Brandi Carlile By the Way, I Forgive You released

By the Way, I Forgive You Brandi Carlile

Released: February 16, 2018 Peak: 5 US, -- UK, 27 CN, -- AU, 12 DF Click for codes to charts. Sales (in millions): -- Genre: alternative rock/Americana

Tracks: Song Title (date of single release, chart peaks) Every Time I Hear That Song (11 DF) The Joke (11/13/17, 4 AA, 1 DF) Hold Out Your Hand The Mother (1 DF) Whatever You Do (2/2/18, --) Fulton County Jane Doe Sugartooth (1/19/18, --) Most of All (18 DF) Harder to Forgive Party of One (11/10/18, 29 AC, 18 DF) Total Running Time: 43:25

Rating: 4.017 out of 5.00 (average of 29 ratings) Awards: (Click on award to learn more).

A Snapshot of Carlile’s Career Singer/songwriter Brandi Carlile was born in 1981 in Washington. She started singing on stage at age 8. Inspired by Elton John’s music, she taught herself to play piano and later learned to play guitar. She dropped out of high school to pursue a music career. She signed to Columbia Records in 2004 and released her self-titled debut album in 2005. Her next album, The Story, is her best seller to date, achieving gold status. Her sixth album, By the Way, I Forgive You, is her highest charting album to date, reaching #5 on the Billboard album chart. It also topped Billboard’s Americana album chart. The “stately, spooky” AM By the Way has been called “her best yet.” PM The album landed a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year and won for Best Americana Album. A Mix of Genres She delivers a mix of “backwoods balladry, operatic Americana, and rough-hewn rock” AM with “a batch of songs that range from folk, country and blues to symphonic pop and rock pieces that would sound at home on a Broadway stage.” PM She returned to “the kind of grandiose emotional bloodletting she pioneered on…The Story.” AM The Players She was challenged by producer Dave Cobb’s assertion that she hadn’t topped her vocal on that album’s title song in the decade since. AM She took up the challenge and hired Cobb and Shooter Jennings as co-producers. It worked. Carlile “hasn’t sounded this nuanced or forceful on record since The Story.” AM By the Way I Forgive You is “a record with more texture, shade, and ambiguity: it is clearly the work of a maturing artist and it’s all the richer for it.” AM Once again, twin brothers Phil and Tim Hanseroth – with whom she’d started her career – are on board playing bass and guitar respectively and co-writing all of the songs on the album. “The Twins have always elevated Carlile’s songs above the realm of delicate confessionals, but here they attack with a muscular grace, keeping their full power in reserve until the necessary moments. Cobb and Jennings not only capture this elemental musicality, they accentuate it through cinematic string arrangements from the late Paul Buckmaster. Sweeping and symphonic, Buckmaster’s strings command attention but they do not overshadow Carlile.” AM The Songs By the Way “wears its scars proudly, using Every Time I Hear That Song – a lament whose refrain provides the album with its title -- as its touchstone. Wounded but compassionate, the song is about forgiveness, and that’s the underlying emotion” AM that underpins the album. She “doesn’t always find forgiveness easy but she’s operating from a place of empathy, which gives her tales of loss, frustration, and wrong turns a deep resonance, especially as her lyrics find a match within the music.” AM The album’s first single and most celebrated song was The Joke. Former President Barack Obama called it one of his favorite tracks of 2017. WK Carlile said of the song, “There are so many people feeling misrepresented…so many people feeling unloved…The song is just for people that feel under-represented, unloved or illegal.” WK Party of One was remixed as a duet with English singer/songwriter Sam Smith and released as the album’s second single. Portions of the profits from the song went to Children in Conflict, a non-profit focused on helping children affected by war. WK Fulton County Jane Doe “is based on the real-life story of an unidentified murder victim in Fulton County, Georgia.” WK On an album filled with highlights, The Mother might take the cake. The song is a beautiful tribute to Carlile’s daughter in which she sings, “The first things that she took from me were selfishness and sleep / She broke a thousand heirlooms I was never meant to keep / She filled my life with color, canceled plans and trashed my car / But none of that is ever who we are.”

Reviews: AM AllMusic.com review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine PM’19 Paste (11/22/2019). “The 40 Best Folk Albums of the 2010s” WK Wikipedia Related DMDB Links: First posted 11/5/2025.