Two rarities during the musical performances at “Saturday Night Live” this weekend: real rock ‘n’ roll was performed. Even rarer than that, Thomas Jefferson was quoted—prominently and extensively—in the place where a guitar solo might have gone.
During Brandi CarlileCarlile’s performance of the hard-rocking, U2-styled “Church & State” featured a spoken recitation between choruses of the title track. Viewers may have found the words familiar, but difficult to place precisely. From the constitution, perhaps?
Not quite, but close. The words Carlile chose to share with “SNL” viewers are from a riff on the Constitution, if you will — Thomas Jefferson’s famous letter to the Danbury Baptists, from 1802. In words, Carlile calmly reads back on his new album, but expressed as something closer to a howl on “SNL,” Jefferson writes:
“I consider with sovereign reverence the act of all the American people who declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, and thus building a wall of separation between church and state.”
Carlile rarely speaks too openly in terms of party politics, but it’s clear where she stands, and never more so than on a track that manages to come off as a timely protest song just by virtue of quoting Thomas Jefferson. Add to that Carlile’s own lyrics – “While the empire failed…” and “I saw the ivory towers before the revolution began” – and it’s clear that “Church & State” isn’t exactly meant to be an 1802 piece.
Lately conversation with Amount on new album “Returning to Myself,” Carlile talked about writing “Church & State” on Election Night 2024 with his co-producer, Andrew Wattand band members Phil and Tim Hanseroth, as a protest song, or at least a song of reflection, about what they saw going on in America.
And yes, she readily acknowledged the U2 influence that “SNL” viewers were quick to pick up on.
“On November 5th, we were in the studio as a band, and it wasn’t an introspective night. It was a night where I couldn’t stay off my phone because I saw myself waking up to a realization about the country I was living in. And I was listening to ‘Bullet the Blue Sky,’ and I was leaning into my early years and just collecting,” Sear said that night. She says she was led to “read a conversation about the First Amendment” in the recording instead for a guitar solo.”
Explained Carlile, “When the lyrics were coming together for that song, I just couldn’t stop thinking about the wisdom of Thomas Jefferson’s speech to the Danbury Baptists. There is so much wisdom in the Constitution, and even the notations on the Constitution are full of wisdom—the footnotes, if you will. What he told the Baptists would be allowed to practice, that they would be allowed to practice. religion, however you want to refer to it, freely under the Constitution, but he also makes a really important difference that we are not a theocracy.keeping for all people, because it allows the law to be secular as it should be, so I think that is an essential and a life-giving part of that text.
Carlile, who self-identified in his best-selling memoir as a person of faith, says of this text and this song: “In my faith, Jesus was clear not to rule a people based on an interpretation of religion. Even Jesus said, ‘Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s.’ So I can’t get behind rules and laws that I secretly know are based on an interpretation of a religion that I can’t get behind, even though I agree with the religion.”
Speaking about the pronounced U2 influence in the song, Carlile said it goes back to her youth. “One of my top five favorite albums of all time growing up was ‘The Joshua Tree.’ I even entered a contest once as Bono when I was 15 to win a singing competition, singing ‘Running to Stand Still.’ I was wearing sunglasses and shit and I fell to my knees at the end of it. I already had the lesbian haircut that he has, so it wasn’t too hard.”
The musical seed for the song was sewn a while ago, before she took it up again with Watt and the Hanseroth twins on election night. “I got a song from Tim a couple of years ago, this beautiful concept and the riff and this drop-D and all this cognitive dissonance in the song, and I put my teeth into it then. And I said, whatever it is, that’s a direction of where I feel like we could go musically. And then I tucked it away in the back of my mind and forgot about it until November 5th.” At first it was a blur until co-producer/co-writer Watt became more involved. When her band jams, “sometimes it becomes a bit of a sonic tornado, but Andrew had this idea for this separate guitar line, this separate bass line, and I think that’s where it kind of hit the U2 button for me,” with parts similar to peak Edge and peak Adam Clayton. And not forgetting top Larry Mullen Jr.: “Matt Chamberlain just endured with that crazy drum riff. It was an aerobic workout.”
Musical guest Brandi Carlile performs “Church & State” on November 1, 2025
Will Heath/NBC via Getty Images
If you were confused about where the recitation in the song came from, you’re not the only one.
“I love Andrew Watt so much. Every time we talk on the phone he says, ‘I love ‘Church & State,’ – I love when you read the Declaration of Independence.’… I love Andrew Watt, man. It doesn’t matter where he thought it came from. He agreed with it, he believed in it, and it really excited him. He aged and he loved, and he was exactly that part of the song in the same place. where.”
While “Church & State” is rooted in anger, it offers a hopeful resolution. In an album steeped in an awareness of mortality, Carlile takes it as a positive when she looks at failing leadership, declaring: “When weakness overcomes them / And they begin to crawl / Stretch out their bloody hands / Guess who gets to call? / Yeah, they don’t see, what we see / But we think, they don’t live here today, then we don’t think here / That they live today. gone forever… We’ll find a way / Think if we could.”
Carlile’s second “SNL” performance was of a softer song from the new album that also had a connection to the 2024 election, “Human,” which was written the night before the results came in and refers more obliquely to the mood many felt at the time.
Carlile’s appearance on the episode hosted by Miles Teller was her second as a musical guest in 2025. Earlier in the year, she sang with Elton John to promote their double album ‘Who Believes in Angels?’
