Broken Horses

by Brandi Carlile

I still can’t bring myself to go out onstage in ordinary clothes…I see it as a sign of disrespect to the audience and to the art of entertainment. It’s not about having fancy clothes and being rich; it’s about communicating to the crowd that you understand the evening is special for them.

I was way too poor and way too awkward to want to make as much of a spectacle of myself as I was.

history will remember this as one of America’s most unloving and inhospitable decades.

This word sticks in my craw the way the phrase “love the sinner, hate the sin” does. When someone says, “I’ll pray for you,” I feel like they’re saying, “From my platform of purity, I’ll pray for your iniquity.” When they say, “I forgive you,” they’re saying, “From my position of righteousness, I will accept you even though you’re wrong and inadequate.”

“Sometimes I pretend we never met. Because it’s harder to forgive than to forget.”

Turn on the radio and listen to what is being said to your daughter right this minute: That she’s an ass in a pair of blue jeans. That she belongs in the passenger seat of a pickup truck with a koozie. That she’s only into “backroad” guys.

This all used to be rural farmland and untouched redwoods. It was the country out here…now it’s just the country for people who can afford it.