SEATTLE — Over the last handful of years, Brandi Carlile’s musical family tree has grown at a rate that would alarm dendrologists. Since releasing her last solo album in 2021, the Grammy-stacking singer-songwriter, producer and one of music’s most voracious collaborators has helped folk icon Joni Mitchell return to the stage, cut a duo album with hero-pal Elton John and produced records for numerous other artists, including fellow Washingtonian Brandy Clark.

There’s no small amount of selflessness in ensuring artists like Mitchell and Tanya Tucker receive their flowers, helping others realize their artistic visions or challenging country music’s boys club with 2019 supergroup the Highwomen. But it hasn’t been entirely altruistic.

“I really love joining up to other people, like really super going all in,” Carlile said, laughing. “One of my favorite things to do with my voice is to wrap it around another voice and watch it change; watch my vibrato sync up to another person's vibrato and my pitch acquiesce to (theirs). It's how I love music, through the context of harmony and collaboration. Just like anything you love, you can take that too far. And I may have just taken it a bit too far.”

After performing alongside Mitchell at the last Joni Jam concert at the Hollywood Bowl in October 2024, an awe-struck Carlile “had this literal and emotional hangover,” she said, “because I knew on some level it was the last time and that moment won't be re-created.”

The tireless songsmith planned to unplug “for a very long time so I could figure out who I was again and reconnect to myself as an artist.” Whenever she was ready to reemerge and make her next album — which became “Returning to Myself” (out now) — Carlile intended to do so with guitar-shredding superproducer and rock legend whisperer Andrew Watt. Besides producing the most recent albums from Pearl Jam and Eddie Vedder, the 35-year-old Watt worked closely with Carlile and John on their joint “Who Believes in Angels?” LP and the two developed a siblinglike rapport.

But before checking out for that much-needed downtime, Carlile had arranged a no-stakes, get-to-know-ya hangout with Aaron Dessner of the National, an acclaimed producer best known as the indie dude who helped Taylor Swift make “Folklore” and “Evermore.” The day after that last Joni Jam, Carlile flew to meet Dessner — at that point a friendly backstage acquaintance — at his pastoral studio in New York’s Hudson Valley, thinking maybe they’d write a song or two. For whom or what was anyone’s guess.

Left alone in Dessner’s barn and grappling with the idea of “Returning to Myself” (and the merits of solitary self-discovery altogether) after a magical run with Mitchell, Carlile wrote a poem that became the title track to her eighth studio album. A casual meetup that she viewed as tacked onto the end of a work trip accidentally became the beginning of her next record.

“When I met Aaron, it just took me by surprise,” Carlile said. “He was the right thing for me at that time. I had already decided that whenever I did make another album, I wanted to make it with Andrew Watt. … Then I wound up out in that barn and wrote the first couple of songs, and I went back to Andrew, and I was like, ‘Would you mind making the album with Aaron Dessner? Because something happened I didn't expect. And also, would you mind making the album right now?’”

“And (Watt) showed up for me in a really big way,” Carlile added of her primary co-producer, who touched every song but “Anniversary” — a stream of consciousness poem transformed into a chamber-folk dreamland.

Talk to Seattle musicians Carlile used to play with in her Paragon bar days or fellow stars who have come into her orbit more recently, and one thing becomes clear. The wild-dreaming artist and activist with a genuine spirit has an innate ability to make deep and meaningful connections with people in ways that make them want to show up for Carlile the way she does for others, whether it’s with help loading out gear after a Bellingham coffee shop gig 25 years ago or getting one of Los Angeles’ most in-demand producers to make her record right now while the creative lightning bugs were flying about.

However, sometimes showing up for someone means knowing when to step aside.

As the sessions unfolded between Dessner’s New York studio and Watt’s L.A. turf, with Carlile chasing an inward-looking muse and writing on the fly in the studio for the first time, she often had trouble writing to riffs her longtime bandmates and songwriting partners Tim and Phil Hanseroth came up with. Suddenly, Americana’s collaborator in chief was having a hard time collaborating — an “unsettling and jarring” turn of events.

“I was having to take a really, really hard look at whether or not I could play nice with others this time,” Carlile said. “It didn't appear that that was so, and I found it confusing and cathartic at the same time.”

In a break from the past, when Carlile and the Hanseroth twins shared writing credits equally, Carlile has a sole writing credit on four of the album’s 10 songs, plus two (“A War with Time” and “No One Knows Us”) written by Carlile with Dessner.

While the twins were with her “every day, every moment and there are many of these songs that we did collaborate on,” Carlile said, “their most valuable contribution to me personally was that they were totally willing to not contribute and still be just as supportive of me as they always were.”

