“It was sort of bittersweet recording some of these songs. It brought back a lot of memories, singing these songs that I used to listen to as a young girl,” muses Belinda Carlisle. The eldest of seven kids, Carlisle endured a “very chaotic” childhood, growing in various parts of Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley with an absentee father and alcoholic stepfather. But she always had her music — that mellow gold played by the Real Don Steele and Wolfman Jack on AM radio stations like KHJ.
So, now the Grammy-nominated Go-Go’s frontwoman is paying tribute to that era on Once Upon a Time in California, a collection of covers of classics by the Youngbloods, the Hollies, the Association, Harry Nilsson, Three Dog Night, Jim Croce, Gordon Lightfoot, and other artists that she says “inspired me to want to be a singer.” The album is out on Friday and will be eligible for the 2026 Grammy Awards.
“Music for me back then was an escape from my typically dysfunctional family,” Carlisle says. “In fact, my escape was going to my best friend’s house, Christina. Her mom worked and she was a latchkey kid, and we would just lay every day in summer from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. in front of the big speakers and blast all the radio stations. For me, it was a total escape. I was really good at creating fantasy for myself, because of my upbringing and wanting to just leave the family behind. I was really good at fantasy, and I was going to be a big, famous singer one day.”
As Carlisle recalls, her family “had no money — I wouldn’t even say we were lower-middle-class, I would say that we were poor” — so it’s interesting that while she dreamed of a glamorous and globe-trotting rock-star life, she got her start in the scrappy first-wave L.A. punk scene, where bands dressed in trash bags and Goodwill rags and it was considered uncool to admit to any grand aspirations. “But I still had my little Dior bag that I ate oatmeal for a month to able to buy,” Carlisle chuckles. “I did have a little bit of a fashion thing going on, even in the punk days. … And even then, I remember [Go-Go’s guitarist] Jane [Wiedlin] and I living at the Canterbury Apartments, which was a punk-rock commune almost, and running down the back stairs of the building yelling, ‘We’re going to be rich and famous one day!’ Even though you weren’t supposed to say that. As [Go-Go’s drummer] Gina [Schock] says in our documentary: ‘What are you doing this for? Do you want to stay in clubs forever and be struggling forever?’”
And the pop sound that Carlisle picked up from listening to ‘60s and ‘70s SoCal radio also made its way into the Go-Go’s’ music from the start. “We always felt like we belonged [in the punk scene], even though our songs are melodic. But after a while, other people didn’t think that we belonged so much, because we had ‘sold out’ or we weren’t ‘punk’ or whatever,” she says. “We couldn’t play our instruments, but they actually were songs with melodies. Even in the early Go-Go’s, on the stuff that it didn’t even make the first album. We had songs like ‘Vicious Circle’ that was like, ‘I go playing with blades,’ about suicide. They were very, very melodic, very sort of uplifting, but we have these dark lyrics. … My preference for the music is I love that contrast of dark lyrics with a beautiful melody, and lot of the Go-Go’s songs are just that.”
While Carlisle doesn’t cover the Beach Boys on her new album, in many ways this project goes back to that formative band, since the very first album she ever owned was the Cali classic Pet Sounds (“I won it at a softball tournament, and it completely changed my life”), and in 1996 she recorded the song “California” with none other than her idol, Brian Wilson, who clearly appreciated her pop sensibilities.
“He used to come to Go-Go’s shows and to my solo shows with Dr. [Eugene] Landy, and I sang background vocals on a couple of his solo albums,” Carlisle reveals. “I remember when I would sing backgrounds on his album, he would stand in front of me and conduct me, and it was amazing. He was such a character. And then from my album A Woman and a Man, we had this song ‘California,’ and he’d be perfect on it. So, we asked and he said yes, and he came to the studio and sang over this little cassette player. … He was singing over the track, and I didn’t quite understand where he was going with it, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, we’re going to have to tell Brian Wilson that we can’t use his part!’
