Great Scott

Virgos both, you and I, and several Virgo traits we both embody: We both love to learn widely, polymaths to the core. We both forge community fervently…we both revel in co-presence with those we hold dear. Yet you’ve so often shown me how to live beyond one virginal insularity through living, yourself, with such attention to your surroundings. I’ve lived too much in my head, Virgo style as our mutual astrologer friend strives to remind me—but you, you live richly and robustly and fertilely in your environment.

Channeling you, I rested this past Saturday in the late afternoon on the top rim of the steeply-raked lawn of The Gorge Amphitheatre and drank deeply of River. Air. Rock. Romance. All at their most rarefied. Years and years I had yearned to be in this sublime space, hearing tell of its singularity as a venue. But it’s no mere means for musicking. The moment I crested the ridge and looked down beyond the lawn, I admitted to my two companions that I’d quite happily have paid the price for these Echoes of the Canyon tickets just to have my breath taken from me as I watched the sun set and the skies darken over this vista for the next seven hours—that there would be, in the bargain, perhaps the greatest concert experience of my life felt in this moment like overkill, like spreading Betty Crocker vanilla butter cream frosting on my Oreos (you shut up!), like all my categories of sense-making were bursting with the frothy spray of stupor. Sublime. Sublime. Sublime, I insist. I looked. I drank. In the place, in the moment, I stayed.

Turpentine

I have to handle sparks of influence with care. Passions (in the words of a scholar who studies fellow masked autistic folx, “special interests”) overcome me, infect me, burn through me. You drew me close enough to inhale Brandi Carlile, reflecting everything I write about you in this space when you took us, three friends you chose, to her concert in a much more intimate amphitheatre as a present to yourself for your 40th—now that’s forging community beyond category. And I was amazed, and I felt her liquid flame then…but, despite my intention to “soon” do one of my deep dives, I let it drain out. I followed other passions, ever mercurial on my audiencing path. And this past weekend, nine years belated, a new companion who is a nuclear Bramily member shared this sublime space with me and I am fully inflamed with wonder. Somehow, long before her mainstream ascendency, you knew—you tried back then to show me that, fire notwithstanding, Brandi Carlile is the coolest person alive.

First for me was Matt Dillon, my generation’s answer to James Dean. Next was Prince, embodying so many bewildering incommensurates at once that “cool” is the only apt term. Then came P!nk, whose coolness allowed me to embrace new ways of listening to music and new ways of attending concerts (little did I know she was teaching me up for TS). And now, an artist who encodes her odd and ostracized adolescent crashes against the chamber walls of normativity in song and memoir in ways that frighten me and make me feel safe all at once—I have no idea how long it will be before the fire of my Brandi Carlile obsession calms to undying embers. But I know with absolute certainty that this ever-uncool kid who drew oxygen from the streams of the country music I have often dreaded and who immerses herself now in the Christianity and the rural living that feel so remote to me even as she rises as the High Woman at the helm of the Redneck Hippie culture that courses right in my very heart—I know with absolute certainty, having been a hundred feet away from her on that second night of Echoes, that she is the coolest person alive.

Stardust

What the coolest people do, the greatest artists, is they show us how to be fully in the moment but with a difference. The stunning fusion of the immediate with the transcendent, fueling our growth toward the most extraordinary possibilities in the fecund welter of the most particular details—that’s the coolest art. Like Joni Mitchell. And she can do it right in front of us, forging this kind of art not just in the distances of decades and private writing spaces and studio recordings encased like fossils but right in front of us in the living present. We held our cell phone lights aloft, and this artist who last played publicly in flip-phone 2003 (with one small and brief exception) was astonished at the sight and learned from Brandi what was happening, and she said we “were like a fallen constellation.” And the magic is that we could feel in that moment the truth of her poetic insight, because constellations are patterns we create and agree to share together out of the impossible-to-behold-on-a-human-scale coincidental arrangement of elements and gas clusters billions of years in the past that we have the chance opportunity to witness now. We could feel her insight because 27,000 of us knew that what we were collectively experiencing was just as improbable, a one-off three-hour performance by, and for, and with, one of the great artists of our lifetime. Eight years ago it was uncertain she would walk or speak again, let alone sing and play live. Twenty years since she last headlined a show—a generation. It is possible she will not perform live again, though I sincerely hope her Gorge success echoes loudly enough for her that she chooses to do so. But that night, we were there, and we knew it was special, and we felt the fibers of time and community that stitched us into that canyon panorama in that singular moment—like a fallen constellation, one might say. If one were Joni Mitchell.

The brilliant vision brought to life on that stage, stirred by Brandi Carlile, was a set recreating Joni’s living room—where Joni and Brandi and a range of other musicians would gather on the right nights over the past several years to reengage the homeowner in the act of making music together. The approach, Carlile warned us earlier during her opening set, would not be one artist blowing through hits in her catalogue one by one, but rather a more collaborative chorus of voices. Annie Lennox sang “Ladies of the Canyon.” Sarah McLachlan sang “Blue.” All 27,000 of us sang “Big Yellow Taxi” to open her set and “The Circle Game” to close the set and lead to the encore. Other musicians took their turns. And it was perfect, an ideal foundation from which Mitchell buoyed herself up musically just as she was supported physically in her taking and leaving the stage. Her voice is of course much deeper than her familiar youthful one, and at the start it sounded a bit ragged. But make no mistake…its warm fullness emerged as night sky starred, and she hit the notes that mattered to her. Her command of the environment was nimble and playful and wicked and joyful. To share this with these folks as she forged this beauty that night in The Gorge, five months from turning 80…”once in a lifetime” is both mathematically inaccurate and descriptively inapt. Being there together helps to create my lifetime in any sense of “lifetime” that matters.

And she considers Saskatoon her hometown. And you returned to Saskatchewan to help create your lifetime, though it’s not quite a return but actually something new. And this rhyming of place cannot be a coincidence, from my vantage point on this rim. Through the gleaming filament of Brandi Carlile, who helped return Joni Mitchell to the stage in a way that was not quite a return but actually something new, you helped me be there, for that something new. And with your help, in that immediate and transcendent moment, I knew to look.