Folk rock singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile has spent the last year furthering her career not just as a musician, but as a political activist. The singer’s most recent album By the Way, I Forgive You marks her most political album yet, along with Carlile’s continued participation in rallies and marches across the country in support of LGBTQ, immigrant and minority rights.
Carlile doubles down on that political sentiment with her new video for “Hold Out Your Hand.” In the video, Carlile shows footage of a live performance she did at the Seattle March for Our Lives earlier this year. The clip also shows young men and women marching through the streets of Seattle, demanding common sense gun control and an end to extreme gun violence after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.
The singer, who is a Washington native herself, released a statement with the video, explaining that she’s proud to see the young generation taking action. “The kids in this video left their houses, put down their phones and showed up in Seattle to protest gun violence and ask for the adults in this country to take responsibility for what’s happening to them in their schools,” she said. “This is the way I would want my daughter to communicate and this is a generation I am in complete support of.”
Carlile told NPR earlier this year that her album By the Way, I Forgive You was inherently political because politics has become a part of everyone’s daily life today. “I think that people are feeling politics more personally than they’ve ever felt them before,” she said. “We have a long way to go in terms of social justice. So when I sing about politics, it’s intertwined with my marriage, which couldn’t have happened just a number of years ago.”
Watch Carlile’s video for “Hold Out Your Hand” below: