By the Way…
Ok, the jig is up. Everybody knows Brandi Carlile now. Time to tell my story…
I suppose this is the inevitable paean from a longtime aficionado, paying homage to an artist that the wider world has just recently embraced as its own. And that’s okay. I can think of no artist more deserving. Certainly, no one else has moved me to write something like this.
I don’t really remember how I “discovered” Brandi Carlile. I do remember that her eponymous first album was the soundtrack to my painting the exterior of my house (Tragedy — Austin Cello Versions takes on additional shimmer when at the top of a 20-foot ladder). And it must have been during that daring project that The Story arrived. One auditory trip through that album, and I was hooked. For life. And I had that special relationship that a fan can have with a relatively obscure artist. My little secret. Something I’d share only with my best of friends. Um, check that. Only with my best of friends who had really good taste in music.
Time marches on. Brandi Gave Up the Ghost, and walked us along Bear Creek. She showed us she could really rock it on Firewatcher’s Daughter (an album that gave us The Eye, which in addition to being one of the most spine-tingling songs in her catalog, is definitely the song in which Tim and Phil Hanseroth, Brandi’s insanely gifted bandmates, most fully assert themselves as partners in this musical project).
Fast forward to 2018. I had a slow, unsteady introduction to By the Way, I Forgive You. Having come along for the long ride, I had an awful lot of Brandi material already resident in my grey matter. From the cellos on the “real cut” of Tragedy to the soaring heights of The Story to the rocks in the center of the snowballs on Bear Creek. I’ve sung them in the car a hundred times each. But now it was time for something new.
The songs on this new album opened up to me slowly, like poems that reveal themselves a just little more each time you read them. It probably didn’t help that my now-busy life kept me from the sort of “dim the lights, pour some wine and fire up the good stereo” listening sessions this album deserves. Mostly, I listened on my way to work, or running errands in the car on weekends. So it took a few weeks to realize that this album was special, even by Brandi’s standards.
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Over time, By the Way… and I became intimate friends, like all the albums that had come before. And then, on a cold winter day in Chicago, I learned that Brandi had been nominated for a long list of Grammy awards. Six of them! And prior to this album, none. What? Was By The Way… really so superior to the others? Or was it merely the one the public (and the Academy) finally noticed?
Sitting here a day after the Brandi Grammys (yes, they’re hers now, she stole the show), listening to the full breadth of the career of a simply amazing artist, I’m confident that “By the Way… “is the pinnacle (so far) of an amazing, underappreciated career. The songs on this album are approachable, touching, moving, sad, funny, and of course, musically stunning. “The Mother” brings tears to my eyes after hearing it 200 times, as does Party of One, albeit for achingly different reasons.
I can think of no musical artist who has both given birth to such rich, meaty, sometimes-messy songs, and then presented them to us so perfectly. So musically, so openly, so perfectly willing to touch the occasional raw nerve
Side note: I saw Brandi Carlile live for the first time this past summer. I don’t know why it took me so long — and it’s beside the point. Anyway, in this show, at Taste of Chicago, Brandi revealed to me (and a few thousand others) that she was a Total Geek for Elton John when she was a kid. Guess who else was? I was a in seventh grade when Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy was release. About a month later, my mom finished an embroidered denim shirt with every album name (to date) on it, and most of his hit songs, complete with rhinestone glasses on the back. I wore it proudly for a couple of years, and it faded into my closet with many other cast-offs made irrelevant by the rapid growth of adolescence.
I had forgotten that shirt. I had forgotten how much Elton John meant to me, musically, during those impressionable years. Brandi reminded me. And then she played, with Phil and Tim and the rest of the band, the LIVING HELL out of Elton’s Madman Across the Water. Here was my muse, my favorite artist perhaps of all time, winking at me in the seventh row, saying “I knew you were coming.” It was an arcane and somewhat suspect bit of my geeky youth suddenly vindicated and celebrated. It was how I discovered the real meaning of The Joke, four-and-some minutes of sonic perfection.
So. Post-Grammys. I’m elated at the awards won. Disappointed that she didn’t (yet) win The Big One. Happy that the world is discovering Brandi, and of course wistful for that past when it was just the two of us (okay, Tim and Phil, four of us), and nobody else knew what was going on. It’s a bit like I felt during the 2016 Cubs parade in Chicago, celebrating the win with the masses, while remembering every gut-wrenching thing (since 1969) that came before.
I’m thrilled. I’m proud. I may be a bit jealous. But mostly, I’m excited for what is yet to come.
