In this episode of the Sad Song Queens, music supervisors Laura Webb and Lindsay Wolfington sit down with the incomparable Brandi Carlile—an Oscar nominee, 11-time Grammy winner, two-time Emmy winner, and New York Times best-selling author who has released ten studio albums to date. They discuss Brandi Carlile’s stunning new deluxe release, Returning To Myself (Sad Gay Version), which features intimate, reimagined versions of all ten songs from the original album. Brandi details the meticulous and vulnerable choices behind reshaping these tracks, including a deep-dive discussion into Brandi’s latest single "Human (Sad Gay Version)," her beautiful collaboration with Jon Hopkins.

Fresh off winning Song of the Year at the 2026 Americana Awards for the title track "Returning To Myself" from her acclaimed 2025 album of the same name, Brandi Carlile joins the show to discuss her incredible career and collaborations with idols like Joni Mitchell and Elton John. She also reflects on how the music she listened to in her adolescence influenced both versions of Returning to Myself, and what sad songs got her through her younger years.

Laura, Lindsay and Brandi share their love for sad songs and go through many of their favorites to determine what makes a song “sad gay” - a genre in and of itself, according to Brandi - while playing a game of "Sad vs Sad Gay,” They also share stories about the shows’ past guests whom she has been inspired by and worked with, including Sara Bareilles, Bernie Taupin, the Secret Sisters, and Lucius, celebrating the tight-knit community of incredible artists she continually champions.

Whether you are looking for a good cry, a deep dive into the craft of songwriting, or simply an inspiring conversation about community and creativity, this episode has it all. Grab your tissues, check out the show notes for the full playlist of every track discussed, and tune in now to experience this unforgettable chat with Brandi Carlile!

Keywords: Brandi Carlile, Returning To Myself Sad Gay Version, Human featuring Jon Hopkins (Sad Gay Version), story behind the song, indie folk music, singer-songwriter interviews, music supervision, acoustic sad songs, music supervisor podcast, Lindsay Wolfington, Laura Webb, Sad Song Queens podcast

Support the show

To help support these artists’ as well as their favorite sad songs, please check out our Official Spotify Playlist!

Find us elsewhere:

https://linktr.ee/sadsongqueens

If you like what you hear, you can buy us a coffee!

Our theme song is "All My Favorite Songs" by Weezer, courtesy of Crush Music, Atlantic Recording Company, and WEA International Inc, a Warner Music Company.

Our Sad Song Queen image was created by Keahu Kahuanui.

Check out our friends at The Songwriting School of Los Angeles!

Singer-songwriter duo, The Secret Sisters, join Sad Song Queens hosts Laura Webb and Lindsay Wolfington to dive into the emotional backstory behind their poignant track, “Hold You Dear” from their 2020 album Saturn Return. In this intimate conversation, real-life sisters Laura Rogers and Lydia Slagle, reflect on the raw vulnerability of early motherhood, family, and the fleeting nature of time that inspired the song.

Known for their close vocal harmonies, traditional Southern roots, and introspective songwriting across country, folk, and Americana music, The Secret Sisters have carved out a unique space in modern roots music. They share details of their music career journey that started unexpectedly when a spontaneously open audition in Nashville led to a record deal and their 2010 self-titled debut, produced by T-Bone Burnett and Dave Cobb. The album brought rapid national attention and tour slots alongside Paul Simon, Willie Nelson, and Ray LaMontagne.
The Secret Sisters tell Lindsay and Laura about their challenging experiences in the music industry, and how they almost left the business before Brandi Carlile encouraged them to continue making music. Carlile then co-produced two of their albums, You Don't Own Me Anymore (2017) and Saturn Return (2020) - both earning them Grammy nominations for Best Folk Album. Their most recent album, Mind, Man, Medicine (2024), is a deeply emotional exploration of human connection, self-reliance, and post-pandemic healing co-produced alongside Ben Tanner (Alabama Shakes, St. Paul & the Broken Bones) and John Paul White (formerly of Grammy-winning duo the Civil Wars).

To wrap up the episode, Laura and Lydia break down their personal favorite cry-worthy tracks from legends like John Prine and George Jones to modern masters like Big Thief and Madison Cunningham, making this an essential listen for anyone who loves a good cry.

So grab your tissues and prepare for tears as you dive into this deeply moving episode!

