Watch the Video for Brandi Carlile’s “Returning to Myself,” the Title Track off Her Eighth Studio Album

By Josh Jackson  |  September 3, 2025 | 2:29pm
Photo by Collier Schorr
Music News Brandi Carlile
Watch the Video for Brandi Carlile’s “Returning to Myself,” the Title Track off Her Eighth Studio Album

Today, Brandi Carlile announced the release of her eighth studio album, Returning to Myself, coming Oct. 24 on Interscope/Lost Highway. The album is produced by Carlile, along with Andrew Watt, Aaron Dessner and Justin Vernon.

She also released a black-and-white video for the title track, directed by Italian-Canadian filmmaker Floria Sigismondi, which you can watch below.

The 11x Grammy winner says of the song:

“I’m not my favorite person to spend my time with. Returning to myself is not just a lonely, but a painfully boring thing to do. So much so that I’m actually not at all interested in doing it.
“I prefer to double, triple, and quadruple down on co-dependency, which I’ve come to learn that outside of 12-Step programs and junior high school relationships, isn’t really that unhealthy at all…
“For me the key to learning to ‘be alone’ is not being alone at all. It’s being alone in a crowded room. It’s hearing an unexpected doorbell ring and wondering who has shown up to watch me read my book and bite my nails all day. That a guest can be a deep lean-in over a cheap bottle of wine or simply an eyebrow raise and a gesture toward the refrigerator while I play Zelda…where I totally choose myself with someone so close to me I can hear them relax.
“People want to be together in silence more than we allow in our time. It’s falling deeply in love with the car wheels on a gravel road. The possibility of the visitor. The “not being alone-ness” of it all…
“Togetherness has given me everything I love about being alive. Starting with my original family in a single wide mobile home, gathered around a wood stove all the way to living with my band, haunting my wife everywhere she goes, raising my children on a tour bus, learning at the feet of Joni Mitchell, to making music with my greatest hero of all time, Elton John.
“Why is it heroic to untether, when the tense work of togetherness is so much more interesting?
“…because I don’t want to do it. Because I don’t want to return to myself. 
“And that’s why I will.”

Brandi Carlile will perform three shows at Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre this weekend before taking a break from the road.

Tracklist:

1. Returning To Myself
2. Human
3. A Woman Oversees
4. A War With Time
5. Anniversary
6. Church & State
7. Joni
8. You Without Me
9. No One Knows Us
10. A Long Goodbye

 
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