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Elton John and Brandi Carlile on Reinventing the Collaborative Album With ‘Who Believes in Angels?’: ‘We Couldn’t Do Steve and Eydie — We Had to Go In Hell-for-Leather’
Elton John and Brandi Carlile discuss wanting to imbue 'Who Believes in Angels?' with vitality, and how it speaks to LGBTQ+ or just general audiences.
The album title “Who Believes in Angels?” may or may not be a rhetorical question, but it’s OK to stick with that lofty circumlocution long enough to consider the idea that Elton John and Brandi Carlile may actually be a match made in heaven, figuratively or otherwise. But they took a big chance and tested that mutual chemistry with an Andrew Watt-produced album that defies a lot of the rules of these kinds of collabs — never settling into any single routine about what genre the songs should be in, or how the vocals should be shared. Maybe any fan of either artist who didn’t imagine that we’d ever get to hear a single album with first-hand echoes of both “Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding” and “The Joke.” After talking with John and Carlile together last fall about their soon-to-be-Oscar-nominated song “Never Too Late,” Variety spoke with them again on the verge of their doing a joint show at London’s Palladium, which was filmed for a CBS special this Sunday night.
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