Brandi Carlile

Artist's Website

Give Up The Ghost, Brandi Carlile’s third album, unveils her talents in their truest form. After 2 albums and non-stop touring, she has let her guard down and offers her most candid recording to date. If the phrase ‘give up the ghost’ most often refers to death or dying, it can also be used to describe the passing of stages in life, of transformation.

After debuting with a self-titled album in 2005, the Washington State-bred Carlile saw her fanbase mushroom with her sophomore disc, The Story. Among the growing legion of Carlile fans is Elton John. ‘Brandi has an amazing voice,’ he says. ‘She’s a great songwriter and has a tremendous career ahead of her.’

If she took root in performing songs by the likes of Patsy Cline as a child, Carlile’s journey gained traction during her teen years, when she began earning a living as a busker at Pike Place Market in Seattle when not playing in a band. Eventually, she and the Hanseroth twins recorded a collection of songs, for which they had modest hopes. To their surprise, those songs became Brandi Carlile, which sold more than 120,000 copies and spawned the popular single ‘What Can I Say.’

Her second album, The Story, upped the ante considerably, selling 313,000 copies and rising to No. 41 on the Billboard albums chart. Several of Carlile’s songs have appeared in commercials and on televisions shows such as Grey’s Anatomy. Along the way, she’s toured with the likes of Ray LaMontagne, and Sheryl Crow, who raved about Carlile’s support performances online: ‘She has the most amazing voice I may have ever heard. Soulful. Country. Perfect in every way-and propelled by taste.’

With all that encouragement and experience under her belt, when Carlile set out to make Give Up The Ghost, she did so with ample ambition: ‘When we recorded The Story, we set up our instruments with one drummer, like a stage, and we treated the record like a show, and we recorded that performance. This is the first time we treated something like a record. We really dug in, and chose musicians, and instruments, and set-ups very specifically to each song. We didn’t go halfway on anything.’