Throwing Good After Bad

Album: In These Silent Days (2021)
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Songfacts®:

  • The closing track from Brandi Carlile's In These Silent Days album is the first song she wrote after finishing her memoir, Broken Horses. "That song's about grief, acceptance, and love as an action instead of a feeling," she told Stereogum. "It's about loving someone that has something so good and seeing them throw it away, throw it after something so bad. It's just an ongoing theme in my life to live inside of and accept rejection. And so that was the first song I wrote after I finished the book. I went straight to it."
  • Expanding on the theme of rejection, Carlile said she was thinking about family dynamics and what it means to be a Carlile. "It's family stuff. It's about feeling different," she said. "I'm a person with a lot of familial pride. It's important to me, what it means to be a Carlile. A lot of that I think is just generational and sort of paternal. The older I've gotten, I've realized that it doesn't mean to be a Carlile what I thought it meant to be a Carlile. Is family even real, or is it a construct?"
  • Carlile wasn't sure what to make of the song when she finished it. "Is this song really weird?" she asked her wife, Catherine Shepherd, who told her to sit with it for a few days before making any decisions. Instead, she sent it to Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls, who gave it the seal of approval.
  • Carlile re-released the album in September 2022 with a bonus disc titled In The Canyon Haze that contained acoustic versions of all 10 tracks. Following "Throwing Good After Bad," she included a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."

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