14 October 2023, Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles, CA

Somebody told me today that I live an enchanted life. I had been sitting on the beach thinking about what to write to accompany my photos from last night’s Brandi Carlile and Friends show at the Hollywood Bowl, and as music is inextricable from life for me, naturally I dived into existentialism and experientialism. 

I live a life that is about experiences. My life has been “experiential” long before that became a marketing term for giving people something fun to do in the pursuit of selling a product. When my experiences encompass friendships, travel, beaches (got to have beaches) and good music, then that can be magic, enchanting. When trauma, heartbreak, disappointment, failure, desperation and various combinations of those come in to play, then fear and bewilderment can wreak havoc on my very existence and sometimes music can soothe, or temporarily distract, sometimes it is impossible to listen to at all. But life without it seems unfathomable.

This week I’ve been taking in the Audible version of Brandi Carlile’s book Broken Horses, after reading it upon its release in 2021. The Audible features solo acoustic performances of many of the songs that tell the intimate stories of her highly storied life. Her rise from poverty to superstar is the story that she earnestly sets out to dispel as being any kind of fairy tale, even if flowers and phone calls from Elton John seemed to arrive like magic fairy dust, even if learning to love Joni Mitchell and then becoming the essential core of Joni’s enchanted circle is so much more straightforward than finding forgiveness for the so-called godly man who refused to baptise her when she was an openly gay teenage girl with deep religious convictions.

It would be easy to look at Brandi up on the stage of the Hollywood Bowl in her bespoke outfits and presume that her life is all success and joy, and she sure does a good job of looking like it is, but having read and listened to her story and followed her career fairly closely for a few years now, I’d say it’s more likely that as a mother, wife, sister, aunt, business woman, creator, performer, and highly functioning, brilliant, beautiful and somewhat obsessive over-achiever, she rides that seesaw from enchantment to anguish even now. Don’t we all, really?

Joni would have lived on that seesaw of enchantment and despair, otherwise where did all those heart-wrenching and profoundly philosophical songs come from? Allison Russell has written all about her life on that seesaw on her two albums, Outside Child and The Returner. Doubtless there was nobody on that enchanted stage last night, whether an icon like Annie Lennox or two sassy string-playing sisters with highly animated hair braids, or Brandi’s stunning, talented, passionate British wife, or those dynamic identical Hanseroth twins, who hasn’t lived through the highs and lows and during those lows wondered how there would ever be highs again. Or in an audience of 16,000. Or anywhere in LA on a warm October night. Or anywhere in the world. In the midst of pressure to “be happy” and “be grateful” there is a dichotomy of experience that music by fiercely honest songwriters validates, all the way to somewhere over the rainbow. 

Last night wearing a sequinned dress and coat, sitting, mostly standing, in the front row at the Hollywood Bowl, I guess I did present myself like I was living a life of enchantment, living the dream, living something closer to fine.

For four years I have started to write about Brandi Carlile and stalled several times. There is so much to say and I’m surprised at how hard I have been finding it to say it in prose, to rise up to the standard of such an extraordinarily impactful artist. A much longer piece must be written but today I am just going to post these photos from a magical night at my favourite venue in the world. I wondered afterwards what people attending their first Brandi show would have made of it, when out of 23 songs only eight of them were actually Brandi Carlile songs. The rainbows were pertinent. The Bowl shell was lit up a la rainbow and the Bramily (fan club) managed to spread the word amongst the massive audience to do their part to create a phone-lit rainbow. But mainly this night was about the Friends. We in the Bramily had aspirationally hoped for Elton, Paul McCartney, Dolly Parton, other superstars in that superstar stratosphere in which our Brandi now resides. Today some of the music press referred to the “surprise” appearance of Joni Mitchell. That was one superstar we always knew would be there. Not a surprise at all, but enchanting nonetheless. 

This concert took place four years to the day since Brandi performed the Blue album at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, a concert experience quite early in my Brandification. I wrote of Joni nearly a year ago when she turned 79, to commemorate the Joni 75 concert where I first witnessed Brandi singing live on stage. Now Joni is on the verge of turning 80, and there she was last night, on her throne, holding court, in a recreation of the famous Joni jams that have been taking place in salons in Joni’s living room (and on stage four months ago at The Gorge). That Brandi has resurrected or at least revived Joni in the public eye when most were resigned to the fact that she would not sing again, and that Brandi has brought artists such as Allison Russell, SistaStrings, Lucius and more into the wider public eye, and that she’s turned this old girl, not gay, but completely besotted, into a devoted fan, warrants so much more than these okay photos and rambling self-examining seeking-deeper-relevance words can convey.

So all the other Brandi concerts I’ve attended, the many photos I have taken, and more thoughts that I have, will follow in a further post.