Keywords: The Secret Sisters interview, Hold You Dear, Laura Rogers, Lydia Slagle, Cry-worthy songs, songs about motherhood, acoustic folk harmonies, Sad songs podcast, music supervisor podcast, Lindsay Wolfington, Laura Webb

Exciting news! The Sad Song Queens podcast is a finalist in two categories for the Signal Awards! The Signal Awards recognize the podcasts that define culture, and we've been recognized for both the Best Music Podcast

Essential Sad Songs, from LoveCat Music. Stream it now on Spotify.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4DyWdiKiwI6L01fOJG5Zgc?si=gs0i5XrcSL6oU9Yz4zvR-w

Support the show

To help support these artists’ as well as their favorite sad songs, please check out our Official Spotify Playlist!

Find us elsewhere:

https://linktr.ee/sadsongqueens

If you like what you hear, you can buy us a coffee!

Our theme song is "All My Favorite Songs" by Weezer, courtesy of Crush Music, Atlantic Recording Company, and WEA International Inc, a Warner Music Company.

Our Sad Song Queen image was created by Keahu Kahuanui.

Check out our friends at The Songwriting School of Los Angeles!

In this episode of Sad Song Queens, hosts Laura Webb and Lindsay Wolfington sit down with Andrew Bird—Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter, violinist, whistler, and recent Emmy winner for Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics. Recorded prior to his big win, this conversation dives into the award-winning track "Need Someone," co-written with composer Gavin Brivik for HBO Max's hit medical drama The Pitt.

Whether you are a longtime fan of Andrew Bird, an admirer of his work across film and television, or simply a lover of deeply emotional, melancholy music, this episode offers a captivating look into his creative process and collaboration with The Pitt composer Gavin Brivik. During the interview, Andrew reveals that he wrote "Need Someone" in just an hour and a half after watching a single poignant scene. He reflects on how writing to picture provided a refreshing constraint, pushing him to be far more emotionally direct than on his solo albums. He also breaks down the song's core theme: the universal human need for connection and comfort during end-of-life care, and the profound reality that healthcare workers are often the last people by our side.

Beyond his 18 studio albums and contributions to projects like The Bear, Ted Lasso, and Disney's The Muppets, Andrew Bird touches on scoring Netflix's upcoming series Pride and Prejudice. He also opens up about his broader artistic philosophy—how fatherhood alleviated his career anxieties, why playing guitar keeps his songwriting grounded compared to complex violin arrangements, the real story behind his iconic whistling, and why live performance offers a far deeper connection than studio recording. To wrap up, Andrew shares some of his personal favorite sad songs and what makes his musical style so unique.

Grab your tissues, tune in, and enjoy this deep dive into music, emotion, and storytelling!

Keywords: Andrew Bird interview, Andrew Bird Emmy, Need Someone Andrew Bird, The Pitt, Gavin Brivik, Emmy-winning song, whistling, Sad songs podcast, music supervisor podcast

Exciting news! The Sad Song Queens podcast is a finalist in two categories for the Signal Awards! The Signal Awards recognize the podcasts that define culture, and we've been recognized for both the Best Music Podcast

Essential Sad Songs, from LoveCat Music. Stream it now on Spotify.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4DyWdiKiwI6L01fOJG5Zgc?si=gs0i5XrcSL6oU9Yz4zvR-w

Support the show

To help support these artists’ as well as their favorite sad songs, please check out our Official Spotify Playlist!

Find us elsewhere:

https://linktr.ee/sadsongqueens

If you like what you hear, you can buy us a coffee!

Our theme song is "All My Favorite Songs" by Weezer, courtesy of Crush Music, Atlantic Recording Company, and WEA International Inc, a Warner Music Company.

Our Sad Song Queen image was created by Keahu Kahuanui.

Check out our friends at The Songwriting School of Los Angeles!

Grammy-winning songwriter Dan Wilson (Semisonic, "Closing Time") returns for part two of his Sad Song Queens interview with hosts and award-winning music supervisors Laura Webb and Lindsay Wolfington. In this episode, he goes deep on co-writing Adele's heartbreaking hit "Someone Like You." Dan shares the untold story behind the song's iconic piano part, how Adele's iconic “screechy” falsetto note almost got cut, why her mum's tears convinced them to finish the song, and what really happened in the studio during those two legendary writing days.

Plus: Dan breaks down his personal (comprehensive) list of the saddest songs ever written — from "Fast Car" and "Somewhere" to "Rainbow Connection" and "I Can't Make You Love Me" — and explores why nostalgic songs like "In My Life" and "Night Swimming" hit just as hard as the openly heartbreaking ones.

