“It’s about addiction, what’s happening in my family. An addiction recovery and the reaction people are expected to have after one recovers from an addiction after years of turmoil.”Brandi Carlile (51)

“It’s a song about my niece, my very first niece, Caroline. I had so much to say about her that I couldn’t fit all the words into that song. It was like a total tongue twister, that one is.”Brandi Carlile (51)

“I lost a friend to suicide when I was 16. He was 16, too. I was just in such a hyperactive phase in my life. But one of the ways that I moved past it was by blocking it out in terms like applying this sort of ridiculous rigid concept to it about selfishness. I just wrote it off and never talked about it or thought about it. And then like 10 years later this song came out of nowhere. You know, your feelings, it’s just funny how they surface like that. And I wrote this song about reconciliation and forgiveness, and the understanding for the first time that he’s what happened to him, not anybody else.”Brandi Carlile (51)

“I used to write a lot of songs about my brother, and a falling out that we had and then the changes over playing music together. We used to play music together like Tim and Phil do, and we fell out and stopped playing together, completely, altogether. So I wrote all these songs about having a problem with him and our fights and our disagreements. And then things happened and I got older and he got older and he got married and had kids. This light bulb went on in my head like, Oh, this is what life is all about to him. He actually wasn’t wrong, and I wasn’t wrong. He just had a different path in mind for himself than mine. And so I wrote some other songs like, “If There Was No You,” and even “Heart’s Content,” about the next chapter about how my feelings about him evolved over the years. I don’t feel wrong about the way that I wrote about our relationship in the past, I just feel like it has evolved.”Brandi Carlile (51)

“I used to write a lot of songs about my brother, and a falling out that we had and then the changes over playing music together. We used to play music together like Tim and Phil do, and we fell out and stopped playing together, completely, altogether. So I wrote all these songs about having a problem with him and our fights and our disagreements. And then things happened and I got older and he got older and he got married and had kids. This light bulb went on in my head like, Oh, this is what life is all about to him. He actually wasn’t wrong, and I wasn’t wrong. He just had a different path in mind for himself than mine. And so I wrote some other songs like, “If There Was No You,” and even “Heart’s Content,” about the next chapter about how my feelings about him evolved over the years. I don’t feel wrong about the way that I wrote about our relationship in the past, I just feel like it has evolved.”Brandi Carlile (51)