A powerful new voice in Americana, Brandi Carlile made an indelible impression with 2007’s raw-throated love song “The Story,” later covered by both LeAnn Rimes and Dolly Parton. Since then, she has displayed a songwriting sensibility steeped in folk and country traditions while also reflective of her creative restlessness and her identity as one of roots music’s most prominent LGBTQ+ artists. Her gritty but nimble pipes fuel her poignant, down-home songwriting on tunes like 2014’s “The Eye,” where she howls to a troubled lover over sparse, fingerpicked guitar, and 2017’s “The Joke,” a prescient song for the times about not giving in to bullies or pessimism. Carlile continues to disregard obvious boundaries between genres, baring the contents of her head and heart with a voice equally capable of conveying desperate urgency, stark intimacy, and gale-force-wind bravado. Witness 2021’s electrifying “Broken Horses,” which won her two of her many Grammys. And after co-founding country supergroup The Highwomen, she teamed up with her formative influence Elton John for the 2025 album Who Believes In Angels?. “I’ve been singing with Elton all my life,” she told Apple Music. “He just didn’t know it until about 10 or 20 years ago.” Going toe to toe with that musical titan proves just how far Carlile has come since debuting in the mid-2000s.