When Brandi Carlile woke up in an unfamiliar barn one morning last fall, she was a little lost, more than a little hung over and feeling unexpectedly, profoundly alone.
She had arrived the day after her final Joni Jam, the epic series of concerts that Carlile had helped orchestrate at the Hollywood Bowl with the long-elusive Joni Mitchell, one of her lifelong heroes, alongside a constellation of rock and pop luminaries. The performances capped a period of incandescent ascent for Carlile, the singer-songwriter with the golden-ranging voice, 11 Grammys and a sideline as an icon whisperer.
Her musical idols — Sir Elton John! — were now her regular-phone-call besties. She had a devoted wife and two daughters, a family compound stuffed with loved ones and an acclaimed supergroup. She was in almost every respect at the top of the mountain: “I had done everything,” she said. “Twenty-five years of career-development work, in five or six years.”
And yet, she was also at “a breaking point, where I realized I had sort of totally forgotten how to stand on my own two feet.”
In that rural refuge in upstate New York, she wrote a poem that captured her mood: “Why is it heroic to untether? / How is alone some holy grail?”
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