Playing with fire

It was nearly three years between the 2012 release of Brandi Carlile’s album “Bear Creek” and this spring’s “The Firewatcher’s Daughter.”

And it was a monumental three years.

Carlile and her longtime record label, Columbia, amicably parted ways, and she signed with the indie label ATO Records. She married her girlfriend, Catherine Shepherd, and the pair welcomed a daughter into their lives.

So when it came time for Carlile and her longtime bandmates Tim and Phil Hanseroth to come back together to record, they decided to do things differently. Most of the 12 “Firewatcher” songs were recorded in single takes, lending an appealing raggedness to the album’s sound. The songs are rich in gorgeous three-part harmonies. They also rock. It’s one of her best-reviewed albums, and it has been a hit with fans. It hit No. 9 on Billboard’s top 200 chart, and went to No. 1 on both the rock and folk charts.

She’ll bring some of those new songs, some cool covers and some reworked versions of old favorites back to Spokane next week for a show at the Knitting Factory.

Going into the studio for “Firewatcher” was liberating and amazing, but challenging as well, Carlile said by phone from a recent tour stop in Chicago. The musicians had a “don’t look before you leap mentality,” she said, and that’s something that’s unheard of on a major label. “It was a really special process,” she said.

“What it felt like was recording a record for no one but us,” she said. “Not knowing where it would go or what would happen, but certainly knowing what would happen would be because of us, and not because of anybody else. Which was added pressure, oddly enough, and added freedom. It was a really interesting dichotomy.”

Many people would assume that Carlile is a solo artist. But the Twins, as the Hanseroths are called, have been with her from the beginning. That familiarity and comfort are evident on “The Firewatcher’s Daughter.”

Listen to “ The Eye,” which is all harmonies and an acoustic guitar, and you’ll hear three voices that seem destined to make music together. That relationship is an important one, Carlile said.

“It’s something I’m really, really proud of,” she said. “There are only a handful of things in your life that you really stick with for that amount of time. This band being one of them and having worked out, I think I’ve proven a lot to myself about my ability to see love through.”

The three met in Seattle in the post-grunge years and signed with Columbia in 2004. The debut album “Brandi Carlile” came out in 2005, and Carlile was hailed by Rolling Stone magazine as one of 10 artists to watch in 2005.

Success wouldn’t really come until two years later, when “The Story” was released. By 2008, the title track from that record was everywhere – commercials, movies, and, memorably, a musical episode of TV’s “Grey’s Anatomy.”

During her three-year hiatus, the Maple Valley, Washington, resident said she was “learning how to grow things, and be a bit of a farmer, and preparing for raising a child and getting married, and writing songs about being on the precipice of living a totally different life.”

Some artists find that parenthood changes how they make their art. Carlile isn’t sure that’s the case with her.

“The way I’ve made my music has been so inconsistent that I don’t think I really had a ‘way,’ ” she said. “So much of what I care about is based on live music and entertaining, that I don’t really sit around and wonder, ‘Well, should I write a song today?’ It happens in the most inconvenient times, and I’ll just suddenly have something to say and I’ll have to write a song.”