At an intimate listening event and Q&A last weekend at the Paramount Theatre, where Carlile debuted the new album for fan club members, someone in the audience asked if the Hanseroths felt sidelined by the process, which also invited two new voices in Dessner and Watt — who seems destined for a producer of the year Grammy if ever Jack Antonoff chills out — into Carlile’s inner circle.

“Something cool about our band, you’d think our relationship’s based on music,” Tim said. “It’s not. It’s based on friendship. Sometimes you gotta get out of the (expletive) way to grow, so that’s what we did. I can’t speak for Phil, but I decided a long time ago that I was going to live a life in support of Brandi. … If she said jump off a cliff, you (expletive) jump and we know that there’s going to be a safe place to land. So, here we are.”

“Returning to Myself” finds the Americana star doing just that after years of extensive collaborations. It’s a record of reinvention and rediscovery, filled with songs unlike any Carlile has made before, often leaning into her singer-songwriter side but painting with different sonic palettes, aided by her estimable (and wildly different) co-producers and cameos from Justin Vernon of Bon Iver.

At times it’s cozy, others, exhilaratingly daring, while portending bold, new musical avenues Carlile could further explore. It’s also an album that affirms the defining midcareer creative run that took Carlile from being a reliable theater filler to a household name is not over.

Among the highlights are the masterfully constructed “A Woman Oversees,” a spacious folk-soul ballad illuminated by the halos of SistaStrings’ angelic backing vocals. It’s a soft-landing piano number that reminds us that Carlile’s voice can drop jaws without swinging for the big note," which became a Carlile trademark during her ascent into popular music’s mainstream.

Easily the album’s biggest head-turner,though,is “Church & State” — an urgent political rocker that rips through the tight 10-song affair like a tornado. In what Carlile called her “favorite rock ‘n’ roll song our band has ever written,” there are post-punky hints of U2’s haunting '80s heyday and latter-day Pearl Jam, with Carlile reading Thomas Jefferson's famous 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in place of a guitar solo. (Didn't see that one coming, did you?)

Here's what else Carlile had to say about making the most distinct album of her career — kicking it off with a string of Seattle events — and Soundgarden's upcoming induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

On her hometown album rollout, which soft-launched with sit-ins with Dua Lipa and I’m With Her …

"It feels really right to me. The music is coming from a place of regional attachment and retrospect to my home. I can point to a time when making music was a different thing for me than it has been for the last 20 years. There came a point where I dropped out of high school, and I had to make music my job, and that was the way I was going to pay my rent (and) feed my horse. So, I played in all the bars and restaurants that you know about, in the daytime at Pike Place Market, busking.

"There's something happening to me right now in my life — I don't know if it's because of my age or whatever — to where I'm curious about the time before it was work. When I was writing songs, it was like the greatest adrenaline hit I could find, you know? In my abstract mind, when I think about that, I just think about here."

On trying to maintain that initial flame …

"There's no holding on to it. It comes up in fleeting ways, in temporary moments. You have to harness them because it's only there for a moment, that feeling that you used to just have all the time. I wanted to go back there in a way when I made this album."

On contrasting her co-producers Watt and Dessner …

"Andrew has a lot of bombast, chaos, bravery and volume. And Aaron, he's surgical. There's a refinement and an emotional sensitivity and intelligence around the way that he constructs things. When you take both of those things and you combine them, that's the kind of music I want to make forever. I want to make emotionally intelligent, but bombastic and chaotic music."

On entering the studio without fully formed songs …

"It took all the workmanship out of it. That feeling of work, where you woodshed your songs, practice and get them down into the format that you like so you can go to the studio and not waste anybody's time. That's when I'm creating with my work ethic.

"I had to kind of unplug my work ethic, and I think it led to something that sounds really different than the rest of my albums. I think the main reason is because we didn't woodshed these things. We didn't work them out. We didn't have a plan. It's really self-conscious and free. It's weird to be both of those things at the same time, but you can."

On performing with Soundgarden at the Seattle rock giants’ upcoming Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction Nov. 8 …

"I cannot wait to (expletive) perform with them. I worship those guys. Not everybody knows this, but when I got to be the record store ambassador for Record Store Day, I had the idea to ask Soundgarden to record that little EP with me and the twins. It was as much my dream as it was the twins’ dream.

"When they agreed to do it, we went to London Bridge(Studio), where Pearl Jam 'Ten' and 'Temple of the Dog' (were recorded). That's also where I met the twins when I was 17, 18 years old. That's where (Soundgarden) recorded all their demos, that's where I recorded all my demos. Talk about a full circle moment. It was something I'll never forget. So, when they got in (the Rock Hall), I was like, 'Put me in, coach!'

On bringing Echoes Through the Canyon back to the Gorge Amphitheatre …

We don't have dates yet, but it's happening again. I had enough rest. I needed a rest. It was a very big one last time I did it.

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