Tish Melton, the 17-year-old singer who recently made a splash with her official debut single, “Michelle,” can’t wait to graduate high school next year and devote herself fully to her nascent music career. But in the meantime she’s got a hell of an early graduation present: a forthcoming debut EP helmed by one of the music world’s most notable artist-producers, Brandi Carlile.
The EP won’t be out till some time early next year. But PvNew has an exclusive first look at Melton’s music video for a teaser track, “The Chase,” and got the singer and her producer together on a Zoom call to discuss how they came to work together, and how Carlile believes that she is being mentored, in some sense, by her teenaged protege. Watch the video, below, and read on for our conversation with the generation-crossing pair.
Melton is a real find, as a singer-songwriter who’s able to explore her messiest emotions without apology, even as she projects calm-amid-the-storm assuredness. She gets her inner brat on a bit with “The Chase,” a song that pumps up the volume as Melton puckishly resents the hide-and-seek object of her affection, in contrast to the more ruminative and resigned tone of “Michelle.”
“I think it’s my most fun song,” says Melton. “It’s very petty and angry! And I think that if I heard that song, and I was in the middle of literally any kind of breakup or angry feeling at someone else, I would want to bop my head a little bit and get excited.”
“Yeah,” Carlile says, “especially about the part about calling yourself a blonde ‘when your hair has been brown since you were 13.’ I mean, everyone feels that,” she says of the resentment inherent in the tune, which she doesn’t think is limited to Melton’s teen contemporaries. “Like, I’m guilty of it. People who don’t relate to that song — I think there’ll be very few people who don’t.”
Carlile hesitates at embracing the title of “mentor” for Melton. “Tish has just got such amazing people in her life, you know? Her moms [Glennon Doyle and Abby Wambach] and her dad [Craig Melton] and her siblings — her family is like solid. And I think that my relationship with Tish is one where I’m being mentored and learning as much as she is. And I’m pretty content and happy just to be her pal and go to a Boygenius concert with her now and then.”
If you hear a bit of a Boygenius influence, there’s a reason for that. As much as Melton appreciates Carlile’s music, and is a Swiftie almost from birth, there may be an artist or two that exist on a perhaps even slightly higher plane for her. She taught herself Lucy Dacus’ last solo album, “Home Video,” in its entirety, and professes that “I definitely look up to her — she’s my favorite songwriter, ever.”
Says Carlile, “Tish played me all kinds of music leading up to our series of sessions that has already kind of ripple-affected and extended well into my own next phase of music-making and my psyche. She was directing me into how she wanted to develop the songs that she was writing, and it was becoming sort of crystal-clear that I would be certainly tapping into a different generation of what Lizzie McAlpine and Lucy Dacus and Phoebe Bridgers and Boygenius represent. You know, I’m pulling from Seattle, and I’m pulling from Sleater-Kinney and pulling from Elliott Smith. And it was really cool because I could hear who Tish’s heroes’ heroes were, and it made it really fun and really exciting for me.”
Carlile was friendly with Glennon Doyle, and as Melton presents it, “My mom had taken a video of me singing and sent it over and was like, ‘I do not know if she’s good or not, but I think you should listen.'” Carlile tells a slightly longer version of the history that involves Linda Perry as the middlewoman. After Doyle asked her about her daughter’s possibilities about a year and a half ago, Carlile suggested they call Linda Perry, who had some talks with Tish a bit and ended up putting her on a showcase at the Troubadour. Then, “Linda sent me the video, and I knew at that point that Glennon wasn’t bullshitting, and that this was fantastic.” Melton had previously picked up a little bit of attention as an even younger teen with a song on a podcast, but “the leap from the podcast song to what I was seeing was noticeably jarring, actually,” Carlile says. They then spent about six months discussing possible directions before cutting the EP.
Previously in her production career, Carlile has maybe been more notable for asking people to relate with artists who are further along in their careers — notably, her own idol, Tanya Tucker, whom she drove to Grammy glory, or other artists with a track record, like Brandy Clark, the Secret Sisters and Lucius. Now, as she prepares to unveil the EP she did with Melton, and also looks toward producing the first full album for SistaStrings in 2024, she’s relishing the prospect of working with artists from the ground up.
