Brandi Carlile Concert Review

This week on The Rock-N-Roll Show Podcast, I’m reviewing Brandi Carlile’s Valentine’s Day concert at Madison Square Garden.

I went into the show a fan from seeing her on TV over the past 5 years especially, and was excited to finally see her live. I came away even more impressed. Brandi Carlile is a warm, generous, powerful performer, and her band can move from folk to country to Americana to full-on rock without missing a step.

Give a listen and find out why I think seeing Brandi Carlile at Madison Square Garden was such a joyful night of live music.

Also, check out the Rock-N-Roll Show Podcast Playlist on either Spotify or Apple Music, this week featuring all 25 songs from her show, plus an extra song she recorded with another band that I really like.

Thanks for listening — and remember, life is short, so get those concert tickets!

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Transcript

0:00

Welcome to the Rock 'N' Roll Show podcast. I'm your host Alex Gadd, and this week I've got another concert review for you. For Valentine's Day, I took my girlfriend to see Brandi Carlile and her band at Madison Square Garden, and we had a great time. Brandi puts on a great show, and she was so charming as well, sharing stories and inspirations for some of the songs, and expressing her appreciation at being able to play for us. 25 songs at the world's greatest arena, it was a great combination of musician and audience, and I can't wait to tell you all about it. So stick around for my Brandi Carlile concert review coming up right now. My first exposure to Brandi's music was hearing her 2007 hit, The Story, which I downloaded when it was featured as the iTunes Song of the Week. Think back to those times. I found it interesting, if a little overly dramatic, and went on with my life. I didn't run into her music again for another decade when she was featured on a song by a band called The Old 97's. The song was called Good With God, and she was, uh, singing the part of God on the song. That was a high octane track that caught my attention, and I remember wondering what she had been up to since The Story. In the fall of 2017, she released her sixth album, By The Way, I Forgive You, which contained her next big hit, The Joke. And at that point, I felt like I was starting to dial in a feel for her music, but I, I couldn't say I was a fan yet, just familiar with her hit songs. It wasn't till 2021 when I saw her perform her song "Broken Horses" from her In These Silent Days album on Saturday Night Live that I connected to a song of hers that strongly. That performance blew me away, the song was a real passionate Rock-N-Roll song, and it was so defiant. I loved it right away. That's happened to me a few times throughout my life, and I remember every one of those times. Strangely, Saturday Night Live has played a part in that from the first time I ever heard Elvis Costello when I was a kid to Chris Stapleton, Sturgill Simpson, and finally Brandi Carlile. Her second song that night, a performance of Right on Time, was also really strong, and then she performed Broken Horses again at the Grammys the next year in 2022, and I was again blown away. She was back on SNL at the end of 2022, and she did another really good song from the In These Silent Days record, You and Me on the Rock, and at that point I was all in.

Alex Gadd 2:43

A year later, I watched her HBO Max special where she and her band played the whole In These Silent Days album live from Laurel Canyon, and I really enjoyed that. So I've been an invested fan since 2021 and have been looking forward to seeing her live. Now, This was her third tour where she headlined Madison Square Garden. After playing single nights on each of her last two tours, this time she booked two consecutive nights, which was a good step forward for her. My girlfriend Jeanne is a country music fan in general more than a Brandi Carlile fan specifically, but she's up for most shows, so off we went, and after a nice Valentine's Day dinner at the Bryant Park Grill, We headed over to the Garden. I had purchased tickets on the floor about halfway back, and we got to our seats in the middle of the opening act's set. The opening act was The Head and the Heart, a band that has an ongoing relationship with Brandi as they're both from the Pacific Northwest. I'm not a huge fan of The Head and the Heart, but they were entertaining enough. Then after a short intermission, the lights went down and the main set started. The opening song was "Return to Myself," the title track from her latest album, and she started off performing it behind a massive curtain that covered the stage and showed her only in silhouette. About halfway through the song, the curtain came down as the band kicked in, and she appeared and finished the song. Heads up, I only captured the first half of the song because I didn't know when or if the curtain would come down during it.

