Brandi Carlile is hardly the only songwriter to be inspired by Joni Mitchell. But she is on a short list of artists who can boast that her own album is a direct result of having been Mitchell’s close collaborator. “I had finished playing the Hollywood Bowl [in 2024] with Joni, and it took up so much of my spiritual space and my mind space,” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “I felt really emotionally make-or-break, because I just wanted that to be a pivotal moment for Joni.” Carlile’s stewardship of her hero’s comeback performances, alongside Who Believes in Angels?, her 2025 team-up with Elton John, another one of her idols and mentors, left her little time to tend to her own music. “It became so overwhelming and so all-consuming that this little voice did start to say, ‘OK, you’re not going to live very long if you keep setting the bar for yourself in these really stressful places,’” she says. “‘And you’re also hiding a little bit.’” Following her time in LA with Mitchell, she headed to Aaron Dessner’s Long Pond Studio in upstate New York to begin work on Returning to Myself. “I didn’t know whether we were going to be writing songs for someone else, or writing songs for me, or what we were going to be doing,” she explains. Though she admits to struggling initially with the process, the end result runs from the sweet and sentimental (“Anniversary”) to the angry (“Church & State”) and, of course, an emotional ode to Mitchell herself (“Joni”). Read below for Carlile’s thoughts on a few key tracks. “Returning to Myself” “I didn’t even bring a guitar. I went upstairs to the bedroom, and I sat on this bed looking at a blank wall, and I was so stressed to be that alone. I wrote the poem for Returning to Myself. It was just a poem; it didn’t have music or anything yet. I was just almost rejecting it. I was almost feeling like, ‘OK, this is it. This is a noble pursuit, me staring at this wall. This is what it means to learn to be alone. I guess I’m evolving right now. I feel like I’m not doing anything at all but just indulging myself and sitting here on this bed.’” “Human” “I do feel that every generation since recorded history believes that their generation is the one living through the end of the world. I think that’s really comforting. And we do. We all see our conflicts and our wars and our political upheavals and tyranny and democracy in constant balance. We are in a loop, and the loop is the loop of humanity. And don’t be apathetic. Don’t ignore it. Don’t look away. Do fight. Do be an activist. Do get out of bed every morning and think about how you can serve humanity. But also touch grass. Also realise that you’re here for a split second and that you don’t want to look back and realise you missed the whole thing because you believed you were living through the end of the world.” “Church & State” “We were set up to jam and that song was really carnal. We were in a circle. It was like rock ’n’ roll time, and it was November 5th, the night of the [2024] election. I went into the studio, laptop open, spiralling, just not doing great emotionally. I mean, I knew what was coming. I had written ‘Human’ the night before, and it was like a primal cry for self-preservation in a way, and not just for me, for everybody.”