When You're Wrong

Album: In These Silent Days (2021)
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Songfacts®:

  • In this emotional track from Brandi Carlile's In These Silent Days album, the Americana singer addresses a loved one who's made some bad choices and hopes they can find "someone strong enough to love you when you're wrong." Although it was written by her collaborators Phil and Tim Hanseroth, Carlile connects with the song's theme on a personal level.

    "I didn't pen this one, but I mean it. I think it's absolutely for me when I sing it. It's about balancing intense pain and anger, which I feel like are packaged as one emotion in this song, with acceptance and empathy, which is really hard to do," she told Stereogum in 2021.

    "When I sing this song, I am angry and really hurt by this person's choices and their existence. And then, on the other hand, I'm accepting their decision and empathizing with the things that led them to making that decision. And that's, I think, really important because that's the only way to put one foot in front of the other. That's kind of a classic… This is Al-Anon language for me, which I basically grew up marinating in. I feel really raw when I sing this song because I can understand it and fathom what's been written in a really big way."
  • Carlile's life is intertwined with the Hanseroth twins, her longtime band members and songwriting partners. Phil Hanseroth, her bass player, is also her brother-in-law: He married her younger sister Tiffany. All of their families, along with some of their friends, live on the same sprawling property in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains outside of Seattle, where they quarantined and wrote the album during the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Carlile told Stereogum that the close proximity also influenced this track. "This is one of those situations, without being too abstract, where I share a life with several families," she said.

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