana star Emmylou Harris. The projects may differ in tone and genre, but Carlile instead points to Wrecking Ball‘s larger cultural footprint as her true inspiration.
“She was trying to own the narrative and have some agency over who people believed Emmylou Harris was. The way that she asserted her Emmylou Harris-ness was to do something so unexpected sonically that it challenged the psyches and the ears of Americana listeners,” Carlile recalls. “That’s the ethos that really resonated with me. It wasn’t like I took a swing for that level of genius or refinement. It was more like I wanted to feel the same way.”
One of the most unexpected sonic turns Carlile makes on her new album arrives with its sixth track, the surging rock anthem “Church & State.” Amidst an album of plaintive, introspective folk songs, “Church & State” roars with rebellion and electrifying anger, as Carlile rails against the political powers that have tried to decide the future for her and her community.
The song was written largely on the night of the 2024 election, when Donald Trump won a second term in office. Carlile recalls the rage she felt as she watched the results come in. “I just saw my marriage hanging in the balance. Everything that my kids depend on in terms of feeling, and living within the legitimacy of our family, and how we walk through the world together,” she said. “I was just so, so angry, and stressed out, and I’m in need of some catharsis.”
She remembered a riff that one of her oldest friends and collaborators Tim Hanseroth had sent to her months prior. The two had joked about a time when Billie Jean King had once told Carlile, “‘We Are the Champions’ is too f–king slow, somebody needs to write a sports anthem that’s actually up tempo,” and Hanseroth made good on that promise with a pounding bassline that became the heartbeat of the song. “Writing that song was like I was running a mile; it just was coming out of me,” Carlile says.
The lyrics that came pouring forth concerned the “frailty” of right-wing politicians, reminding them that when their day comes, this will be how they’re remembered. She puts it much more succinctly in our conversation: “Time waits for no one, and no one stays a strongman forever,” she says with a smirk.
As they began to put the track together in a studio, Carlile pitched an odd idea to Watt, Dessner and her band. What if, instead of a guitar solo on the bridge, she simply performed a spoken-word rendition of an 1802 letter written by then-President Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptists Association? The choice may seem strange, but Carlile points to the famous missive for creating the oft-cited “wall of separation between church and state” that is fundamental to the functioning of American democracy.
“I think it might be the one of the most important pieces of text that has ever been introduced into the American political system. It is so timelessly wise, and it should offend no one — yet I know it will offend many,” Carlile says, before staring directly into her camera. “And if you’re offended by it, you are the problem. Period.”
Carlile knows there will even be some in her own fanbase who would prefer that she not speak out on political topics. But she says she cannot afford to stay quiet, especially when her existence is at-issue in the current administration. “We have no choice but to wake up and be political every day because we’re women and we’re gay and this is how we now have to live our lives in this country,” she says, exasperation punctuating each word. “There can be no ‘shut up and sing’ as an option for me, that’s just not possible.”
Even with its sonic left-turn, “Church & State” still finds itself fitting into the rest of Returning to Myself, as it finds Carlile re-examining and reaffirming her own relationship to religion and politics, the same way she re-examines her relationship to age on the emotionally bare “Human,” or reaffirms her marriage on the loving ballad “Anniversary.”
But there’s still the question of her “cause” for Returning to Myself — for an artist who has moved forward with a clear sense of purpose on each one of her projects, collaborations and performances, what principle guided Carlile through this latest phase of her career?
A pregnant pause forms as Carlile considers her answer. “I dropped out of school at 16, and I moved away from home at 17, I immediately had to work in order to survive. I had no skills and no driver’s license, and all I could do to make a living and pay for my rent was find places that would let me sing live,” she says, her brow furrowing as she thinks back to her earliest performing days. “As long as I can remember, I have had to make music my job.”
She smiles as she corrects herself. “There was a time, though, when I was a teenager and I could just sit on my bed and cry and just feel this magnetic draw into the magic of music. I hadn’t felt that feeling for a long, long time, and I could barely remember what it even was,” she says. “I needed to go back to that bedroom before the hustle and figure out what I loved about this. What can I unlearn about song structure? Can I become innocent about this again? So my next steps are going to be to find and stay in that innocence for as long as I possibly can.”
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