Brandi Carlile's Giving Up her Ghosts

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Your live shows are incredible. Why is it important to you to have acoustic and unplugged songs at your shows?
It's our music in the way that it's conceived; in its purest, rawest form. It's important to tell the whole story, it's important to do the really dramatic over-the-top Queen glam songs, and it's also really important to strip things down and have them performed the way they are in our practice space and so we can really introduce all the elements of our band at our shows.

“If There Was No You” is a love letter. Was that song written about anyone?
"If There Was No You" was written as a songwriting exercise. I found myself writing these songs that were always intended to be loving love songs about something or someone, and then it's always only the parts of that relationship that I'm tortured by that are what make it into the song. I can never just write a sweet song without having to turn it in the end to coming from a place that I suffer from, and that is where my songwriting comes from. It comes from things that puzzle me, that are hard for me to understand. So "If There Was No You" was a songwriting exercise and experience that I had with a friend, and I just wanted to write a song about the good feelings I had about the friendship, not the bad.

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