brandi carlile

From the Ruins of the American Empire, a Six-Stringed Consolation Prize
Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk | 12 June 2025

Paris—It is 2 a.m. on the Rive Gauche and the bistros have finally run out of rosé. Somewhere between a tab of questionable MDMA and a heated debate on whether NATO still exists, a busker breaks into “The Joke.” Half the terrace joins on the chorus, the other half Googles the chords. Nobody wins the argument, but for three minutes the city forgets that the Seine is technically flammable on hot days.

This, in microcosm, is the global career of Brandi Carlile: an Americana export more effective at soft-power diplomacy than any State Department envoy currently stuck in a Kyiv Marriott. While Washington auctions spare aircraft carriers on eBay, Carlile has been quietly air-dropping harmony into war zones, refugee camps, and the BBC Proms—places where the phrase “country music” normally triggers a 30-minute PowerPoint on cultural imperialism.

Start with the numbers: three continents, six Grammys, zero military interventions. Her 2023-24 “Beyond These Silent Days” world tour grossed more than the GDP of Tuvalu, yet somehow left venues standing—an operational record the Pentagon still studies with envy. In London she sold out the O2 twice; in São Paulo she duetted with Milton Nascimento, reminding Brazilians that gringos can, occasionally, read the room. Even in Tel Aviv, a city allergic to nuance, she split the set list between Brandi and the Highwomen, proving that four-part harmony is kryptonite to the modern siege mentality.

Of course, cynics will note that every revolution now comes with corporate sponsors. Carlile’s guitar strap bears the discreet logo of a luxury outdoor-clothing conglomerate that also outfits Arctic oil rigs—an irony not lost on the Oslo crowd shivering through her climate-benefit concert. But hypocrisy is the seasoning of late capitalism; at least hers is low-sodium.

Back home, she’s a blue-state totem in a red-state body: raised evangelical, came out at 15, now married to a woman she met at an Indigo Girls show—plot twists that would make a Netflix algorithm blush. Internationally, this résumé translates into a kind of geopolitical Swiss Army knife. Need a folk singer for a Ukrainian benefit? Carlile. Want someone who can quote both “The Sermon on the Mount” and “The Second Sex” without sounding like a freshman seminar? Carlile. Require a last-minute replacement for that Icelandic festival after the headliner is detained at Keflavík for unpaid lava taxes? You guessed it.

Her secret weapon is sincerity, a commodity so scarce on the open market that Interpol should probably regulate it. When she sings “Party of One,” even the French existentialists stop rolling their eyes. The song functions like an emotional Geneva Convention: temporary, imperfect, but better than the alternative.

Meanwhile, the planet keeps producing fresh horrors—AI-generated pop stars, oceans full of microplastics, another season of “The Crown.” Carlile’s response has been to double down on analog: wooden guitars, human harmonies, set lists that change according to the moon phase and her mood. It’s a business model that would make a McKinsey consultant cry into his avocado toast, yet it’s somehow more resilient than half the Fortune 500.

Will it scale? Probably not. But that’s the point. In a world addicted to scaling—scaling debt, scaling surveillance, scaling the sheer tonnage of unsolicited Spotify singles—Carlile offers the radical act of staying small enough to fit into one pair of lungs. When she hits that high note in “The Story,” every karaoke bar from Lagos to Ljubljana suddenly remembers what lungs are for.

Which brings us back to the Parisian busker, now being handed a crumpled fifty-euro note by a tearful investment banker who just shorted the franc. The banker doesn’t know the lyrics, but he recognizes the transaction: a momentary reprieve from the algorithmic doom-scroll, priced at whatever you can afford. In that sense, Brandi Carlile isn’t just an American singer; she’s a floating black-market currency of hope, trading at a premium wherever the night is long and the rosé is gone.

The empire may be crumbling, but the encore is global. And, for once, nobody’s checking passports at the door.