Concert in your area for Folk & Blues, Country, Rock, Indie & Alt, and Pop.
Musical pretty much since birth, Brandi Carlilie grew up listening to the likes of Johnny Cash and was encouraged to perform regularly by her mother. Learning the guitar in her teenage years, Carlilie began to take her craft more seriously and even dropped out of high school to pursue her musical passions.
Moving to Seattle, Brandi Carlile was picked up by Columbia Records in 2004 after she was seen performing at a series of music clubs throughout the city. A year later, the singer released her eponymous debut album with the label. The record was well received and won Brandi Carlile a large fan base after the album peaked at number 80 on the US Billboard 200 chart and hit the number one spot on the US Folk charts.
It wasn’t long until Brandi Carlile followed up the success of this first album with her 2007 release, “The Story”. The album peaked at number 41 on the US Billboard 200 and sold over 300,000 copies. Multiple tracks from the album were used in commercials and on television shows such as “Grey’s Anatomy”. She was also named one of Rolling Stone’s “Top 10 Artists to Watch in 2005”.
These opportunities introduced Brandi Carlile to a wider, commercial audience and this in turn helped her next two albums, 2009’s “Give Up the Ghost” and 2012’s “Bear Creek”, hit the top 30 on the Billboard 200 and the top five on the US Folk chart. “Bear Creek” actually hit the number one spot on the US Folk chart.
Brandi Carlile has toured alongside Ray LaMontagne, Hanson, Indigo Girls and Tori Amos. In 2014, Brandi Carlile was invited to sing the National Anthem at the NFL Playoff game between the Saints and the Seattle Seahawks.
All the band members Charity Rose Tielen, Chris Zasche, Kenny Hensley, Tyler Wilson, Josiah Johnson and Jonathan Russell met after a series of open mic nights in a pub in Seattle. The band name, as explained by Johnson is based on the concept that “your head is telling you to be stable and find a good job, you know in your heart that this [the band] is what you're supposed to do even if it's crazy.”
The band spent most of their formulative years touring around the Northwest region of the United States, and released their first self-titled album in 2010, and then was re-released when they signed with Sub Pop Records in 2011. Having gained a lot of popularity, the band toured the United States, as well as Europe as the supporting act for various other bands such as Vampire Weekend, Dr. Dog, Iron and Wine and Death Cab For Cutie. They even made their debut television appearance on Conan at the end of 2011.
The band’s music was also featured on various, widely popular television shows. “Rivers and Roads” was used for both Chuck as well as How I Met Your Mother, and “Down In The Valley” was used for the British television show, “Beaver Falls.” Following the success of the first album, they released their sophomore album, “Let’s Be Still” in October 2013, which was entirely produced by all members of the band with the help of Shawn Simmons.
Brandi Carlile. I just can’t get enough of this brilliant woman. Her lyrics are heartbreaking, her voice is earth shattering, and her seemingly gentle exterior makes it impossible not to love her.
The most incredible thing about the 33-year-old singer is that her voice is just as striking and brilliant live as it is on her recorded tracks, which is admirable in and of itself. Her range is so astonishingly wide and smooth in her recordings, it is hard to believe that she is able to accomplish that same perfection on stage without an engineer going in and fixing the kinks. The woman is a force to be reckoned with. Brandi is a charming performer, and you don’t even have to watch her performing to know this—you just have to watch her fans. At every live show, the audience is always quite visibly entranced by her strong stage presence, her powerful vocals, her staggering lyrics, and an unmatched ability to connect with them on an intimate level, even from the stage. During her performance of “Turpentine” at Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre, she begins by yelling “Sing along with us, Red Rocks!” and the crowd yells back in delight at her openness and her obvious love for them.
Brandi’s ability to permeate her audience is what makes her live performances so magnetic, and her shows have a unique atmosphere that you won’t find anywhere else.
Seeing The Head and the Heart live at New York’s Celebrate Brooklyn! absolutely changed my life.
I must have talked about that show for weeks afterwards, gushing to anyone who would listen, swearing I’d never seen anything like it—and, to this day, I still haven’t. The band is made up of six multi-talented vocalists and instrumentalists, all switching back and forth between roles for each different song. Just as I thought the violinist was just a violinist, she broke out into a roaring, breathtaking vocal solo—and so on and so forth. Though each band member is incredibly talented in their own right, it is the chemistry between the six of them that makes the group unlike any other. In a completely unplanned fit of enthusiasm during their heartbreaking “Rivers and Roads,” all six members went airborne all at once, coming off the ground just slightly, no longer able to contain the power that was driving them to perform. I have never seen anything like it, before or since. Every time The Head and the Heart performs, they make you feel like you are first falling in love, and exactly how they’ve managed to bottle this feeling, I’ll never know. The show wrapped with band member Josiah’s solo acoustic performance of “Honey Come Home,” his gentle, gravelly voice following fans out of the venue long after the performance was through.