4:28

Watching it burn 'til the fire dies Was it heroic to want to live? I was a lonesome boy Oh no, could not find myself in jail

Alex Gadd 5:20

Next up was the song Human, also from the new album and the song the tour is named after. This mid-tempo track has a strong message, and it too picks up partway through the song, so another nice one for the start of the show. But this song does call out one of the only issues I have with Brandi, and that's that she uses a vibrato when she sings sometimes, and sometimes it's a little too much for me,. Thankfully, she doesn't do it in every song, but when she does, it's similar to the way Patty Scialfa sings, and I'm not a fan of that style of singing. But that minor quibble aside, the third song was the strong Mainstream Kid an upbeat rocker that also showed off a video wall behind the band. Take a look This was a good reminder that Brandi and her band are a rock band as much as they are an Americana act or a country act or a singer-songwriter with a backup band. In fact, she makes every effort to call attention to her band, especially to the twin brothers with whom she's been making music since she first signed a record contract back in 2004, and I'm guessing even before that. Those guys are Phil and Tim Hanseroth, whom she often refers to simply as The Twins. The Twins play lead guitar and bass respectively, and sing harmonies with Brandi, as well as writing or co-writing some of her songs with her. She's also been performing with a band that includes Chris Powell on drums and Josh Newman on cello, and for the past few years at least, she's had the sister act Sista Strings playing violin and cello and providing additional backup vocals. So it's a solid band that can do it all, from country to folk to rock. I came into the show hoping she would play "Broken Horses," which she hadn't played on the first three dates of the tour, but all of a sudden, coming out of "Mainstream Kid," she went into "Broken Horses" and my hopes were answered. She rocked it. Take a listen One of the things I really enjoyed was the intimacy Brandi creates between herself and her audience. She's clearly appreciative of her fans, and her fans of them, And she took the time to thank us more than once during the show for her fans' ongoing support. She stopped to talk to the audience a lot throughout the show, which amplified that intimacy I mentioned, and at least for me, helped me understand her music better, because I was hearing about her thought process when she was writing some of these songs. After Broken Horses, she shared her thoughts about how unbelievable it was that she and her band got to play the Garden at all. And if you've listened to this podcast, you know that I think the Garden is the pinnacle achievement for any rock and roll band. So to hear her say basically the same thing felt pretty good to me. But more than that, she went on to talk about time and the years she and the twins had been coming to New York, working their way up to playing the Garden, as an intro to the new song, A War With Time. I don't have a clip of the song, but here's the intro to it

Speaker 11:45

Oh man, if I could just, it's like Joni Mitchell sings in The Circle Game, "If I could just slow down time tonight, and just be here at my second night at Madison Square Garden for, for-" If I could bottle this gosh, just the entire night, I could. There are things about this, what this feels like to stand on this stage after 20 plus years of coming to New York City and the Mercury here. It's just And I know I've played Madison Square Garden before, and I don't know if you guys remember, but you guys remember how I, I came out on the stage the first time I played MSG and I just started crying Yeah, there's a bunch. Um, it's just that it's really an emotional thing. You dream about what this is gonna look like and sound like and feel like, and then you're here and it happens so fast. And the thing about, you know, going ahead and letting it take 20-plus years to get here is that it doesn't go as fast. You can slow down. You can be here, and you can recognize what a privilege it is to stand in this sacred space where some of the great musical moments of all time have happened I'm seeing and I'm meeting a lot of people these days, these amazing pop stars, incredible artists coming up. Words matter a lot more than they used to these days. And there's just amazing music happening, but I'm seeing these guys go from, like, their first couple of clubs straight to an arena or to, like, Madison Square Garden. And I'm so happy for them, and they're kind of crushing it. I know I wouldn't have crushed it. I thought it happened to me and the twins when we first started. But I think, "Oh man, they're missing all those miles, all those other clubs and restaurants and places. They're missing that 20 years, and they don't know," you know? And it's because I bet that I've met thousands of you. I bet we've been friends for a long time, you know? We played places in this city that don't even register as venues. I was thinking a lot about that lately. I'm feeling very, very nostalgic for New York City. I was when I wrote this song. I was in upstate New York with my friend Aaron Dessner, Feeling very alone and having kind of a reckoning, kind of a full circle moment. I was out there by myself and it was cold. And, um, I remembered my first ever trip to New York City. And, um, you know, I'd never even got in a plane till I was 17 years old. And, uh, it wasn't long after that I came here for the first time to this city, and I had all these expectations about what it was gonna be like, and it was different. It was like beyond my wildest dreams. I couldn't believe the lights and the activity and the people and the audacity and the generosity and the audacity. And I didn't know what I, what I thought it was gonna be like, but, you know, I knew that like my whole life I've wanted to see a cockroach. We don't have those in Seattle, man, and I was like, "I gotta get to New York City 'cause that's where the cockroaches are." That's right. Even little things like that, you know? When you're, when you're young and you wanna see a new place and you haven't touched, you haven't touched very much ground, it's, it's incredible. And I remember getting into the city, looking down a street and, and seeing in towers, just impossibly long towers, and this little sliver of blue at the end of it and thinking, "Is that the sky?" And, um, and I thought it was so beautiful and so unlike anything I'd seen in the town I was raised in. So I was thinking about that, all these little visceral memories and moments, and I wrote this song about it. 'Cause I know that my kids are gonna make their first solo trip to New York City one day without me. And it'll look and sound and smell and feel totally different. But I don't want 'em to, but I do. And so I'm fighting an unwinnable war with time

