Brandi Carlile’s All-Request Tour Is a Novel Stunt That’s Also Moving

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’!”

No one chosen in Oakland wanted to choose the fucking “Story,” or “The Joke” or anything else that might qualify as too big a hit, possibly in fear of eliciting groans from a rarities-inclined audience. (It does feel safe to call her biggest songs hits, even if toward the end, listening to the roars for obscurities, she said, “It almost makes up for the fact that we never had a hit. If you’ve never had a hit, all your songs get to be hits with your buddies. I don’t think we need one.”) But Carlile stating her openness to doing more predictable songs did create a safety net for the audience, establishing that there would be no wrong answers or incorrect pleas.

Also no duds, although one song choice did pose an unsolved mystery, with its unexpected popularity, which was resolved with a bit of discussion between performers and audience. A couple in the front row of the Fox Oakland’s balcony requested “Heart’s Content,” which got only light applayse Carlile then noted had also been requested the previous night in Portland… to her puzzlement. “I think this song’s gonna be requested every night,” she laughed, “because we never play it and it’s to me the most obscure song. Is it even on one of our albums?” It is — from 14 years ago — but it’s understandable why it’s never been a concert favorite: Perfectly pleasant-sounding, it’s the rare tune in her 21-year catalog that just doesn’t really sound like a Brandi Carlile. Phil Hanseroth relayed reportage from someone in the front rows: “It’s in a movie.” “What’s the movie?” “Safe Haven.” “Is it a romcom?” inquired Carlile. “Is it sad, like ‘The Notebook?’ Well, thank you — now I understand… A bunch of romcom fans up in here.” No judgments.

There was a greater sense of consensus, on-stage and off-, about most of the rest of the 22 songs played in Oakland. The first chosen was “Raising Hell,” a rowdy oldie that made it clear that, among other things, Carlile and the twins have always harbored stomp-and-holler tendencies… with literal stomping, on a few occasions in this set, to add percussion into the mix. In the most extreme pendulum swing possible, next up among the requests was a song about raising heaven, “The Mother,” a gorgeously happy song that deals with motherhood very generally and gay motherhood very specifically.

Carlile preceded “The Mother” with an extended anecdote about chaperoning the social life of her eldest daughter, who’s repeatedly named in the chorus — with a side note that the story should not leave the room, since Evangeline is at the age where it’s not easy to always discern whether she resents being talked about on stage or takes pride in it in any given moment. That alone, in the singer’s mind, justified the decision to have phones put away in Yondr pouches, something Carlile has not required at any of her previous gigs but wanted for these, both to create greater intimacy and to keep flubs from going up on YouTube. (There weren’t any blatant ones, although the Hanseroths did shoot knowing smiles at each other a couple of times when a note sounded a little bit interesting.)

Carlile has often spoken before “The Mother” in concert, but the loose formatting of this show seemed to allow her to stretch out even more, over a period of minutes. “I remember having a really difficult time with it because Catherine carried both girls… Somebody talked me through it and told me I needed to come up with a mantra. And my mantra became, I have to tell myself I’m a mother so that I can believe I deserve to call myself that. So it became ‘I am the mother of Evangeline.’ And when I first wrote this song, I thought, ‘Well, this thing’s niche! You have to be a gay mom that didn’t carry a child to understand this song.’ And it’s not true — it’s a universal thing — because here I am in Oakland, and this man stood up and wanted me to play the song.”

The mood swings got wilder from there, as “Folsom Prison Blues” was requested next, a cover Carlile figured they hadn’t done in a decade. (Actually, only seven years.) The twins spent a bit of time remember and working out the licks before a formal kickoff that led to some wildly exuberant death in Reno. From there, in another big turnabout, it was “Dying Day,” which they opted to do at the lip of the stage, without amplification, as they’d done in the distant past, albeit probably in slightly smaller rooms than the 2,800-capacity Fox. Voices carried.

The tour offers an opportunity to witness problem-solving in real time. For Carlile and the twins, perhaps the biggest problem was obliging a request for Alanis Morissette’s “Uninvited.” This was not because of recent unfamiliarity with the tune — they performed it nearly every night on this year’s “Human” arena tour, among the encores — but because they’d never done it as an acoustic trio. Without the heightened drama of a string section and the number’s signature piano notes. “I have no idea how we’re gonna do this without strings. Love will find a way,” Carlile said. “And no piano? That’s the whole song!” But she and the brothers found their path to make it a pure guitar-and-bass rock ‘n’ roll scorcher, followed by an exultant “We don’t need no stinking strings!” (With implicit apologies, undoubtedly, to SistaStrings.)

“I Belong With You” was introduced as having been written “when I first met my wife, Catherine… I wasn’t a big love song girl. I didn’t really get them.” The monologue was interrupted when she went to greet a young girl in the front row who was having her own emotional moment. Hi babe. What’s goin’ on?… Don’t cry!” When she came back, she dropped the love-story intro, but did have some instructions for the Hanseroths: “You guys aren’t on in this one until four minutes.” They took five for four, and you didn’t have to look at your watch — but just for fun, I did — to know that she was right on target with her reminder to the bros, give or take 10 seconds. This was a woman who knows her own material, as was repeatedly evident when each request was immediately followed by a callout to her guitar tech about which instrument to bring out. (“That’s gonna be capo 8 for a strummer”… “‘That Year’ is gonna be Kalamazoo, capo 7.”)