Dan Wilson is a Minneapolis-born, Los Angeles-based artist with four Grammy wins across seven nominations, including Song of the Year for the Chicks' "Not Ready to Make Nice," Album of the Year as producer on Adele's 21, Best Country Song for Chris Stapleton's "White Horse," and Best Song Written for Visual Media for "It Never Went Away" with Jon Batiste. As the frontman of Semisonic, he also co-wrote generation-defining hits like "Closing Time" and "Secret Smile."

This episode is a must-listen for fans of Dan Wilson, Semisonic, Adele, and lovers of iconic sad songs.

Topics covered: Adele songwriting process, appoggiatura in sad songs, Someone Like You, Saddest songs of all time, Dan Wilson interview, Music production stories, Grammy-winning songwriters.

Exciting news! The Sad Song Queens podcast is a finalist in two categories for the Signal Awards! The Signal Awards recognize the podcasts that define culture, and we've been recognized for both the Best Music Podcast

Support the show

To help support these artists’ as well as their favorite sad songs, please check out our Official Spotify Playlist!

Find us elsewhere:

https://linktr.ee/sadsongqueens

If you like what you hear, you can buy us a coffee!

Our theme song is "All My Favorite Songs" by Weezer, courtesy of Crush Music, Atlantic Recording Company, and WEA International Inc, a Warner Music Company.

Our Sad Song Queen image was created by Keahu Kahuanui.

Check out our friends at The Songwriting School of Los Angeles!

Music supervisors Laura Webb and Lindsay Wolfington kick off this episode with a summer catch up. From travel tales and rock biographies to the tracks on heavy rotation, the Sad Song Queens sync up on everything that defined their summer break.

The duo peels back the curtain on the raw realities of music supervision and clearance, and music coordinator Jordan Linsley steps into the studio to talk shop—and host a high-stakes, hilarious game of Misunderstood Songs.

Play along as Laura and Lindsay throw down, attempting to decode famously botched lines from your favorite bands. Equal parts industry insider track and laugh-out-loud song trivia, this is the ultimate listen for music lovers and trivia nerds alike. Stick around to the very end to see who takes the crown!

Support the show

To help support these artists’ as well as their favorite sad songs, please check out our Official Spotify Playlist!

Find us elsewhere:

https://linktr.ee/sadsongqueens

If you like what you hear, you can buy us a coffee!

Our theme song is "All My Favorite Songs" by Weezer, courtesy of Crush Music, Atlantic Recording Company, and WEA International Inc, a Warner Music Company.

Our Sad Song Queen image was created by Keahu Kahuanui.

Check out our friends at The Songwriting School of Los Angeles!

New York rock veteran Jesse Malin joins Sad Song Queens hosts Laura Webb and Lindsay Wolfington to break down "My Little Life," a song that's taken on an entirely new meaning after the health crisis that nearly ended his career. Malin has spent more than two decades as one of New York's most beloved rock artists — his 2003 solo debut The Fine Art of Self-Destruction earned him praise from Rolling Stone, and his songs have since been covered by Bruce Springsteen, Lucinda Williams, Green Day, Elvis Costello, Bleachers, and Counting Crows. In 2023, Malin suffered a rare spinal stroke that left him paralyzed from the waist down. Rather than step out of the spotlight, he learned to stand again and returned to the stage the following year, later channeling the experience into his off-Broadway debut, Silver Manhattan, a Drama Desk–nominated autobiographical production, and his new memoir, Almost Grown: A New York Memoir.

"My Little Life" plays a pivotal role in Silver Manhattan, and the hosts open by unpacking why the song — written years before Malin's stroke — feels almost prophetic now. Malin explains that he originally wrote it about people in his life who struggled with the simplest, everyday things: friends and family members who felt like they never quite fit in, for whom just getting through the day carried real weight.

The conversation moves into how "My Little Life" ended up in Silver Manhattan in the first place. Malin describes handing his entire back catalog over to the play's director and co-writer to cherry-pick from, and being genuinely surprised by some of their choices — only to find that hearing his own songs performed in a new context, in front of an audience, changed how he understood them. He's candid about the physical challenge of performing at all after his stroke, describing the months of physical therapy it took just to stand and balance long enough to sing one song upright for his sold-out Beacon Theater shows.

