The first time I heard this song, I was driving. I was talking to my partner, Carolina, about the greatest songs from adverts and she mentioned to me there was once a really cool ad for the beer ’Superbock’ across Portugal. She hit play and my whole life changed. It was one of the moments where It felt as though that was exactly the right time for me to discover somebody. I have always been a huge advocate for women playing guitar songs. I grew up listening to Sheryl Crow and Bonnie Raitt and I couldn’t believe I’d never heard of Brandi Carlile! From the moment I heard the first line ‘All of these lines across my face, tell you the story of who I am…’ I became obsessed with listening to every song she’d ever released.

I wasn’t in the best of places during this time, I didn’t have a lot of money and I was feeling the strain of committing my life to music whilst sacrificing ’normal’ adult things. I felt as though I was letting people down and I wasn’t talking openly about it either. So when the line ‘Even when I was flat broke, you made me feel like a million bucks’ came, I was in pieces. I felt like I’d heard a lyric that somebody wrote about my entire life. That was the first of many drives with this song on full volume and me crying and singing along. I’ve never found an artist who I felt as though fully represented who I was, and Brandi is exactly that.

Charlotte Carpenter