Brandi Carlile Is Releasing Alanis Morissette’s “Uninvited” After Viral Newport Folk Performance

“I was, like, out of body,” Carlile says. “I was just totally in it, immersed in the song, unaware of the fact that I was onstage at Newport, unaware of any camera, and it was just a really honest release of something that I was feeling. And so, when it got posted, I kind of knew why it resonated. And then everybody started saying, ‘Release this, release this, release this,’ and I was like, Yeah, why not? I enjoy singing this song so much. It’s such an important song for me to sing every night. I want to keep doing it, and people enjoy it. So, like, yeah—give people what they want.”

About two weeks after the festival, when Carlile shared the nearly five-minute video of the Newport performance, calling it “my full totally unhinged version of ‘Uninvited,’” the world lost its collective mind, leading normies and celebrities alike to flood the comments with their jaw-dropped praise. Ted Lasso actor Hannah Waddingham declared it “Just beYONNNNNNND.” Reese Witherspoon wrote, “UNREAL.. I’m levitating.” Laverne Cox? “Bonkers amazing.” Melanie Lynskey said she felt “this performance in my heart my soul my entire body.”

Again and again, commenters begged for the track to be released officially.

Wish granted.

“It was actually really fun to mix and get into that, to the performance, and understand retroactively what was happening, because in real time, I didn’t,” Carlile tells VF. “I think that what that song is, and why it probably resonates with women—kind of retroactively, right now, in the times that we’re living in—is because it’s just a five-minute boundary. It’s like, No, the fuck you won’t. No, you will not push past what I want in my life.”

“I’m in a situation right now—I’m going through something where I need to say that every day,” she continues. (There’s no further elaboration on the situation.) “It’s become like a mantra, and I think that if women are drawn to that song right now, or if women are drawn to my cover of that song, it has everything to do with a collective consciousness where we are needing to set a boundary around our bodies and our beliefs and our freedom to stand up and speak out and earn a living and our freedom to lead, and so ‘Uninvited’ is a strong song. It’s a strong statement.”

Earlier this year, Carlile played the song for Morissette herself, at the induction ceremony for the Songwriters Hall of Fame, screaming the deceptively tricky track with furious abandon. Carlile admits that the occasion felt “really high-pressure because [Morissette] was there, and also like right in front of me was Taylor Swift and shit.”

Still, the Newport rendition stood out to Carlile. Maybe it resulted from the “hard morning” she says she had before the set, but Carlile knew right away that that particular “Uninvited” performance was different, and she wasn’t surprised by the strong reaction online.

“I did notice that there were a lot of people that have had to put their foot down at one point or another in their lives—notable people and celebrities, but also just regular people in the comments—and so I knew why it resonated,” she says. “I understood kind of immediately.”

One Instagram commenter, whose bio describes them as a realtor in California, wrote, “This feels like the final theme song of the female liberation & takeover over movement, we are angry stronger than ever❤️‍🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 @alanis.”

On the initial shorter clip Carlile posted, Morissette signaled her approval with “jesus brandi” followed by four fire and four melty-face emojis, which Carlile says she was “pretty jacked about.”

Carlile says that she immediately clicked with Morissette when they performed together at Carlile’s Mothership Weekend festival, noting that the Jagged Little Pill rocker seems to be on the receiving end of “a retrospective gratitude” as of late.

“It’s like saying ‘you were right,’ which is like what we’ve been saying to Sinéad O’Connor and a lot of people that took a lot of flak to speak out on behalf of the wishes of women.”

Perhaps the highest form of flattery for a musician is to have another artist cover their song. It shows admiration of a message, a style, a craft. It says, “I wish I’d thought of that.” Carlile, who released her self-titled debut album in 2005 and hasn’t stopped creating in the decades since, knows this better than anyone. She’s seen other artists pay homage to her own work (the 2017 album Cover Stories, for example, found musicians like Pearl Jam, Indigo Girls, and even Dolly Parton herself rerecording the tracks off Carlile’s 2007 album, The Story), and cover songs across a wide range of genres and artists are a fixture of Carlile’s own setlists during her frequent live performances.

Ask any Carlile fan (they call themselves the Bramily) which of her covers is their favorite, and you may never hear the same song title twice. There are so many of them to choose from: Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You,” Linda Ronstadt’s “Long Long Time,” John Prine’s “I Remember Everything,” or Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun.” She’s belted “Mad World” and “Call Your Girlfriend,” and one Reddit commenter cried “big lesbian tears” listening to her rendition of “Hallelujah”—a song so ubiquitous that it might be cliché and tired in the hands of anyone but Carlile.