Brandi Carlile - "The Story"
Brandi Carlile - "Josephine"
Brandi Carlile - "Shadow On The Wall"

Carlile, clearly influenced by artists as disparate as Patsy Cline and Jeff Buckley, is smart enough to find a producer worthy of producing her sophomore effort. T-Bone Burnett has shown remarkable production ability in his many mid-nineties studio efforts, and rightly earned his rep helming Counting Crows' August and Everything After and The Wallflowers' Bringing Down The Horse, among many others. And he brings his ear for sonic depth and musical restraint to Carlile's work on The Story, fleshing out her signature style with full-band arrangements countered by acoustic recordings, reining in some of her vocal idiosyncrasies while emphasizing her astounding ability to emote through stunning melodies and harmonic layers.

What results is an album of surprising resonance. Carlile clearly is an artist performing well beyond her age; this recording oozes the confidence of someone who's been recording for decades. The album's depth makes it worthy of repeat listens, but it's the consistency of material on The Story that puts it more than a few steps ahead of competitors like Tunstall, who seems happy milking the popularity of "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree." On "The Story," Carlile channels Grace-era Buckley as she puts all her energy into the words she's singing. When, at the end of the song, her voice noticeably cracks as she sings the line, "all of these lines across my face tell you the story of who I am," it's hard not to draw comparisons to Buckley's cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." Both Buckley and Carlile knew how to stop listeners in their tracks with vocals which laid every emotion on the line. Carlile, however, manages to rein in the emotion just enough on this album not to let her unique vocal sound overpower the rest of the music.

The entire album's worthy of a listen from start to finish. In fact, that's what stands out about The Story compared to her self-titled debut. Carlile has learned, with the help of Burnett, to push the melodies to the front in a way that invites radio play while creating a work which, as a whole, plays like one intriguing song suite. While songs like "The Story," "Josephine" and "Shadow On The Wall" are layered with hooks and deserve repeated listens on their own, the album's a compact exercise in subtlety which hooks from the beginning and doesn't let go.

Something about Brandi Carlile's sound makes her stand out in the crowd even though she's not likely to see much radio success due simply to her more avant-garde focus on the album as a complete entity. She's produced two albums in a two year period which both hold up as cross-genre examples of what great music can be produced when an artist takes control of her destiny. For that reason above all others, The Story deserves your listen.