Brandi Carlile Reveals the Person She Thinks Sets the Songwriting “Standard”

Brandi Carlile is singing Joni Mitchell’s praises. In an interview with People, Carlile gushed over the music icon’s songwriting know-how, even saying that she sets the “standard” for the craft.

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“I don’t really understand the metric of how I judge those things,” Carlile told the outlet said. “It just has to do with how I feel when I’m playing them.”

Carlile went on to note that Mitchell has “inspired” her in “so many ways.”

“I think one of the most profound ways is in what I won’t write because of Joni,” she said. “There are songs that just don’t get through the filter anymore of, ‘Can I drive up to that gate and play this song for Joni over a glass of wine?’ If I can’t, it doesn’t get written.”

In order to impress Mitchell with her work, Carlile knows that it has to be authentic.

“I could play a song with two chords and 10 words for Joni, but if it comes from the place that she calls ‘the muse’ instead of ‘the ick,’ then I can hold my head up,” she said. “But if I try and satiate someone or something by writing a song, if I’m trying to guess how it’s going to be perceived by other people in the process of making it, it will come out in a way that I can’t stand behind.”

Brandi Carlile’s Connection to Joni Mitchell

Carlile and Mitchell have been connected for years. In fact, it was the former woman who brought the latter one out of retirement in 2022 to play at Newport Folk Festival.

Carlile faced backlash for that move, which came seven years after Mitchell a brain aneurysm. At the time, internet trolls argued that Mitchell was putting herself in the spotlight too much in relation to Mitchell.

“I took a lot of s**t for my time with Joni in a way that just made me feel so beat down,” Carlile previously told Howard Stern. “I don’t know why because most people were beautiful about it, and in some ways, I got too much credit. But any criticism at all just felt so unjust because I knew people didn’t understand what was happening. I would just freak out.”

All the while, though, Mitchell supported Carlile, telling her of the naysayers, “Brandi, those people have always been there. They’ll always be there.”

Photo by Astrida Valigorsky/WireImage