Carlile sang “Turpentine,” a song about physically battling with her brother growing up, with its wistful rejoinder, “I’m warning you, we’re growing up” — and though she didn’t directly make the connection this night, it was easy to surmise how growing up to close to her “Irish twin” brother prepared her for a life and career with the Hanseroth twins. She taled about writing “Stranger at My Door” in Australia, “jetlagged with a broken heart,” and bringing the new song to the twins in a club’s backstage alley. “‘Tell me the truth. Is it too much? Is it too many words?’ Phil’s like, ‘Eh, it’s a little wordy.’ Phil’s a 7 on the Enneogram. You know what that means?… You’re incredibly impatient, and this song is five minutes long and full of words and that’s why you guys love it!” she laughed, turning to the attending Bramily.

Dolly Parton was saluted with “Jolene” — “She had a temper, she had a dirty mouth, and she had the biggest heart in the world,” said Carlile — and a call-out for some Joni Mitchell on that singer’s birthday went rewarded with an E-major “River.” The singer talked about a two-and-a-half-hour phone call while driving home on Halloween night, hearing even more wild stories from the legend than she’d already heard. “A lot of times she’ll end the story by going, ‘And that was where I found “Refuge of the Roads.”‘ Or, ‘And that’s why I shouldn’t have got on that plane.’ In those moments, I realized that, no matter what happens in my life, I got to listen to Joni Mitchell play solitaire and tell me her stories. She’s not lying. I’m not even sure she’s capable of it.”

The last stretch of the Oakland concert lifted the show from delightful travelogue to a something heavier on some of the trio’s most emotionally incisive songs, although it was difficult to know whether they were making these selections intentionally or those requests were providentially just arriving right on time. Tim Hanseroth did say he’d been waiting all night to pick on the guy in the front rows holding a sign asking for “The Things I Regret,” and subsequently showed up on Instagram thanking the fan again. It raised one of those questions that can only arise at a rarities-filled show like this: Why was this not a bigger hit — even amongst the band itself? It’s got an unforgettable singalong hook and serious stomp-and-holler bona fides, and it’s about the accumulation of screw-ups that adds up to a lifetime’s worth. What more could you ask?

But the most touching highlights were “Most of All,” a song about seeing your family in yourself (there are few lines more evocative than “His heavy hands swing at the end of my arms”)… and “That Year,” an alternately chilling and warm ballad about looking to make peace with a high school friend who committed suicide, from across the veil that separates the living and the dead. And the recent “No One Knows Us,” about how each friendship bond formed among young people is precious, irreplaceable and worth the upkeep in a more depressed middle age. And the penultimate number, “That Wasn’t Me,” a neo-gospel ballad so healing and cathartic, it would have become Carlile’s signature song in some other lifetime, instead of a deep cut.

The actual climax? A rare cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Going to California,” because Carlile can hit the golden-god notes. And then California surrendered the combo to the next stop in Tucson. (Where they did not get the Led out, of course, and where the next stop involved only repeating four of the 22 numbers heard in Oakland.)

As a cherry on top, anyone leaving the show each night finds that there was a bonus offered earlier, not to them, but to anyone suffering at home with FOMO. Right before she takes the stage, when the local audience is already seated, Carlile does a livestream of a single song while she’s having her makeup applied, just for everyone who doesn’t have the privilege of the live show (though, of course, the concert crowd can catch up with it later). It’s the little livestreams…

Saying this was the best show I’ve ever seen by Carlile and company probably without saying, after saying all of that; at times, I got to thinking it was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen from anyone, out of untold thousands. Concert hyperbole is a dangerous thing, but I found myself hard-pressed to recall comparable instances in which I’d seen rock ‘n’ roll performers so throughly committed to the moment, not just for a moment but for close to three hours of them. Maybe that’s because I have a worse memory than Carlile and the Hanseroths, but more likely because this really is as good as it gets, if you have a taste for the rare intersection where hair-trigger meets tear-jerk. Adjust your settings for how many hundreds of dollars you’d pay for a resale ticket for the remaining dates accordingly.

Setlist for Brandi Carlile at the Fox Oakland, November 2026:

Raise Hell
The Mother
Folsom Prison Blues (Johnny Cash cover)
Dying Day
Heart’s Content
Uninvited (Alanis Morissette cover)
I Belong to You
Human
Turpentine
Hard Way Home
I Will
The Stranger at My Door
Most of All
Jolene (Dolly Parton cover)
That Year
River (Joni Mitchell cover)
The Things I Regret
Closer to You/I’ve Just Seen a Face (Beatles cover)
No One Knows Us
Beginning to Feel the Years
That Wasn’t Me
Going to California (Led Zeppelin)