Songfacts®:

• This explosive track shares its name with Brandi Carlile's 2021 memoir, Broken Horses. The book details the singer's rocky road to fame, starting with a dysfunctional upbringing that found her facing poverty, a life-threatening illness, and religious trauma. Reliving the memories not only helped her get in touch with her feelings, but also inspired the material for In These Silent Days.
  
  "Finishing the book, it sounds so cliché, but it really gave me so much closure and perspective. But it also gave me access to some of my emotions. I was able to connect dots that I had never connected, because you don't try and connect dots unless you sit and do something like this," she told Stereogum. "It basically just took the lid off of some righteous anger that I had."
  
  That anger surfaced one night while she was listening to Elton John's 1970 Americana album, Tumbleweed Connection. She plugged her electric guitar into an old amp, and her rage poured out in the form of "Broken Horses."
  
  "I was having some generational, genetic, queer, maternal anger about the world making me or my kids feel marginalized in some way, while also knowing how much better it is and it would have been if I had tried to do this 50 years ago," she told The Seattle Times. "I just wanted to scream and yell about it, and had a pretty amazing all-nighter, rock 'n' roll evening of exorcising demons."
• Broken horses are horses that have been tamed, but the title has a different meaning for Carlile. Growing up poor, her parents could only afford to buy injured and discarded horses that were sold off for cheap. When Carlile told her 5-year-old daughter the story of her "broken horses," she realized it was the perfect title for her memoir.
  
  "These entities that came into my life were so substantial," she explained in Glennon Doyle's We Can Do Hard Things podcast in 2022. "It literally would not have taken the path that it took without them in it, and they were just the most unbroken thing in the world, but they were only accessible to me because of their brokenness. I saw the arc of my artistry in that metaphor, too."
• This won the Grammy Awards for Best Rock Performance and Best Rock Song at the 2023 ceremony, where Carlile also performed the song. In These Silent Days took the trophy for Best Americana Album.
• Carlile performed this, along with the album's lead single, "Right On Time," on the October 23, 2021 episode of Saturday Night Live.