1 October 2021, Frost Amphitheater, Stanford, CA

On a beautiful end-of-summer/early fall day in Silicon Valley I stood in the sun for hours waiting to get into the grounds of Stanford University’s Frost Amphitheater for my first full live concert in 19 months. Many artists had recommenced post-pandemic touring at the beginning of that US summer, and by the time I saw Brandi Carlile on this stage she had played through the summer at various outdoor venues as well as appearing at AmericanaFest and Ohana Festival. I had been somewhat preoccupied as I had taken off on a solo road trip around the United States, an epic odyssey that connected me more deeply to music – so often it was just me, my RAV4 and my music – and it also disconnected me from much of what was happening in the rest of the country and the world.

My wanderings only this once intersected with Brandi – at Stanford, while I was staying in the lovely home of friends not far away in Pacifica, south of San Francisco. It was perfect, really, as after five months of driving I had returned to California and was in need of live music.

A few weeks earlier Brandi had played two nights at Red Rocks in Colorado, one of her annual must-sees for many Bramily people, something I had yet to experience. As I drove along westward in the first part of September, one of my Bramily friends, Annalie, and her partner, were driving eastward towards Colorado. In the way of truly monumental Bramily experiences, Annalie and I tracked each other’s routes and skilfully managed to rendezvous at dusk on a Friday night at Mount Rushmore, South Dakota, before she continued on to Red Rocks and I continued across Wyoming to Devils Tower and Yellowstone. That rendezvous was all thanks to Brandi Carlile. (Annalie was the Bramily friend I got my Hollywood Palladium ticket from, by the way.)

Before packing up my Santa Monica abode and starting my five-month road trip, I had watched all the live streams Brandi and her band played in their barn, or by their campfire, from their Maple Valley, WA compound. The Compound Quarantine shows were really special and several of those shows featured the albums being performed in their entirety. It felt incumbent upon me to listen to and study them before each of those online gigs, giving myself a Brandi Carlile accelerated learning course, and making future live shows that much more meaningful. I had also read her amazing autobiography, Broken Horses, newly released as I set out on the road. I was fortunate that I dived into my Brandification process when she was leaning heavily on the 2018 album By The Way I Forgive You in her sets, and that is still my favourite Brandi Carlile album, so I was in heaven. But it definitely helped to have more context, knowing where the other songs they were performing resided in the wider Brandi Carlile Band (aka BCB) context. Why “Cannonball” and “The Eye” and “The Things I Regret” and “Pride and Joy”, and of course “The Story”, were so pivotal. How that jaw dropping epic song “The Joke” was not some astounding fluke that landed out of nowhere, as it had seemed to me that night I watched the Grammy Awards in early 2019.

Just as I had driven across the southwest states of Arizona and New Mexico and then south through Texas immersed in Eagles and Don Henley albums, months on I’d wound my way across the Northwest, around the hairpin bends of the Oregon and northern California coasts, especially those Mendocino coastline bends, listening to Brandi’s full catalogue, as well as familiarising myself with Outside Child, the brilliant debut album from Allison Russell, who would be opening for Brandi at Frost Amphitheatre. So I came that night really ready for the pandemic-induced drought of live music in my existence to break.

It was a splendid night. Brandi was mighty fine. She was playing just four songs from her new album, In These Silent Days, actually released that exact day. It was just her and the Hanseroth twins, similar to when I had seen them more than two years before in Costa Mesa, but curiously that’s not how I remember this show. I remember it as being huge.

Allison Russell was glorious and sultry and bursting forth into her own time. The weather was balmy and beautiful. Brandi ended the show with a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Going to California” and that was perfection. I was not long from moving back to Australia, I was very confused and conflicted about that, but on this night, I was exactly where I needed to be.

(Retro-posted March 2026)