brainsplotch

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...

Backtracking to London... We had a whirlwind stay in London. Our one full day, we walked across Hyde Park to the Victoria & Albert Museum and spent almost the entire afternoon there. It was the one major museum we didn't make it to in 2023, so it was thrilling to get there this time around. The collection of artwork and sculpture there is astounding, and one can almost feel the presence of ghosts from the Victorian era in the old building, which also still bears the visible scars of the blitz during the Battle of Britain. I wore my Brandi Carlile t-shirt and we bumped into some American Brandi fans at the V&A who were in London primarily for the concert. These fans invited us to a pre-show get-together at the Gloucester Arms. (We considered it, but didn't end up going). After we finished at the V&A, we walked back across Hyde Park to our hotel, charged up our phones a bit, grabbed dinner in the Aubaine Restaurant adjoining the hotel, then trekked back across Hyde Pa...

It was another emotional, powerful, brilliant, utterly captivating performance by the Brandi Carlile Band, at Huntington Bank Pavilion on Chicago’s lakefront. As usual, I was a puddle of tears during “The Story,” “The Joke,” and “Party of One.” Brandi’s voice and words (though it was Brandi’s bandmate Phil Hanseroth who wrote “The Story”) just go straight to my heart like few other musicians are capable. There were so many highlights at the show, so I will just list them as I think of them, in no order.   There was the alternately soaring and shit-kicking “Broken Horses,” the always shit-kicking “Mainstream Kid” (my favorite Brandi rocker), the Hanseroth twins (Phil and Tim) opening the show with their dueling guitar “Twintro,” Brandi and the twins singing three-part harmony on “The Eye,” opening act Celisse joining Brandi and the band for rousing covers of Bowie’s “Space Oddity” and Radiohead’s “Creep,” the second opener (and legend) Ani DiFranco joining a worshipful Brandi for...