“So, I was kind of freaking out, and the producer said, ‘Let’s let him go into the vocal booth.’ And then all of a sudden, it was like a symphony. It was so emotional. I get really emotional just thinking about it, because he was layering these parts so that it was a symphony. Watching him work and doing that, for me, that little girl that had worshiped him and the Beach Boys, he’s like Mozart. So, he sang for a couple hours on the song, and then when he left, we just sat there — like, mute. Nobody could say anything because it was so emotional, and we called it a day. He was an amazing, amazing human being. An amazing artist, of course. [His death] was a big loss for me, for sure. It felt like part of my childhood had gone with him.”
Carlisle, who grew up in the shadow of the Watts riots, reading “a lot of Joan Didion books” and obsessing over the Beach Boys-associated Manson murders (“I used to sneak the Herald Examiner when my mom would go out the room and read the testimony from Susan Atkins or Squeaky Fromme”), gravitated towards darker. melancholy songs when choosing covers for Once Upon a Time in California — like the Carpenters’ “Superstar” (“I had no idea that song was about a groupie!”) and “Reflections of My Life” by Marmalade, which closes the album.
“I can bring my myself back to a moment with that song. I remember when it came out and I was living in Burbank. I was in the garage where I’d dress up and put elaborate makeup on and have twigs that I’d use for [pretend] cigarettes and sing. I remember that hearing that, and I just thought it was the weirdest song, because it didn’t fit in with a lot of the other material that was coming out then. It’s a little bit odd, but I loved it, and every time it would come on, I would just turn it up and actually be waiting to hear that song again. … When I decided I wanted to do that one and dig into the lyrics, I was like, ‘Wow, how amazing that I get to sing these lyrics being this age, and experiencing so much of life and love and loss,” says Carlisle, now 67.
Carlisle also chose songs that she thought would best fit her voice, and while she was always “a singer, not a screamer — as cool as screaming is,” even in the punk days, Once Upon a Time in California definitely showcases a crooner/torch-singer side to her vocals rarely heard. “I wasn’t [vocally] trained, but after I heard the second show the Go-Go’s played, at the Rock Corporation in the Valley, someone had a cassette tape of it, and I thought I was hot, like the best thing since sliced bread — and then I heard my voice and I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m horrible! I have to do something about this!’ So, I was saving my money to go to vocal lessons, and I started that after I heard that cassette,” she explains. “But I never really took my voice that seriously until after I got sober. I used to smoke and drink and carry on all night, and then get up onstage the next night. I don’t know how I did that, but I did. So, I never really took care of it. But now, for the past 20 years or so, I’ve really, really take care of it, and I’m serious about it. And I think it shows in the album.”
Interestingly, Carlisle says it was actually when she finally quit alcohol and cocaine for good, at age 47, that she started having vocal issues. “It started happening when I got sober, ironically. … I went to my doctor, who I still have, and I said, ‘What is going on? All these years of carrying on, and now that I’m really good and diligent about taking care of myself, I have problems?’ And he goes, ‘It happens to all singers. They clean up, then the problems start.’”
Carlisle underwent surgery last year for a vocal-cord node (“I did a whole tour singing that way; I could tell something was wrong”), and now, thanks to that as well as her breathing exercises and pranayama yoga practice, she’s sounding better than ever. Which of course begs the question if she and her on-and-off Go-Go’s bandmates, who recently reunited for this year’s Coachella and Cruel World festivals, have any new music in the works. “I’ve learned so many times, over and over again, never say never with that band,” she laughs. “Because something always comes up, always. … We have no plans to do anything, not even thinking about it. But I’m sure that something is going to come along again. It always does.”
However, a long-rumored Go-Go’s biopic seems to finally be happening, although Carlisle isn’t confirming much about that either. “I can’t really talk about it, but it’s definitely in the works,” she says. “Those kinds of things, they have a very small chance of ever getting made. … But if it happens, I think it’s going to be great. It’s being written right now, so it’s still in the very early stages.”
And as for who would portray her in this cinematic California saga, Carlisle wants Florence Pugh — even though Pugh is reportedly being considered for a Madonna biopic. “I think she’d be much better playing me, although she’d be great playing Madonna,” says Carlisle. “I think that we have a lot of energetic similarities and also physical similarities. … But I really hope that this does happen.”
Watch Belinda Carlisle’s full interview below: