California dreaming: Belinda Carlisle hopes to tour new album Down Under
Before going solo Belinda Carlisle gained fame as the lead vocalist of the all-female rock band The Go-Go’s. Now she has a new album out with the promise of an Aussie tour in 2027.
Belinda Carlisle is having trouble with the internet. After a few false starts, the singer is back online from her home in Mexico City and is ready to talk about her new album, Once Upon a Time in California. It’s a deeply personal album for Carlisle, reflecting on the music she grew up listening to during the AM radio days of her childhood.
The new album features Carlisle – who found fame originally as a member of The Go-Go’s, then from 1985 as a solo artist – covering the likes of Anyone Who Had a Heart, The Air That I Breathe, Everybody’s Talkin’ and others.
“We started with about 150 songs,” Carlisle begins. “We narrowed it down to 50, then even fewer. I wanted to capture that time of intricate harmonies and real melody. I wanted the album to sound not retro – but kind of modern, with a nod to that.”
Produced with long-time collaborator Gabe Lopez, the record is lush, rich but never overcooked.
“We started in 2017, off and on,” Carlisle explains. “Because of the pandemic, it stretched out over eight years. I was flying in from Thailand, then Mexico, and we’d do a bit here and there. You worry, right? That if something takes that long, maybe it’s not working. But having that time gave us space. We never got sick of the tracks and we stayed objective.”
Carlisle glows when discussing the process – her appreciation for the songs themselves runs deep in her DNA. She may still be a punk, but she also loves that delicious West Coast pop sheen and segues at some point with what the Brits were recording in the late 1960s.
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“There was one song, Holiday by the Bee Gees … I love that song,” she says. “It’s such a weird song. But our version was horrible (laughs), so we canned it.
“Others like Anyone Who Had a Heart, I wasn’t sure I could sing it. Dionne Warwick’s version is iconic. But Cilla Black’s version – that’s the one that really hit me. It was so sparse and emotional, and it helped me find my way into it.”
You hear that reverence throughout Once Upon a Time in California. Everybody’s Talkin’, originally penned by Fred Neil and made immortal by Harry Nilsson, feels breezy and wistful in Carlisle’s hands.
“I actually hung out with Harry a few times,” she reveals. “He’d hold court every night at my husband’s restaurant. Such a lovely man. I just hope I did him proud on that one. I think I did.”
Carlisle’s vocal performance throughout is nuanced – she knows how to sell a lyric.
“I prep like crazy,” she continues. “I do breath work, vocalising – I want to go in strong. Some songs, like One … I had to be in the right mood to sing. But it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. The hardest was Anyone Who Had a Heart. That was so full on.”
Carlisle and Lopez heavily invested in the sequencing of the record, and it shows.
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“We spent a lot of time getting the track listing right,” she says. “The final song we added was Reflections of My Life by Marmalade. It was a hit back in the day, always on the radio. But it’s about loss, beauty, life’s sadness – it’s heavy. I’m singing it at this stage in my life and it hit different. It was the perfect ending.”
For Carlisle, the path to pop perfection was never straight.
“I was a rebellious kid,” she laughs. “Radio started changing in the ‘70s and some of those artists – I didn’t love them at the time. Then I discovered Roxy Music, I saw the cover of Raw Power and it flipped my world. Punk came in and I jumped in. You didn’t need to be good – you just had to feel it. That’s how The Go-Go’s started. None of us knew what we were doing.”
Flash forward to 2024 and Carlisle just played Coachella.
“I mean, Charlotte joined The Go-Go’s because she knew how to plug the guitar into an amplifier,” she says. “And here we are. Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Coachella. My first band, The Germs, with Pat Smear – he called me and said, ‘Can you believe we went from The Germs to this?’ It’s insane.”
Outside the studio and off stage, Carlisle’s Buddhist practice and daily breathwork anchor her.
“I chant every day. I do pranayama most every day, which is breathing – heavy breathing, like Wim Hof kind of breathing. It’s changed my singing. It’s made me stronger. I don’t know if it’s impacted my taste in music, but it’s impacted my performance for sure.”
She plans to return to Australia in 2027 and speaks fondly of the musicians she plays with here. “It’s a killer band,” she says. “Singing with them is pure joy.”
And, of course, she doesn’t forget the fans: “When I sing Summer Rain down there, that reaction – it’s incredible. That’s my favourite song in my catalogue. The melody, the mood – it’s a little odd, a little off, but the melody is beautiful.”
Belinda Carlisle’s Once Upon a Time in California is out now.