If we had to pee, we’d do it in a cup and pour it outside. The guy who owned the trailer was sharing it with the rest of our family and he slept in a recliner in the living room. We’d stay out late and come home to our garage and wash our spiky hair in a washing machine with powdered detergent. It’d been abandoned for years, but we’re always fixing it up and salvaging useful bits of garbage, like the Boxcar Children. In my dream, we’re all adults but we’re squatting there. I think it’s the most time we spent in a house and although it was only a mystical moment in a complex and meaningful childhood, it has sustained itself in my memory through all my transitions.

I still dream about that place all the time. Then Dad fell off the wagon and we got evicted from the trailer on the hill. He wasn’t crazy about my sexuality, but we each individually thought that the other was a total dickhead anyway, so it didn’t really matter. I had found a group of friends who accepted me, and my brother, Jay, and I were inseparable. I started to have relationships with girls in secret at school and creepy relationships with much older women in my band/work life. In this excerpt from Carlile’s excellent new memoir Broken Horses (Random House), the singer-songwriter talks about some of the tragedies (a friend’s suicide), trauma (trying to get baptized) and thrills (falling for her first girlfriend) from that period.

But before then, she spent much of her time narrowly avoiding trouble with siblings Jay and Tiffany, falling in love with her first girlfriend, Jessica, and tending to her horse named Sovereign, which she purchased for $75 at the age of 17. Carlile’s teenage years days were full of uncertainty and exploration: In just a few short years, she would begin gigging relentlessly around Seattle and meet her future musical collaborators, the Hanseroth Twins. Before Brandi Carlile was a folk-rock superstar, she was a high school dropout spending her time in a lakeside shed with her first real band, which comprised Carlile, her brother Jay, and a pair of thirty-something locals from Carlile’s native Washington State.

Brandi broken horses