You Without Me – Brandi Carlile (2025)
If ever there was a need to mark the Fourth of July with a positive American story, it is now. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Brandi Carlile!
Two weeks ago, Lynn and I took in four shows in three different cities over six days. Wilco at the Royal Albert Hall kicked that sequence off and my plan is to retrospectively pick up the others over the next few weeks. These will be posts done on the move as the blog is getting in the campervan and heading to the south west of England for some walking, some pasties and a bit of digital nomadery.
This week I am picking off the third musical performance which was Brandi Carlile at the Glasgow Concert Hall. In truth, we might have been able to manage a RAH weekend special as her short UK tour landed in the famous hall two days before Wilco. But that wasn’t logistically possible, so Lynn set her alarm for 3am in a hotel room in Guadalajara and got us great centre stage seats towards the front of the stalls in Glasgow.
I’ve posted a couple of Carlile tracks before but these have both been covers – The Indigo Girls’ Closer To Fine in WIS 20Oct23 and her live version of her hero Elton John’s Sixty Years On for Lynn’s big birthday in WIS 18Apr25. I’ve also posted one of her many collaborations (with Brandy Clark on the terrific Dear Insecurity) in WIS 29Dec23 and talked about her powerful influence on the career of Allison Russell (WIS 27Oct23). So it’s long past time that her own work gets a showcase.
As well as being a prolific and Grammy award-winning Americana singer/songwriter and producer, Carlile has been recognised for her activisim and humanitarian work. Lynn has been a huge admirer of her for some time but she has been an infrequent visitor to the UK and had only played live outside London once before in 2008 with small gigs in Manchester, Leeds and Glasgow. Hence, the middle-of-the-night ticket purchasing for the appropriately named and instantly sold-out Lost Time Tour.
I went along to the gig familiar with her songs but not with the same level of anticipation that Lynn had. Or, as it turns out, the crowd in Glasgow had. We were located among what I now know (from the sewing on the back of a denim jacket in front of me) is called the Bramily – her loyal fans. After a politely enthusiastic reception for support act Audrey McGraw (Tim and Faith Hill’s daughter), you could feel the excitement levels in the hall rise and it was easy to get caught up in it all. This (Scottish) reel on Carlile’s socials gives a flavour of just how hyped the crowd was for her and how she reciprocated. The big bloke leading the chanting that a delighted Carlile could hear and later mimicked was sat just along from us!
What played out was two joyful hours of live music where the artists on stage and the audience in the hall fed off each other – I’ve read this cliche in many live reviews before but I’ve never really experienced it quite like this gig. Carlile was bursting with energy and clearly loving the reaction to her long-awaited return to Glasgow. She is a hugely engaging stage raconteur, sharing stories of her life and the inspiration for her songs. Musically, the band were as tight as a nut and the performance was well-paced and suitably muscular when required – there was a lot of rock in her folk-country-pop mix as she constantly swapped guitars as seen above. Crooning piano ballads and acoustic three-part harmonies around the mic were contrasted by some significant thrashers. In preparation for their next date at Glastonbury, they encored a blistering cover of Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock and the guitar wig-out on Radiohead’s Fake Plastic Trees (which she medleys with her own Pride and Joy) would have done Wilco proud.
Hearing the songs live, what really struck me was the strength of the songwriting. She knows her way around a melody and deploys that fantastic soaring voice to dramatic effect on the powerful, triumphant pop of the Elton-esque The Joke, written in the aftermath of Trump defeating Hilary Clinton. It And, to these ears at least, the tunes she performed from her recent collaboration album with Mr Dwight himself sounded better live, particularly the slightly less cluttered arrangement of Who Believes in Angels?
But it was the acoustic ballads that really connected with me as they allow her lyrics to have greatest impact. A personal highlight was Whatever You Do, a less celebrated track from her 2018 By The Way I Forgive You album, which nearly veers towards cliche in its imagery but is saved by the emotion in her voice in the chorus as she sings:
There’s a road left behind me that I would rather not speak of
And a hard one ahead of me too
I love you, whatever you do
But I got a life to live too.
Right at the tender heart of her set, Carlile chose to pair her two songs about motherhood to devastating effect. I was aware of the insightful The Mother, written about the early years of Evangeline, her first daughter with her partner Catherine. Although Lynn and I are some time from that period in our lives, the line “The first things that she took from me were selfishness and sleep” still resonates.
It was preceeded by You Without Me, the only track from her recent album with EJ which she performs herself and not one I was that familiar with. Her captivating introduction explained the song was about the mixture of shock and pride at the moment when she saw her daughter do something driven by her own will and realised for the first time that she was separating from the ‘mother-ship’, starting to become a person in her own right. Sung solo, gently picking on an acoustic guitar, the beautiful chorus goes:
There you are, my morning star
I wondered when you’d show
Give me just a quick thumbs up
A wink before you go
I never hеard that voice before today
I rеmind myself to breathe
There you are, it’s just you without me
An audience video of both songs from Glasgow is below but the sound quality is a bit echoey.
Alternatively, with better sound quality, Carlile’s full Glastonbury performance is on BBC iPlayer for those lucky(?) enough to be in the UK. Of the mother songs, she only plays You Without Me and you’ll find it at about 21 minutes in. The set includes the wig-out covers noted above but you only have until the end of July to view it here.
In terms of the performance, I have to admit that watching her work hard to win over a small, not totally committed crowd in the open air in the early afternoon made me glad we saw her three days earlier in the darkness of an indoor venue as part of the Bramily!
Last Word
While it was nice to be able to dip into the Glastonbury coverage – the English Teacher live set was excellent! – I must admit I got a bit put off by the media “Glasto” overkill. Can everyone please stop endlessly enthusing about everything! Maybe, I’m just getting old.
Brandi now added to the mix on the master playlist – sounds like a cocktail…
AR
If you enjoyed this, there is plenty more where that came from. Subscribers receive a link in their inbox every time a post is published, so you never miss out.
Contact the blog directly on weekinsound@hotmail.com
WIS FREQUENT FLIER TAG CLOUD
Allison Russell Amy Winehouse Aztec Camera Billy Bragg Blondie Brandi Carlile David Bowie Eels Elton John Elvis Costello & The Attractions Emmylou Harris Everything But The Girl Ezra Collective Faces Gang of Four Gil Scott-Heron Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit John Grant Johnny Cash John Prine Lucinda Williams Madness Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds Nick Lowe Paul Weller Prefab Sprout Public Service Broadcasting Ramones Sparks Steely Dan Steve Earle Talking Heads Taylor Swift The Beatles The Clash The Cure The Decemberists The Go-Betweens The Jam The National The Rolling Stones The Stranglers The Waterboys The Who Wilco
WIS VAULT SEARCH
Week In Sound 
Leave a comment