Click here to read the full article.
For the season premiere of “Austin City Limits,” Brandi Carlile is officially the one being feted, as the episode finds her formally inducted into the Austin City Limits Hall of Fame. But who’s honoring who is an open
question, as the 2026-27 kickoff episode finds Carlile joined by Bonnie Raitt, bringing together two of the greatest voices of their respective generations in a mutual admiration society.
When the hour-long program airs on PBS stations Saturday night, viewers will get to see their joint performance of Raitt’s classic “Love Me Like a Man” as part of a show that otherwise consists of selections from Carlile’s latest album, “Returning to Myself.” You can get a sneak preview of that with Variety‘s exclusive premiere of the Carlile/Raitt team-up.
But there’s more. Recorded during the taping, but not included in the PBS airing, is a second duet, offered here as a web-only only bonus, with the two singers joining forced for John Prine’s “Angel From Montgomery,” which Raitt brought to its greatest public attention in the 1970s. “We miss John and we’re gonna hold him in our hearts right now,” Raitt says in her introduction. Watch it below.
The episode premieres on most PBS stations Saturday at 8 p.m. CT/9 p.m. ET (check local listings). The full episode is available to stream at PBS.org and on the PBS App. All Season 52 episodes, including Carlile’s Hall of Fame hour, will also be available to stream free on the ACLTV YouTube Channel.
“For more than half a century now ‘Austin City Limits’ has been a loving home to all kinds of real music and the real people that make it,” says Raitt in her introduction of Carlile as an ACL honoree. “There’s really no one quite like her. The most amazing range in voice, clarion and clear and powerful, and as far-reaching as her songs and lyrics.”
Carlile goes on to recall her first journey to Austin with comrades Tim and Phil Hanseroth. “Me and my brothers… first rolled into Austin in our old Chevy van, White Lightning it was called, over 20 years ago,” she says. “I remember getting to town and wanting two things: Tex-Mex and to know where Austin City Limits was taped.” She notes that, thanks to the program, she was more familiar with the Austin skyline than her native Seattle skyline growing up.
In the lead-in to “Love Me Like a Man,” Raitt says, “I’m so excited that you picked this song and I was so surprised.” She doesn’t say whether the surprise is because the tune is an “unapologetic blues song,” as Carlile notes, or because Carlile is usually not singing about a man’s loving as the apex of her experience. (She changes the gender in the verse to “a woman who can take me home instead of taking me for a ride,” but leaves the chorus as-is when she’s pairing her voice with Raitt’s.) Carlile tells Raitt that it’s “one of my favorite songs that you’ve ever done,… The guitar playing alone is about the sexiest thing I’ve ever been able to fathom, until you factor in the lyrics from this song… So i sent her a little note, and she rolled her eyes at me, but she said, “Sure, Brandi.”
The part of the PBS program that features Carlile with her band includes one other cover, Alanis Morissette’s “Uninvited,” which she has lately made a regular part of her touring setlist, plus the originals “Returning to Myself,” “No One Knows Us,” “Human,” “Church & State” and “You Without Me.”
Carlile is about to wrap up her “Returning to Myself” U.S. tour in San Diego Sept. 22, but she has an intriguing spinoff album release on the horizon for Sept. 25: a rearranged and re-recorded version of the most recent album that is being dubbed “Returning to Myself… (Sad Gay Version).” The streaming version comes out then and the vinyl is due Dec. 11.
