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Chris Willman
Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic
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Jen Horton Is it possible to plan for magic, serendipity, peak-level proficiency and finally sublimity by… really not planning at all? That is the question. On Brandi Carlile‘s current “Burn the Setlist!” tour, the answer is clear: Sometimes Shangri-La really is best reached with a lost roadmap.
The shortish 19-date outing Carlile is undertaking at the moment is the first all-requests tour in memory by any artist significant enough to have it show up on our radar. It might even be a historic first, as far as a proven headliner opting to play nothing but spontaneously generated live audience picks. Which is odd when you think about it, because doesn’t anyone who’s been to a lot of shows over the years have a favorite moment when a star got loose and succumbed to someone shouting out a favorite (though they usually don’t want to encourage that kind of behavior?). But at the opposite end of the scale from bar bands and tip jars, doing solely requests sounds like as much of a nightmare to most performers as it does a dream to hardcore fans. There are perfectly good reasons not to throw the song selections completely open to stans for roughly 2 hours and 40 minutes — as Carlile and her two bandmates, Phil and Tim Hanseroth, are doing now — when you have a recorded catalog of close to a hundred original songs, plus a repertoire of proven live cover choices.
Who among even the greats of music has anything close to 100% recall? When the recent and distant pasts are both being dredged up, a good corollary to “Never let ’em see you sweat” might be: Never let ’em see you forget.
Fortunately, Brandi Carlile and the Hanseroth twins are freaking elephants.
Brandi Carlile in Oakland at the Fox Theatre Jen Horton But making a point out of not planning is different from not being prepared. And Carlile and the brothers are prepared for this, first of all, by having brain chemistry that is clearly a little bit different from mine or probably yours, with the power not just to generate constant creative sparks but to put those sparks in an easily accessible lockbox. You’re either genetically predisposed to that kind of recall or you’re not, and at least a little part of why Carlile and the Hanseroths have been ideal partners since the turn of the millennium is that shared gift. Not that they came into the “Burn the Setlist!” tour relying completely on muscle memory. Tim Hanseroth posted an IG video of himself running through their studio albums and strumming along to stir the old juices. Carlile said in a video livestream for fans on the tour’s eve that she would have a monitor for lyrics if she needed it. But at the show I caught, I barely noticed Carlile looking down at it… which I can’t say for most big tours I attend where the show is locked in for months straight.
All of this risks making the tour seem like a stunt, which it kind of is. But the bigger reason for why it’s such a rousing success — and a reason why fans may remember these shows almost as well as Carlile and company remember their songs — is how many deeply moving moments are stirred up up in the shows, in the quietest bits that come between the outbreaks of hysterical shouting and sign-waving. Leaving the setlists up to fans, chance or God results in obscure picks and ironic juxtapositions that sometimes aren’t anything more than fun or curious, but are sometimes unexpectedly touching in a way that one of Carlile’s perfectly laid-out arena shows probably couldn’t be. Not just a mere test of skills, these concerts are really a nightly emotional chemistry experiment. On the right night — and the show I saw in Oakland was the right night — it might be transcendent, in a way that’s a little different even from the transcendent gigs we’ve seen before.
Carlile had some notes before the show began; rather than restrictions, felt like promissory instructions about how to best proceed through a candy store about to open. “I can see your signs all the way back, and I will call on people all the way in the back,” Carlile declared at the top of the concert Nov. 7 at the Fox Oakland, the second on their tour. (She later made good on that, picking more people from the rear balcony than any other part of the audience, though the front rows did OK too.).”Everything is pretty much fair game,” she instructed — “any song that we’ve ever done.” She noted that they wouldn’t be open to attempting songs they’d never performed even once before, “so we’re not gonna be able to ‘Free Bird’ or ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ this shit. But we might be able to get away with the handful of covers we’ve done in the past. And listen,” she added reassuringly, “you don’t have to worry about me — I’m 45, so if there’s a song I don’t want to do, I will just say no.”
But Carlile also wanted it understood that this was not meant to be a tricky pop quiz. “Don’t feel like this should be a ‘stump the band’-type deal,” she said. “We really want this to be musically awesome for you guys. We want you to love what you’re hearing and request the songs that you really want to hear. I’m a deep cuts girl. I love track 7 on everyone’s album. I’m a last track gal. And I know that you know that you’re never gonna hear those songs on the big tours that we do.” That said, she opened it up to the idea that predictability isn’t always a negative. “If you want to hear the fucking ‘Story,'” Carlile declared, “just request ‘The Story’!”
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