Alex Gadd 16:02

After A War With Time, she dedicated the next song, A Woman Oversees, to her wife Catherine. And that was followed by Right On Time, which I mentioned I had seen on SNL back in 2021. That one was really good, and then after that was a title track to her record collaborating with Elton John from 2025, Who Believes in Angels. Following that, the next set of songs were all new to me, and I just sat back and absorbed them and enjoyed them. There was a cover of a Graham Nash song that I had never heard, a few audience requests, and another song from the Elton John album before she got to her first hit that I mentioned earlier, The Story. If you know Brandi Carlile, you know this song. It's her breakout hit, and here's some of that The story was followed by You and Me on the Rock from 2021, which was originally recorded with the vocal act Lucius singing background. For our show, Sista Strings filled in admirably After she took time to sing Happy Birthday for Monique from Sister Strings, she went into No One Knows Us from the latest record, followed by Sinners, Saints, and Fools from 2021, and a Linda Ronstadt cover, Long, Long Time. That led into her other big hit from earlier in her career, The Joke. Written with the Hanseroth twins and Nashville super producer Dave Cobb, this song is the ultimate underdog song, telling the people who mock the singer or put the singer down that the joke's on them. You can feel the passion and the personal nature of this song. I got some of that, so take a listen She finished out the main set with the song Hold Out Your Hand, also from the 2017 album By The Way I Forgive You, and then headed off before the encore. She came back out wearing an I Love New York T-shirt, nothing like playing up to the local crowd, and she shared a story about a poet named Andrea Gibson, who was the subject of an Apple TV documentary titled Come See Me in the Good Light. The film was about Andrea's poetry as they were dying of ovarian cancer, and Brandi mentioned that she was bringing out a special guest

Speaker 3 22:49

We're gonna do something special for you guys tonight There was an amazing human being who touched this earth, incredible human being, and their name was Andrea Gibson The greatest poets I'd ever seen or heard of. And, um, they put out books that inspired all of us, and they left us too young. But they left us exploding with joy and gratitude. And, uh, and they left us their words. And so I have a special guest tonight to come out on stage and sing a song In honor of Andrea and their wife, May, please welcome to the stage Sarah Bareilles

Alex Gadd 23:42

That led into the song that Sarah and Brandi recorded together for the end credits of that documentary using an unfinished poem of Andrea's as the basis for the lyrics called Salt Then Sour Then Sweet. That was powerful, and I didn't record it because I was just focused on listening to it. The next song was another rocker, a more overtly political song from her new album called Church State, which I also heard for the first time while watching Brandi on SNL this past fall That was followed by a cover of Alanis Morissette's Uninvited, which had been Alanis' first single released after her breakthrough smash hit album, Jagged Little Pill. It was put out on a soundtrack album for the movie City of Angels just months before her second album came out. Brandi did a great job with it before finishing up with the last song on her current album. The song was called A Long Goodbye, appropriately enough, and that was it. We were out the door and back into the cold New York City night to head home full of joy from a night of great music. Brandi Carlile's a warm, generous entertainer who seems much more genuine on stage than most musicians, especially when they're playing Madison Square Garden, and I encourage you to seek her and her fantastic band out. They're playing three dates this weekend at their unofficial hometown venue, The Gorge, in Washington State, but then they'll be back out for a month from mid-August to mid-September across the Northeast and Southeast with a stop in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in between before they head over to Europe and the UK in October. So go see this band. Also, she has nine albums for you to go check out if you're not already a fan. And that's it for this week's episode. Thank you for joining me. If you like what you heard today, I'd appreciate it if you would like and either subscribe or follow this channel to make sure you get notified about each new episode, and please tell your friends. Also, a reminder that I release a playlist for every episode, so look for the Rock-N-Roll Show podcast playlist on Spotify and Apple Music every week, this week featuring all 25 songs from the Valentine's Day show at The Garden, plus one song that I mentioned that she did with The Old 97s, so check that out. Additionally, I wanna know what you think. Please leave me a comment, and I'll try to respond to every one of them. The Rock-N-Roll Show podcast is a World Highway Media production. I'm your host, Alex Gadd, and until next time, remember that life is short, so get those concert tickets.