Michelle Branch wants to make one thing very clear. “I don’t condone violence,” the singer told Tamron Hall on an episode of the Tamron Hall Show airing on Thursday (Sept. 15). The singer said she and husband Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney have started therapy recently, something she wishes they’d done a long time ago.
“It’s made such a huge difference in such a short amount of time,” she said, while urging anyone who is struggling in their marriage to get some professional help. “The night… what went down was so unfortunate, like the worst night of my life,” she added of the night last month when she was arrested on domestic assault charges following an altercation with her husband; Branch had filed for divorce from the drummer, citing irreconcilable differences, earlier claiming, in a since-deleted tweet, that the drummer had committed adultery. The charges against Branch were dropped on August 24.
“To have to have that out in the world as I’m getting ready to put out a record it has been a lot, but all I can do is be honest about what I’m going through and what’s going on. I’m not the first person to have gone through this,” she said, confirming that the “allegations” that she slapped Carney were “not allegations.”
“I slapped my husband, not the finest moment of my life,” said Branch, who is preparing to release her The Trouble With Fever album on Friday (Sept. 16). The singer described the cascade of challenges she faced in the lead-up to that night, which she said included being seven months postpartum following the birth of the couple’s second child, as well as “sleep, stress, life stress, marriage stress, work stress… and also we’d been out at a birthday party that night and I’d had a few drinks. All the blocks were stacked in a way that I didn’t have time to think about what I was doing.”
In retrospect, she said, she probably shouldn’t have sent the tweet and “definitely” shouldn’t have let her anger get the best of her. “Maybe this will give us the tools to give us the tools to have a stronger marriage than we ever had,” she said. Branch and Carney married in April 2019 and in the wake of the incident and the divorce filing, court documents obtained by Billboard this week revealed that they have suspended their divorce proceedings and will attempt a reconciliation for six months.
See Branch on Tamron Hall below.
