SEATTLE — For Brandi Carlile, music and family have always been intertwined.

The Washington folk rock hero, who’s set to perform “America the Beautiful” during the Super Bowl pregame show on Sunday, has come a long way since her mom used to give out homemade brownies to anyone who bought her daughter’s CD at the old Paragon bar on Queen Anne. But 25 years later, that familial spirit still permeates most aspects of the Americana star’s career, from the bandmates who have literally married into the Carlile family to the open-arms environment the singer and her “Bramily” fan base have cultivated at her tentpole events Girls Just Wanna Weekend and Echoes Through the Canyon, which returns to the Gorge Amphitheatre this spring.

As Brandi “accomplished more than she could ever have dreamed of,” as her wife and longtime philanthropic and creative director, Catherine Carlile, put it, she made a significant behind-the-scenes change, further aligning her business and family values.

In 2024, as Brandi was completing her ascent to household name, Catherine took over as her spouse’s full-time manager. The move came ahead of arguably the two biggest album rollouts of Brandi’s career, with a string of increasingly high-profile opportunities culminating with Sunday’s Super Bowl performance — an event that drew 127.7 million viewers last year.

“It was Brandi's idea,” Catherine said last month, in between their Mexico destination festival, Girls Just Wanna Weekend, and the Grammys. “I think she had gotten to a point in her career where she really wanted to start to take more things in-house. … She's a really astute and smart businesswoman, as well as being an incredible artist. She's always been really involved, on a molecular level, in her career. As her spouse and having come from the music industry, it kind of felt inevitable that at some point I would take the reins. But it happened sooner than I expected.”

On paper, Brandi and her longtime bandmates Tim and Phil Hanseroth — who released a deeply personal album of their own in 2024 — are now formally represented by Catherine and her new company, Phantom Management. In reality, many of the crucial decisions facing the family business were already being made at their Maple Valley dinner table.

“You get to a certain age where you're not a ‘developing artist’ anymore,” Brandi said of the impetus for the move. “You know the ropes, you know who you are, what you want. What you've accomplished starts to become a part of the conversation, and you start to have a results-based career — a track-record-based career. And so many of those decisions, they got made at home between me and my wife. They got made on behalf of our children and on behalf of Tim and Phil Hanseroth and their families.

“We know what's best for our family moving forward in life. And we thought, ‘You know, why not make that official?’”

For Catherine, it’s the latest evolution of a career spent at the intersection of music and activism. Prior to leading Brandi's nonprofit arm for more than 12 years as executive director of her Looking Out Foundation — which has distributed more than $9 million in grants for social justice and humanitarian causes since its 2008 inception — the London-raised Catherine worked for Sir Paul McCartney. What was initially supposed to be a temp job with his publishing company became a formative decade as the rock legend’s charity coordinator and personal assistant.

As music biz mentors go, one could do a lot worse than a living Beatle.

“Really, I have Paul McCartney to credit and thank for pretty much teaching me everything I know in those 10 years,” Catherine said. “Being so young, it had a profound effect on my path and my journey and literally led me to where I am.”

Indeed, it did. It was through her work with McCartney that Catherine and Brandi first crossed paths. The two wed in 2012, and Catherine traded gray and drizzly London for the gray and drizzly Pacific Northwest. It was a drastic, but welcome, lifestyle change leaving the central London “grind” for Brandi’s log cabin in rural King County. “I was head over heels in love with Brandi, so I probably would have moved pretty much anywhere to be with her at that point,” Catherine said.

It was still an adjustment, one that took a few years to sink in. But Catherine, now 50, earned her PNW stripes (or is it plaid?) somewhere out on Puget Sound, sailing around the San Juan Islands in Brandi’s fishing boat.

“When we're out on that boat, and we're camping with our kids, that's when I really feel like a Pacific Northwester,” Catherine said. “Every time we fly home over that mountain range — doesn't matter where we've come from, no matter how glamorous or unglamorous it was — I'm always very thankful and happy to be coming home to the Pacific Northwest.”

Beyond her work leading the Looking Out Foundation, for which King County awarded her the Martin Luther King, Jr. Medal of Distinguished Service, Catherine (a musician herself) helped spearhead the 2017 charity album “Cover Stories,” benefiting War Child UK. They recruited artists like Dolly Parton, Pearl Jam, Adele and Kris Kristofferson to cover songs from Brandi’s breakout album “The Story,” timed with the 10th anniversary of its release. Former President Barack Obama wrote the foreword.

It was the first major musical endeavor Brandi and the Hanseroths had done with Catherine. For Brandi, it turned out to be an eye-opener.

“It woke me up to how powerful marrying music with activism in a meaningful way, how powerful that could be,” she said. “So, that was a pretty cool first introduction into how Cath could make moves in me and the band's career.”

Catherine was also instrumental behind the scenes in facilitating Joni Mitchell’s reemergence following a 2015 brain aneurysm. It was Catherine with whom Mitchell first hit it off, and as the relationship bloomed, Catherine did a lot of the logistical heavy lifting and curating with the Joni Jam project, which saw Mitchell return to the stage with a surprise Newport Folk Festival appearance in 2022 and a fairy-dusted triumph at the Gorge the following summer.

“It's the thing that dreams are made of,” Catherine said. “For me personally, I was a fan of Joni Mitchell from the age of 16 onwards. Never did I think I would ever see Joni Mitchell play live, let alone sat next to my future wife.”

From the sounds of it, the experience also helped crystallize for Brandi that Catherine was ready for the captain’s chair.

“Joni changed my life, and she also changed my career, anyway you look at it,” Brandi said. “And Cath was a really big part of that. It just got to a point where it didn't make sense to not have Cath officially in charge. And you start to feel kind of anti-feminist when you got a really powerful woman unofficially in charge and then men getting all the credit for it — and the money, you know? That's no slight against my old management; they were amazing. But it's impossible to compete with two women who live together and who have a vision for the future and for their family.”

Say anything about Brandi, she has never lacked for vision or the sleeves-rolled-up determination to see it through. “She’s the equivalent of seven artists,” Catherine joked (but only kind of) in terms of her “work ethic, ambition and her restlessness.”

The all-encompassing job of a manager, as Catherine views it, is to help artists execute their visions. One of the biggest things she's had to learn in managing her wild dreamer of a wife is not to nip an idea in the bud with the practicalities.

“I don't know if you've read ‘The Artist's Way,’ this Julia Cameron book, but it says don't pull up the roots of an idea to check if it's still growing,” Catherine said. “And quite often I would. I would absorb the role of what I thought was practical help, but in Brandi's mind, it was what she likes to call potential problem fatigue. She would have this wild, crazy idea, and I'd say, ‘Well, hang on. Have you thought about how you're going to get there? How much is this going to cost, and how are we going to get this person?’

“I would go straight into practical thinking, and I had to learn to not do that so that she could really flesh out her idea, because it's a really fragile thing for an artist. So I would say that once I learned that, we've really gotten into a good partnership around how to work together in a way that feels effective and not obstructive.”

Naturally, there have been other work-life challenges with having a partner in life as a partner in business, too. For all the productive ideating at home over Sunday morning coffee, there are times when one person is ready to turn it off when the other needs to be on. And they’ll occasionally catch a scolding from their kids for talking shop on the way to school.

“Dude, to be honest, it's always been really wonderful,” Brandi said of working so closely with her wife. “But since the switch, it's been really hard and up and down. We've had to learn a lot, and we've gone through some really intense times in our marriage and our friendship to one another. And a lot of that is fueled by making that position official. It's been really difficult at times, and then at times, it's been so amazing. … We've given ourselves a lot of grace to go ahead and let it take a couple of years for this to be right.”

Even if in some ways the move “felt inevitable,” given how much Catherine was already doing in an unofficial capacity, it wasn’t a decision she made lightly when Brandi approached her with the idea.

The transition also coincided with a significant bump in life’s road when Catherine’s father passed away. As Brandi noted, it’s the first time the Carlile and Hanseroth families have navigated the death of a parent. Catherine’s father was always supportive of his daughter’s music industry pursuits and couldn't hide his excitement, affection and admiration for Brandi's music and career, having been a regular presence at her shows.

“I don't know whether taking on this job was in part a distraction from my grief or a positive place to put my energy,” Catherine said. “But it made me realize that life is really short and anything can happen. And maybe in some ways, experiencing a fundamental shift like that gave me the impetus I needed to do something that I know I live and breathe for.”

“Maybe,” she continued, “it was in part thinking that my dad would be really proud of me.”

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