You're listening to song exploder where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh, your way.

Did you do a lot of like rehearsal pre-production of this song before you started actually recording it for real?

No, I'm very anti-rehearsal prior to recording.

Why's that?

Well, because I'm superstitious, I believe that every song has a moment. And it's a really fragile moment where you write a song and you know it, but you don't have it yet.

Like it's still a risk, it could still derail, anything could still happen.

And it's really the difference between take one and take three, where you go past that moment and there's none of that anything that happened tension anymore.

And you're past the take that you should have kept. So if that happens to you out rehearsal, the song loses its rock and roll, you know. And I think rock and roll is a risk instead of a genre.

My name is Brandy Carlisle.

Brandy Carlisle is a singer and songwriter from Washington State. She's released seven albums and won six Grammys.

Her most recent album is In These Silent Days, which debuted at number one on Billboard's folk and rock album charts. It was produced by her longtime collaborators, Dave Cobb and Shooter Jennings.

In this episode, Brandy breaks down her song You and Me on the Rock and how it was influenced by her wife, by the pandemic and by Joni Mitchell.

Everything had been shut down all my summer shows had been canceled because of the pandemic. My life changed really fundamentally. And my wife and I who have been married for nearly 10 years, I'll be 10 years in September.

We were shut in with our two kids full time all the time. And I'm the kind of person that has to maintain a certain level of adrenaline and workaholism and that I could not abide a total pause on my life or a shutdown.

So I built a garden at a like stack stones and I made these raised beds and planted a whole bunch of vegetables and then it was like an immediate pouring myself into this project.

The lyrics came to me one day out in the garden as I was working with these rocks with these stones.

I remember the Sunday school song that we used to sing in church when I was a little kid, it's a built your house on a rock.

The world is the built it's house upon the top. The wise man built it's house upon the rock. The wise man built it's house upon the rock. And the raised days of the wind go.

The concept of it was don't build your house in the sand and don't build your house in the stream like build your house on a rock build your house on something that can't be shaken something that can't be dissolved.

And I realized no matter what the world had to throw at me, even if it challenged my very identity, which is what I had done by taking away my ability to play music in front of people that I have managed to build my house on a rock.

And I wrote the lyrics of that song in my mind about my wife and kids.

And then I started thinking about Johnny Mitchell of all things because there was something sun shiny to the song and it really got me thinking about what an influence she's had on me particularly in this era of my life.

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