Review: Brandi Carlile wraps herself around Minneapolis with a special guest

Something happens to Brandi Carlile whenever she takes the stage in the Twin Cities. Her body relaxes under those glam-punk shoulder pads, her dimpled grin gets wider, she lets her hair down. She gets super-chatty and downright giddy. And emotional.

She was doubly emotional on Saturday, Feb. 21, at sold-out Target Center, especially during the encore. After soothing with her traditional closing tune “A Long Goodbye,” she went a cappella in total darkness for the opening verse of Bob Dylan’s “Girl from the North Country.” Then the lights came up and she brought out her special guests, Minneapolis’ own Singing Resistance.

The 14,000 concertgoers went wild as the troupe of protest singers sang their “It’s OK to Change Your Mind” with Carlile acting as chief cheerleader. Afterward, the night’s verklempt star bowed to her social media-famous guests.

On Saturday, Carlile gifted Minnesota a fully realized 2 ½-hour concert, as nourishing, uplifting and, yes, emotional, as any she’s given in the North Star State in the past two decades. But, this being her first proper arena tour, there was more ambitious and dramatic staging, especially with creative live video (a big screen sometimes showed 28 images of Carlile at once), without sacrificing any of Carlile’s inviting intimacy and irresistible genuineness.

The Seattle singer-songwriter hit the stage, silhouetted in an orange circle behind a curtain, singing with an acoustic guitar. Midway through the opening song “Returning to Myself,” the curtain dropped dramatically and, surprisingly, Carlile continued rather quietly, her vibrato ringing on the title track of her excellent 2025 album, which asks God and her family for a little grace.

She then went into “Human,” her current single that is classic Carlile in its juxtaposition of the quiet and the loud, the intimate and the explosive, a perfectly executed power ballad, especially when you have the bravura voice to pull it off. That final chorus soared, and it was goosebumps all around that segued into enthusiastic cheers at song’s end.

Next, it was fasten your seatbelts time as Carlile and her seven-member band rocked out on the punkish stomp “Mainstream Kid” and “Broken Horses.” That opening salvo of two ballads and a pair of rockers typified the kind of exciting musical roller coasters Carlile has kept her fans on.

Carlile, 44, got on her soapbox a few times during the night, as she is wont to do and her fans — Bramily, she calls them — expect it.

One time, she lavished praise on Minnesota for standing up to the federal government’s Operation Metro Surge aimed at immigrants.

“You’re special people. There’s nothing like you,” she said. “I’ve never been more inspired in my life by a city.”

In the encore song of the blistering rocker “Church & State,” Carlile projected footage of protesters on her video backdrop, to a raucous response.

Generally, she’s not one for protest tunes. She is more likely to share her vulnerability in song, but she counters with a determined resiliency, a message that resonated resoundingly in Minnesota after the impact of the ICE operation.

Carlile chose a set list that drew prominently from “Returning to Myself” but also delved into deep tracks like the revved up “Sinners, Saints and Fools” (with a snippet “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round”) and included old favorites “The Story” and “The Joke” and accommodated two fan requests “Beginning to Feel the Years” and “The Things I Regret,” rendered as a trio with bandmates Tim and Phil Hanseroth.

The long and generous program reinforced all the things the Twin Cities has learned about Carlile during the past 20 years, in which she’s performed in Minnesota more than 30 times.

She is multi-genre, grabbing 11 Grammys in six different fields — Americana, rock, pop, folk, roots and country. And on Saturday, you could add another genre to her resume as she recast “You and Me on the Rock” with an island vibe out of Jimmy Buffett’s playbook. Frankly, that seemed like an overreach.

Speaking of missteps, the first encore selection of Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” with opening act the Head & the Heart felt like a throwaway; the way Carlile danced off at the end of the night to Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club” suggested that might be a more prudent cover choice.

Carlile likes to salute her heroes: She did one of her Elton John collabs, the choral-assisted piano ballad “Who Believes in Angels,” offered the Joni Mitchell-inspired “A Woman Overseas,” the Freddie Mercury-evoking “Right on Time,” a creepy (in a good way) treatment of Alanis Morissette’s “Uninvited” and a strikingly heartfelt rendition of Linda Ronstadt’s 1970 hit “Long, Long Time” that had Carlile on the verge of tears.