20 September 2026, Santa Barbara Bowl, Santa Barbara, CA

Happy Gay or Sad Gay, Brandi Carlile makes us all gay. You know, when gay also means bright, cheery and light. Brandi was in fine gay form on the penultimate concert of her Human tour, on a late summer night with a touch of coolness in the moist air. She was also in chatty gay form, talking even more than she usually does with her funny stories, descriptions of her beautiful wife Catherine, their characterful daughters, their life and times at home and on the road. She was just about to release the newly re-recorded/re-imagined version of her year-old album, Returning To Myself. This new one being the “Sad Gay Version”. I took a photo of her looking like a sad gay. But overall she is the happiest, coolest most wide-eyed and glorious artist I love to see, and I am glad I saw her on this night, because I have a feeling I might not get to see her again for some time.

Since I was at her Kia Forum show back in February near the beginning of her Human tour, I have spent time retro-posting about all the Brandi shows I have seen since 2019. The only show I had in fact written about in real time was her Brandi Carlile and Friends concert at the Hollywood Bowl in October 2023. Every other show, before and since, I would leave saying to myself, “Now, finally, I will sit down and write thoughtfully about Brandi.” And then I would go through the hundreds of photos I had taken, do all the touching up, watermarking et al, and feel defeated. I could never find the right words to do justice to all that Brandi is as an artist, as a later-in-my-life musical influence, as a beautifully generous conduit to other more recently emerged artists such as Alison Russell, or the cute and funny Irish singer CMAT who opened for Brandi last Sunday night in Santa Barbara. And as an inspiration in such dark times.

In all the posts I have now done, which I will list below, there are things I have written about her performances, her band, her songs, my experiences of being at those shows, how I got there and why, and more largely my journey as a newer (coming up to eight years) Brandi fan, a Bramily member, and a lucky duck who has been able to meet and chat with her a few precious times. But there is plenty I have left out. I did not write about her Blue concert at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in 14 October 2019 because we were not allowed to take pictures of her singing Joni Mitchell’s album in its entirety in front of Joni, Elton and us. I was way up the back in a concert hall where no seat is bad, just happy to have scored a seat from another Bramily member to the instantly sold out must-be-there show.

I also did not write in any detail about her numerous Compound Quarantine live stream performances during the pandemic in 2020 when we were all staying at home. We would pay something like $10 each week to watch her and the Hanseroth twins and her string players do gorgeous unplugged-style performances in their barn studio out in the woods in Washington state, playing albums in their entirety, which is how I went back and listened to all the Brandi Carlile albums that year. They did that to stay connected with their fan base as much as to keep all their band and staff paid during that time, and it was inclusive and uplifting for us all.

As the world opened up in 2021 and after, she became very busy, showing up everywhere. Singing at every relevant tribute show, such as Dolly Parton’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Or Elton John’s final concert at Dodger Stadium. I was back in Sydney in 2022, which did not help my SAMO (sadness about missing out) as Brandi darted around being everywhere – except Australia – and closed the year with a New Years Eve show in Portland, OR, which was way too far from Sydney.

I tried to write about Brandi then, and I look back on those notes now. “If you hate the feeling of FOMO,” I wrote, “you might not want to be a fan of the unstoppable force that is Brandi Carlile. She’s here, she’s there, she is damn well everywhere… It’s impossible to keep up. I don’t know how she keeps up with herself. She might not have crashed Ticketmaster, Swifty-style, but being a Bramily member, or else just surrendering to Brandification, can be head-spinning and increasingly expensive.

“As 2022 comes to its close, we can reflect on losing too many glorious female singers and songwriters. So to have one as far-reaching as Brandi Carlile, who soars into the future while honouring the old soul she contains deep within, is a comforting, exciting and beautiful thing. Even if I cannot keep up with her. Better sometimes to be chasing the magnificent than what I often do, which is to look back on when it once was.”

I think I understand what I was trying to say there… especially now just a few weeks after losing Dolly.

Anyway, to get back to now, it was a delightful show at the Santa Barbara Bowl last Sunday night. The lighting in that outdoor venue, an amphitheatre, not an arena, was beautiful and often painterly, when I look at the photos I took in the 11th row.

And then there were the usual stage antics – lots of hair shaking. It’s any photographer’s aim to get that hair in focus when it’s everywhere. I rarely do, but I have fun trying.

It was a long show although they played a couple less songs than other shows on the tour, perhaps because of the early curfew at this venue and because the chitchat seemed more extended than usual. Brandi performs several covers in her show – Bonnie Raitt, Billy Joel, Alanis Morissette (“Uninvited” is the “it” song at the moment), and a nod to Dolly and Kenny with “Islands in the Stream”. As with Heart and any band that plays covers these days, I would actually prefer they just play more of their own songs. But Brandi gets so much pleasure from these cover songs, so, okay. “The Joke” is still, and always will be, the highlight for me of any show she does. And I hope she keeps “A Woman Oversees” in her sets forever more. It’s a much more whimsical and sweetly loving, as well as musically sophisticated, tribute to her wife Catherine than the devastating, gut-wrenching and open-hearted “Party of One”, which had been a mainstay of her set when I first started seeing Brandi concerts, and which had beautifully told the story of a more difficult time in their relationship.

I love them all, and while Brandi has such a deep and wide-ranging catalogue of songs from her more than twenty years recording, her shows will usually focus on whatever the new album is. But the band always makes room to dig back. Especially when they take audience requests for Brandi and the twins to perform acoustically, which has been a thing on this tour. “Shadow On the Wall” was the surprise on this night, from The Story album, and it was gorgeous.

At a time when most of the music I am listening to is poignant, intelligent, sumptuous female singer-songwriter music – Sarah McLachlan and Sara Bareilles are top of my list right now in the car – Brandi is always out there in a stratosphere that is not untouchable but certainly unique. Happy or sad, gay or straight or even crooked. She is a true wonder.

In addition to the aforementioned Hollywood Bowl show, here are the other shows I have finally posted about on the Debbie Does Music site:

The Forum, Los Angeles, February 2026

Red Rocks, Colorado, September 2023

Frost Amphitheater, Stanford, October 2021

Benaroya Hall, Seattle, February 2020

Hollywood Palladium, Los Angeles, January 2020

Pacific Amphitheatre, Costa Mesa, July 2019

And here are the Santa Barbara pictures, and yes, the camera is still breathing, a wonder indeed. Click through to enlarge.