Malin also opens up about the origins of Silver Manhattan itself — conceived the day after that Beacon Theater show, when a friend suggested he turn his catalog and his story into an ongoing New York residency rather than retreat. What started as that idea grew into a 92-minute rock show built with his full band, tracing his life from his old hardcore band Heart Attack and his punk band D Generation through his solo career, while also functioning, in his words, as a love letter to Manhattan and to the freewheeling, walking-the-streets life he lost and then had to rediscover from a wheelchair.

Elsewhere in the episode, Malin talks about writing "Shane," a song named for his friend and hero Shane McGowan of the Pogues, and how singing that song live took on new weight after McGowan's death, and after Malin himself began touring in a wheelchair. He and the hosts also dig into Malin's reflections on chasing music before the internet made it instantly accessible, his teenage years in the New York hardcore and punk scenes and its DIY attitude, and how PMA became a guiding life mantra. Don’t miss this candid and reflective conversation between the Sad Song Queens and a New York music legend.

Support the show

To help support these artists’ as well as their favorite sad songs, please check out our Official Spotify Playlist!

Find us elsewhere:

https://linktr.ee/sadsongqueens

If you like what you hear, you can buy us a coffee!

Our theme song is "All My Favorite Songs" by Weezer, courtesy of Crush Music, Atlantic Recording Company, and WEA International Inc, a Warner Music Company.

Our Sad Song Queen image was created by Keahu Kahuanui.

Check out our friends at The Songwriting School of Los Angeles!

Grammy-winning, Tony- and Emmy-nominated singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles joins Sad Song Queens hosts Laura Webb and Lindsay Wolfington for one of the most emotionally raw conversations the podcast has ever recorded. The episode centers on “Forever,” the penultimate track from Bareilles’ seventh studio album, Good Grief, released August 28th — a record built entirely around loss, memory, and the power of music to heal.

Sara Bareilles broke through in 2007 with “Love Song,” pushing her platinum debut Little Voice into the Billboard 200’s top ten, and later composed the music and lyrics for Broadway’s Waitress, earning a Tony nomination before also performing in the show and in the 2022 revival of Into the Woods. The making of Good Grief was documented in the film Sara Bareilles: Good Grief, which premiered at Tribeca before moving into theaters — companion viewing the hosts reference throughout the episode.

At the center of the conversation is the origin story of “Forever” itself, a discussion which brings all 3 ladies to tears. Bareilles details how the song developed over time, initially written while grappling with two overlapping losses in 2020. The song sat unfinished until Bareilles’ close friend and Waitress co-star Gavin Creel was later diagnosed with the illness that eventually took his life, and she reshaped the song with him in mind. By the end, she says, it had absorbed multiple losses, including her own experience with infertility.

The episode also digs into the song’s winding production and Sara’s experience claiming production ownership on this record for the first time in her career, after years of having her demos routinely replaced in the studio.

Grief itself is the philosophical backbone of the conversation. Bareilles reframes it not as something to fix, but as proof of enduring love, drawing on a conversation with poet Andrea Gibson about how the people we lose live on through the people who loved them. Host Laura Webb shares her own experience of ambiguous loss watching her father live with Alzheimer’s, and she and Bareilles connect on “signs” they receive from loved ones and what helps them move through loss. Sara also discusses the upcoming Good Grief Tour — her first since 2019 — and the fan voicemail project she launched alongside it, inviting listeners to share their own stories of loss.

Beyond “Forever,” the episode traces melancholy as a throughline across Bareilles’ catalog, reflecting on earlier songs like “Gravity” and “Manhattan” to this new album, and how her songwriting has widened over time from romantic breakups to the many other ways people leave each other. Whether you’re a longtime fan, a Good Grief documentary viewer, a songwriter curious about her process, or someone processing your own grief, this is an unusually candid look at how Bareilles turns loss into something you can hold onto. Grab those tissues for a good cry with Sara Bareilles and the Sad Song Queens.

Support the show

To help support these artists’ as well as their favorite sad songs, please check out our Official Spotify Playlist!

Find us elsewhere:

https://linktr.ee/sadsongqueens

If you like what you hear, you can buy us a coffee!

Our theme song is "All My Favorite Songs" by Weezer, courtesy of Crush Music, Atlantic Recording Company, and WEA International Inc, a Warner Music Company.

Our Sad Song Queen image was created by Keahu Kahuanui.

Check out our friends at The Songwriting School of Los Angeles!