There is a particular kind of return that means something more than a tour date — where the city and the moment and the album all line up in a way that doesn’t happen by scheduling. Brandi Carlile has one of those coming on Sunday, September 6, when she brings The Human Tour to Moody Center ATX in Austin. She will have been inducted into the Austin City Limits Hall of Fame by Bonnie Raitt just nine weeks earlier, on July 1. The PBS season carrying that induction — Austin City Limits Season 52 — premieres in that same September. And the album behind the tour, Returning to Myself, is about exactly that: the difficult, willful act of finding your way back to your own art after years spent in devoted service to other people’s. Austin, of all cities, will understand the weight of that sentence.
About Brandi Carlile
Carlile has spent the better part of the last decade doing the kind of things that few artists at her level bother to do. She co-founded The Highwomen. She produced Tanya Tucker’s Grammy-winning comeback. She worked alongside Joni Mitchell through Mitchell’s return to public performance. She collaborated with Elton John on Who Believes in Angels? in 2025. Through all of it — the production credits, the Grammy wins (eleven of them now), the Oscar nomination for “Never Too Late,” the Emmy Awards for composition, the New York Times bestseller — she was writing her own songs at a slower pace, holding them close. Returning to Myself, released October 24, 2025 on Interscope and the revived Lost Highway imprint, is the record that comes out the other side of all that. Her eighth studio album, and her first solo project since In These Silent Days in 2021.
She cited Emmylou Harris’s Wrecking Ball as a key reference point while making it — another record by a singer at the height of her powers who stripped away the comfortable frameworks to make something that sounded undeniably, uncomplicatedly like herself. Carlile wanted the same: something, as she put it, “undeniably and willfully me.”
The record was produced alongside Andrew Watt, Aaron Dessner of The National, and Justin Vernon of Bon Iver — working in separate studios, Watt at Henson in Hollywood and Dessner at Long Pond in the Hudson Valley. The ten tracks include the title track, “Human,” “A Woman Oversees,” “Church & State,” and a song called “Joni” that tells you something about where her attention has lived these past few years. The New York Times called the result “the luster and confidence of an artist realizing her prime.” Carlile’s own framing, characteristically, puts the record in the hands of the listener: “My favorite album is yours now. No one really returns to themselves alone.”
Venue Information
Moody Center ATX sits on the University of Texas at Austin campus at 2001 Robert Dedman Drive. The arena opened in April 2022 and holds up to 15,000 in concert configuration. Its low bowl design closes the distance between artist and audience more than you’d expect from a room that size — for a show in Carlile’s register, where the quiet carries as much as the loud, that matters. The venue was the highest-grossing midsize venue of 2025. More information at moodycenteratx.com.
Opening the evening is The Head and the Heart, the Seattle indie folk outfit formed in 2009, arriving in 2026 with the 15th anniversary of their self-titled debut behind them. Showtime is 7:00 PM.
Tickets & Pricing
Tickets are on sale now, ranging from $72.90 to $251.41. Get your tickets via the link below.