Brandi Carlile at Meadow Brook (and in my heart and mind)

It's been three days since we saw Brandi Carlile at Meadow Brook Amphitheater and I had better get my thoughts down before I forget.

This was our 11th Brandi show. (I mistakenly gave us credit for seeing her for the first time in 2009, when in fact it was 2010). So we've now seen her in three different states (Michigan, Illinois, and Colorado) and two different countries (the U.S, of course, and the U.K.). In January, L. will see her in THREE countries, when she attends the Girls Just Wanna festival in Mexico with a friend. She'll also be one up on me in total Brandi shows. That's a hard pill to swallow, but I'll survive.

At this point, need I say that Brandi was amazing yet again? I have never seen her put on a show that was anything less than jaw-dropping. To think that I was at best skeptically curious when L. said in 2010, "I like this singer Brandi Carlile and want to see her in concert." From the moment Brandi opened her mouth and sang her first note that summer night at Meijer Gardens 16 years ago, I was sold. Much like Brandi's artistic and commercial success, my appreciation for her has grown--and continues to grow--with every performance I see and every album she releases.

But it's not just the music and voice that make her so appealing, it's who she is as a person. As inadvisable as it is to put any famous person on a pedestal, I think I can say that Brandi is the real deal. She comes from a humble background, was a misfit in school, had a learning disability as a kid, but seems to have instantly taken to music. (When I was a sophomore in high school in 1983, it's highly likely that a two-year-old Brandi was singing in rural Washington state). She and the Hanseroth twins have worked their tails off to get where they are today. 

This leads me to the most important reason I love Brandi: her siging and songs touch me on a deeply emotional level that no other musician, living or dead, even approximates. Sure, there are some songs by, say, the Kinks, the Beatles, the Replacements, the Tragically Hip, or R.E.M. that give me "all the feels," but nobody can reduce me to a puddle of tears the way Brandi does. It's almost like something operating on a biochemical level. It's the way her voice emotes, the vulnerability, the raw naked emotion, and of course the lyrics. Songs like "The Story," "Party of One," "Right on Time," "The Mother," and the one that absolutely fucking wrecks me every single time, "The Joke."

The first time I heard "The Joke"--I mean, REALLY heard it-- was at Brandi's show at Ann Arbor's Michigan Theater in support of her truly breakthrough album, By the Way, I Forgive You. We had listened to the then brand-new album on the way from Lansing to Ann Arbor, but I noticed the elaborate production touches more than the songs. But when Brandi played "The Joke" that night on stage, the lyrics grabbed me and wouldn't let go. My old dormant feelings of being an oddball as a child and outcast in school came flooding back and I choked up with tears. It was an overwhelming experience, but in a beautiful and cathartic way. As the current expression goes, "I felt seen."

Another powerful Brandi moment involved hearing "Right on Time" for the first time. It was summer 2021, we were finally getting out of Covid's shadow and staying in a cottage in Copper Harbor. "Right on Time," the debut single from Brandi's upcoming album In These Silent Days had just dropped whiler were there. I was already in an emotionally fragile frame of mind and "Right on Time" and its accompanying video turned me into a blubbering, weeping puddle. "Dammit Brandi, you did it to me again!" It's a song about a fight between a couple and the subsequent regrets and emotional anguish and god damn it, it is so beautiful. Brandi is somehow able to seize my heart in her hands and control it, and I'm here for it.

I suspect I always will be here for it.