27 February 2026, The Kia Forum, Los Angeles, CA
It could be the height of irony that a new album featuring songs about pondering our existence, being as human as we are, being with ourselves in solitude in a way that can ultimately return us back more closely to our relationships with others, was showcased on an arena tour this year. In those soulless and cavernous and super expensive (parking!!) venues, to pack in a lot of people and raise production levels so that giant screens and special effects might appeal to a wider audience and entertain those with challenged attention spans and maybe justify the ticket prices…
Or maybe it’s just sincere progress. Brandi Carlile has, in the more than seven years since I became Brandified, become a superstar. A superstar who was solely responsible for bringing Joni Mitchell back to the limelight. Who recorded a fabulous album with Elton John. Who brought Dolly Parton to the Newport Folk Festival. Who sang and played “America The Beautiful” at the Super Bowl. Who could pack out the Hollywood Bowl (an iconic venue that is not an arena, albeit as big as one). And yet a deeply thinking and feeling and caring artist who is as personable and attentive and courteous and quirky as ever in person, if you are lucky enough to have some personal interaction with her.
I have been that lucky a few times, and just a few weeks before her show at LA’s Kia Forum in February 2026, I’d sat next to her at the Grammy Awards. Yes, you read that right. Me and Brandi and her wife Catherine, just the three of us at a little table up front at the Grammys. I was an unpaid seat filler who stood or sat wherever I was told for most of the night, but I eyed that table until Joni and her caregiver got up to leave about an hour before the end of the show, and after some production lackey sat in her seat scrolling on a phone for a while, the seat was vacated and I made it mine. I filled Joni’s seat and I sat next to Brandi. Smiles were exchanged. I was silent for a while. Then I said, “I am a seat filler and I am not supposed to speak to the artists unless spoken to. But I need you to know, I am Bramily.”
“No way!!” Brandi exclaimed, her face completely lighting up. “You’re Bramily? We need a photo!” She got out her phone, took a selfie of us, edited it to her liking, and posted it on the Bramily app chat forum.
Brandi was nominated for Who Believes in Angels?, the album she did with Elton, which did not win anything. Catherine, who manages Brandi, said Brandi already had some Grammys and they were happy just to be there. I said that I thought the new album would be up for Album of the Year next year. Brandi told me she knew Bad Bunny was going to get this year’s Album of the Year. I asked her and Catherine if their cancelled 2020 tour to Australia would ever be rescheduled. I was back in LA and not planning to be back in Australia any time soon but I had friends back there that wanted to know. We chatted about this and that. They were lovely and looked me in the eye completely, like I mattered. Which I did, because I am Bramily and that matters.
After getting a stunning preview of the Human Tour concert format and set list on the live stream from Minneapolis just a week earlier, and having not been at a Brandi concert for more than two years when I was in the front row at the Hollywood Bowl, here I was, camera in hand, in the second row at The Forum, still basking in the glow of that Grammys experience. I had hovered over that damn ticket site for months until a seat I wanted dropped in price (it helps to be buying a single ticket, and Paypal Pay in 4 has become my friend). Forum crowds are almost always unruly and that ludicrously expensive venue attracts a lot of obnoxious people but it was a great show. All the visuals were fabulous, Brandi was totally and perfectly in command, the new songs sounded fabulous. “A Woman Oversees” is so very gorgeous; I loved it the moment I heard it at a record store listening event for the album four months earlier. The band was in fine form, Chauntee and Monique Ross of Sista Strings especially magnificent, and I got to catch up with some Bramily friends I don’t get to see much otherwise. While inside in our Brandi joy, outside war and hell were being illegally unleashed in a world we could barely comprehend. But we friends and fans were there in peace and love and music.
I still love “The Joke” more than any other of her songs, as much as I love nearly all of them. It’s the song that hooked me in early 2019. I entered my Brandi love through that album, By The Way I Forgive You. Then went backwards and got them all. Nowadays, being a Brandi Carlile fan has become an expensive enterprise; she is wont to rerecord an entire album in a different tone (e.g. Returning To Myself now out in The Sad Gay Version… oy!!). Completists want them on vinyl – all the things, signed, rainbow vinyl, whatever other variation there is – and CD and digital and they want the merch including patches and bandanas and the VIP Sound Check experience and…. I don’t. I can’t. I can just love her work and taking photos of her performing, and those occasional up-close one-on-one moments if they happen and let that be enough.
In another life I might have had the opportunity to interview her; maybe one day I will. Maybe I would talk to her about what being a fan of an artist involves now, versus what it was for us when we were younger. For now, as I play catch up on all the Brandi shows I have seen by posting the photos and some words on this site, finally, months or years on, I realise that in seven and something years the journey I have been on as a fan has been nothing as intense as Brandi’s own journey has obviously been. She’s a superstar. She’s human.
Brandi Carlile at the Forum Set list
(Retro-posted September 2026)
Click on through to enjoy the photos.
