The album’s other guiding light is Mitchell, whose strict quality control is “the reason I write a lot fewer songs,” Carlile says.
She pays an affectionate but cheeky tribute to the singer on a song simply called Joni.
“She doesn’t suffer fools, she won’t make cups of tea, and she won’t bandage bruised egos,” sings Carlile over a delicately plucked guitar.
“She is a wild woman,” laughs the star. “She’s 83 and she will drink you under the table.
“She loves Cadillac margaritas and plain Black Jack. And she is unpredictable, untameable, unknowable sometimes, and it’s amazing.”
Presumably it was nerve-wracking to play Mitchell the song?
“Oh, I was quaking,” she laughs. “She was sitting at her desk in her bedroom, putting butterfly clips in her hair, as Joni Mitchell does, and just listening to the song with this furrowed brow, not reacting whatsoever.
“But this big smile spread across her face after the last chorus. Then she made me wait a good minute before she nodded at me like, ‘This is great.'”
One lyric, however, created a little friction.
“When I tell you I love you, and you tell me ‘OK’… That’s love in your way.”
“When she heard that she called me an asshole!” Carlile laughs, “because she knew exactly what I meant – and you’re not supposed to get Joni Mitchell. She doesn’t want to be understood.”
As you might expect, Carlile is full of similarly starry anecdotes.
She recalls seeing Paul McCartney at the side of the stage during her Glastonbury set (“that was a top five moment”); and spills the beans on Dolly Parton’s tattoos (“I haven’t seen them, but I know people who have. She can be really rugged and curse.”)
So what would that lonely child, who warmed her hands around a wooden stove and struggled to play Elton John songs, think about her elevation to the highest echelons of music?
“I have a lot of affection for that girl now, in ways that I didn’t at the time,” she reflects.
“She would love to know that it happened and that she made it. Because I’ve made it beyond where I hoped, and I’m not sure what to do with that.”
If Returning To Myself is the first draft of her answer, it suggests the possibilities are limitless.
With a new confidence and a new direction, Carlile is breaking into uncharted territory: Herself.
