Brandi Carlile Live at Interlochen
Posted by Troy | Filed under Music
Last night we took our 8-yr-old daughter to her first real concert… she is a totally right-brained kid who loves art and music so I knew she’d love it and I had been looking forward to this for a really long time.
Since I’d seen Brandi Carlile last summer I knew she’d be a great first-concert experience for my daughter… and of course I was right.
The evening opened up with a pretty decent performance from The Watson Twins. I’d have to say the highlight of their show was their two covers, “Ain’t No Sunshine,” and “Just Like Heaven.”
Of course those happen to be two of my all-time-top-ten favorite songs, ones of such magnificence that I’d get emotional even if Rosie O’Donnell was performing them.
The twins did much better than Rosie would though and their Neil-Young-Cripple-Creek-Fairy take on The Cure was pretty dang cool. (check out the not-quite-as-hippie version in my playlist)
But when Brandi took the stage it was like time stopped.
Tags: brandi carlile, concerts, Music, original illustration
Indigo Girls: Staring Down the Brilliant Dream
Posted by Troy | Filed under Music
Remember music in the pre-internet world?
A big folder of CDs in the car with a tape adapter and your Discman.
and for those of us outside of any kind of metropolis our musical exposure was limited to what was available on the radio (top 40, oldies, country, CCM) and what was on Mtv (they did actually play music back then).
Which was tough for a kid like me who had a hunger for something outside the mainstream. (Praise the Lord for Nirvana).
So when I left home for college, my entire music library was compiled of Smashing Pumpkins, Weezer, Mazzy Star, Sugar, The Cranberries along with a little Elvis Presley and for some reason I liked Harry Connick Jr. (I can’t remember why)
I was lucky enough to have some fringe tunes in my library (if not physical, at least in my head) like Hum (I was obsessed with them) and Dinosaur Jr…. but that exposure was mostly limited to one friend’s handful of CDs that he’d commandeered from someone else.
So when I met my hippie-ish wife in 1996 she’d ask me regularly if I liked this or that artist and didn’t I just love “Box of Rain?”
Honestly, I didn’t even know much at all about the Dead or Bob Dylan or The Smiths or Joni Mitchell or Led Zeppelin or The Cure or just about anything else she was into.
When she asked me about her favorite band, The Indigo Girls, I had never even heard of them, but was quite certain that I didn’t like them.
Tags: brandi carlile, indigo girls, live, Music
Brandi Carlile: Give Up the Ghost
Posted by Troy | Filed under Music
I saw Brandi Carlile perform this past summer.
By the middle of the first song I swear I had tears streaming down my face… I didn’t even bother trying to hold back. My wife thought something was wrong with me…
I can’t think of anyone else who can induce such a wave of emotion just by just the sound of her voice…
She’s a tiny girl, but her voice will knock your socks off. In fact it has the power to knock the collective socks off an audience of thousands.
and when she performed Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” along with the Indigo Girls as part of their encore…
Forget about it.
As if her mind-boggling voice wasn’t enough, she writes stuff like the first stanza of her (fantastic) new album Give Up the Ghost:
I went out looking for the answers and never left my town.
I’m no good at understanding, but I’m good at standing ground.
And when I asked a corner preacher I couldn’t hear him for my youth.
Some people get religion some people get the truth.
I never get the truth, I never get the truth.
I didn’t actually realize this album was releasing but when I spotted it today I flipped out… I was almost afraid to hear it because I didn’t want to be disappointed.
I am not disappointed.
She’s got a quality, man… some sort of electric energy that pulses out of her mouth, into the mic, onto the tape, over the interweb, out of the speakers and straight into your soul.
Carlile is hardly perfect, but she’s good—a really solid, deep-down kind of good, and not just in terms of her musical ability or quality of output, but on a basic moral level, too. She cares. She hurts. She wants to do right. And she has the heart, guts, skill and wherewithal to make crushing, beautiful art about that struggle. – Paste
Tags: brandi carlile, Music