“It’s so freeing,” Carlile says. “I remember Rick Rubin talking about this when I was making records with him early on, talking about working with young artists that are still experimenting with identity, versus working with older artists where you’re kind of all your work is in trying to help them understand or remember their sense of identity — versus like, ‘Let’s just throw a dart at the board and wherever it lands, I’ll try that on this week.’ It’s nice that a young person can be so fluid, and so it was like just this real juxtaposition for me, coming off some of these other projects that I’ve been doing where these templates of who we know ourselves to be are rightfully and righteously set. There’s something fun when you’re just kind of freewheeling down the road with somebody that’s trying to figure it out themselves.
“You know, the only time you know you’ve broken a rule, musically, is if Tish says so. Because her fans aren’t going to say so, and her label’s not going to say so. It’s up to her.”
Going into the studio, Melton says, “I was really intimidated, because I had been a fan of Brandi and her music for so long. She knew my parents, but they weren’t so close that I saw her often. And at that point, I also didn’t really know if Brandi was just doing me a favor or not.”
“Just like I’d had no idea if she was actually very good,” Carlile says. “Well, I never got the sense of that (intimidation). Your steady nature just is such that none of that comes through. And it so clearly was and is not me doing anybody a favor. It was just that, man, those songs came in… and I’ll tell you what, there are more. These five songs (for the EP) weren’t even all my picks… I had another five more; I think I gave you a dissertation on 10 of your demos.. Catherine and I were just flipping out over the songwriting and the hooks, and there’s this really interesting… I don’t want to use the word maturity because it’s it’s not the right word…
“While I was recording Tish, I was having a conversation with Sarah McLachlan, and we were kind of lamenting a problem with where we’re at in life that we’re struggling to find things that are meaningful to write about, because a lot of the firsts have sort of come and gone… I had just gotten done recording a song with Tish called ‘Long Drive,’ which is literally a song about getting her driver’s license and bursting into tears at her first red light because she realized that she’s not in the backseat anymore… So many of us want that (feeling of writing about completely fresh emotions) back, and I was really lucky to have gotten to witness it in its truest form.”
Melton thinks a song like “Long Drive,” which will be on the forthcoming EP, can translate beyond her immediate demo. “I don’t think that you ever stop having certain feelings when you’re older,” she says. “At the red light, I was just feeling very lonely and scared, and I don’t think that you ever stop feeling lonely or scared no matter how old you are. So, I hope that everyone finds a way to relate to it. I actually feel like ‘Long Drive feels like my most mature song.”
“You do still feel that way,” Carlile affirms, from the next-generation-up perspective. “You just feel that way when you’re dropping your kid off at their first day of school instead. But it’s the same driver’s seat, you know.”
Melton has been wielding an influence on the tastes of Carlile’s children. “My girls are so into Taylor now,” she says. “Oh my God, Tish, it is is officially on. My kids are full Taylor disciples. I blame you,” she kids.
“It’s the only way to grow up,” says Melton. “It’s the only true way.”
Carlile’s appreciation for Swift’s full catalog has grown through hanging with Melton, but the act they’ve bonded the most over is Boygenius. “We took a road trip to the Gorge, and we got to go backstage and hang out with them, and they were so cool — they came out and were like really kind and generous and spent a lot of time with us.”
“I blacked out,” says Melton. “I don’t remember anything. I wish that I could say that I met them, but I don’t even think that I did because I was just so excited.”
Carlile recounts it: “She kept seeing them walk towards us for what felt like maybe an eternity, and she was like, ‘This is absolutely fine. This is normal. This is casual and fine.'”
Melton has done occasional appearances, from appearing at Carlile’s songwriters’ showcase during the Americana Music Festival in Nashville to making a one-song cameo at the Milk Carton Kids’ recent Los Angeles Folk Festival to bestow “Michelle” upon an audience of proud folkies. Mostly, though, she’ll be be waiting till next summer to go full-on into music, having already decided to take a gap year before college.
“It’s hard not to feel like I’m being unproductive if I’m doing anything but music, but finishing strong in school is very important to me, because I’ve spent my whole life working super hard at school. So my goal is to flip that switch when May comes and I graduate into full-on music.” Carlile has been encouraging, even noting that a joint interview needs to take place during a post-homework hour. And she’s doing her best to not remind Melton that she was a high-school dropout, herself, and that she set a poor example, by having that not turn out to be so ruinous in her life at all.
