Gretchen Hartenstein
How Brandi Carlile and this album came into my life is, admittedly, a mystery. In short, I’m a faithful user of the Shazam app. Hint of a catchy chorus in the grocery store? Shazam. Intriguing instrumental break in the background of a commercial? Shazam. A voice that I think I know but I can’t name and it’s right on the tip of my tongue…you get the gist. But how or why “You and Me On The Rock” appeared in my Shazam-ed tracks on Thanksgiving Day…I truly couldn’t tell you. I’ve wracked my brain over and over trying to figure it out but I don’t even remember opening the app that day. Being the romanticizer that I am, I like to think that it was just meant to be.
This heavy-hitting masterpiece is Carlile’s latest studio album, released on October 1st, 2021, which also happens to be the day before my birthday (what can I say…it’s gotta be fate). And just to further prove its worth, it received a whopping seven Grammy nominations, bringing home three of those awards in February.
Just a quick note about Brandi: I’m a relatively new fan, seeing as it was this album that introduced me to her music, but it didn’t take long before I started a deep-dive into her discography and became invested. Put simply, I adore her. When I listened to In These Silent Days for the first time, the connection was instantaneous. Reading interviews that she’s done for this album has been nothing short of enchanting. She speaks the same way she writes lyrics, with an uncanny sense of realness to remind you that she’s just a human like the rest of us. She doesn’t hide and she doesn’t hold anything back. Not to mention she is effortlessly hysterical. It’s not very often that I find myself charmed when the interviewer includes Brandi’s exclamation over the phone as her 110 lb. dog comes unexpectedly flying into the room to cut her off mid-sentence.
It’s still a bit of a wonder to me that In These Silent Days has only ten songs; a perfect, concise, even ten songs. This album is packed to the brim with intricate musical and lyrical content, each song deeply rooted in raw, human emotion, enough to punch you in the gut every now and then. Granted, Carlile had a lot of emotional material to work with, given that this album was largely conceived during the early months of COVID, in the midst of those seemingly endless, “silent days.”
In the next part of this review, you’ll find enchantingly disjointed thoughts on my top five picks from the album. Choosing only five songs to feature was painfully difficult…but you didn’t come here to read an essay.
Unsurprisingly, I can’t say enough about “You and Me On The Rock.” It’s impossible to not crack a smile while listening to this song and it’s no shock that this is the most listened-to song on the album, racking up three of those seven Grammy nominations. The cheerful mood-boosting track channels that call for raw emotion into simple, sweet feelings of love for another. In an interview with Stereogum, Carlile notes that during the early days of COVID, she, like so many of us, felt her career and her identity be snatched away. But it left her with what she calls her “rock,” composed of her family and also faith, the latter a concept that is frequently touched upon in this album. It was this “rock” that inspired this heartwarming and blissfully domestic song. You’ll also hear delightful backing vocals from Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig of Lucius, who Carlile invited to be part of the track after producing their album, Second Nature. Unfortunately for me, I’m not only a romanticizer but a bit of a hopeless romantic as well. Sometimes this song hits a little too hard, but always in the best of ways.
“Broken Horses” comes out of left field, shattering the dreamy, folky trance that the previous tracks have put you in with its driving rock n’ roll feel and the harsh vocals that Carlile adopts. Personally, I can’t listen to this song without remembering the spectacular performance that she put on at the 2023 Grammy Awards in February. If you ask me, every song on this album demands a Grammy performance but Broken Horses was the song to do it with. In an interview after the show, Carlile noted the significance of the recognition the song received in the rock category and how she feels it’s inviting her team to explore a new sound, one that sounds a little more like rock n’ roll. In her words, rock n’ roll describes what they do in their music, taking the risk, putting everything they have out there. And that was certainly evident during the Grammys.
“Stay Gentle” is pretty self-explanatory and there isn’t really much I need to say. Just go listen to it. It’s a bright, reflective song that everyone needs to hear and remember. The first few times I listened, I was beginning to think I wanted it to be played on my wedding day. But it wasn’t necessarily written to be the sweet parent-to-child ballad that it seems. Instead it’s directed towards the common thread that Carlile sees between her young children and many of her aging friends, legends like Joni Mitchell and Kris Kristofferson: gentleness. And she said it best in her Stereogum interview: “What is it about the world that sort of steals our gentleness and then gives it back to us just in time for us to realize that we should’ve just stayed that way?”
Admittedly, “Sinners, Saints, and Fools” is another song that I can’t do justice to in mere words. This track is where Carlile really takes a deep dive into the concept of faith and the song is, in some ways, a representation of the contrast to what she personally believes and what faith means to her. It’s a thoughtfully concocted story of the harshness that can stem from well-intentioned beliefs, beautifully illustrated through its electric edginess. I feel that what makes the track so sinister is the inclusion of the strings, which haven’t yet been featured on the album to this point. Like “Broken Horses”, it’s easy to feel the rock influence in the music for “Sinners, Saints, and Fools”. And even if you take nothing else away from it, at least stay for the last minute of the song. You won’t be sorry you did.
Overall, I think it was the rawness and the relatability in this album that drew me so forcefully to it and keeps me coming back again and again. If you want my advice, carve out forty minutes in your day to sit down with a good pair of headphones and let this record play from top to bottom. You’ll find that you get this delightful kind of whiplash every time a new song comes on and it’s nothing short of a pleasure to experience.