By The Way, I Forgive You
After exhilarating dips into guitar rock and country, Carlile returns to her sweet spot: tear-jerking Americana that shows off her crackling croon. It’s her sixth album and her most moving, with vulnerable outsider anthems rooted in healing and hope. There are ballads about addiction (“Sugartooth”), suicide (“Fulton County Jane Doe”), heartbreak (“Every Time I Hear That Song”), and starting over (“Harder to Forgive”), but underneath the hard truths is plenty of optimism. In “The Joke,” a song for kids who don’t fit traditional roles, she offers a light at the end of the tunnel: “I’ve been to the movies/I’ve seen how it ends/And the joke’s on them.”
Carlile’s sixth LP is a move toward her prestige era, a moment when she’s expected to reconcile the warring parts of herself for a growing audience.
Car Seat Headrest reimagines 2011’s fiery Twin Fantasy with a bigger budget, while Poliça and Stargaze turn in the stirring Music For The Long Emergency, and Brandi Carlile finds strength in forgiveness on the lovely, languid By The Way, I Forgive You. These, plus Superchunk, Ought, and more in this week’s notable…
By the Way I Forgive You represents a return of sorts for Brandi Carlile, finding the singer/songwriter shifting away from the ramshackle mess of 2015's The Firewatcher's Daughter and toward the kind of grandiose emotional bloodletting she pioneered on her 2007 album, The Story.
By the Way, I Forgive You frames Carlile’s gnarled roots-rock and folksy storytelling in grand orchestral arrangements.