Paint a Starry Night Again, Man

When I was in college, like all good Jewish girls who came of age in the early 90’s, I shoved Joni Mitchell’s live album, Miles of Aisles, on CD into the discman I had rigged into my bare bones Honda Civic. The car had no power steering and no power windows and it was a stick shift. It was powered by my two feet and a cigarette lighter I had to plug the discman into to make it spin. 

The album has a lot of favorites on it, but for me, “A Case of You,” was the one. If a CD had vinyl grooves, mine would have been dug clear through on that track. But elsewhere on the album, right before she sings “The Circle Game,” a song I learned first around the campfire in rural Pennsylvania, arms slung around girls I would never see again, Mitchell talks a lot about being an artist. And all these years later, I still think about it. She says the unique gift of being a musician is that she gets to play songs over and over again for a live audience. It is different, in this way, from being a painter or a writer.

Last night, thanks to good friends with whom we make extremely last minute plans as a characteristc of our love for each other, we went to see Brandi Carlile at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester. Nevermind that the acoustics in the place could break your heart wide open even if you were there for a third grade talent show. Nevermind that the air in the lobby smells like tequila and popcorn and promise. Nevermind that you enter knowing you have left behind your work life and your family life and the person you used to be. Just nevermind. Because the thing about this show is that Carlile could have been singing around a campfire, a thing she loves to do so much she lights up like the fire itself when she mentions it, and the acoustics wouldn’t matter a damn.

It was an electric holding of court, this show with almost zero actual electricity. At one point in the already stipped down, acoustic, one-woman (occasionally two-woman, but hang on) show, Brandi walked out in front of of her mic with what we call in this house a travel guitar. It was small. She says she wants to feel the feeling she used to feel when she performed in intimate spaces for small crowds a long time ago when she was a busking teenager trying to belt her way onto the Seattle scene. That’s a lot of what this tour seemed to be about for her. Connecting to something from earlier, before she was the most Grammy-nominted woman of the night. From before she wore sequined zoot suits and built a family out of her band, who are themselves, literal family. 

So she sang to us completely unplugged after she promised she’d holler for the people in the back, but that she just had to do this thing, sing to us in this way. She says holler and I want to move in to her log cabin and cook for her family, wash their sheets. Whatever, anything. You want to be around her is the thing.

She generously let us overhear a chat with her daughter, Evangeline, who was high up in a box for the show, and for whom she wrote a song called The Mother and also whose dance with oppositional defiance, Brandi told us, began when Evangeline was born to two mothers on Fathers’ Day. She lets you in over and over again to their most sacred spaces and never more than when her wife, Catherine, joins her on stage, a guitar slinging, crisp-voiced companion whose presence on “You and Me on the Rock” changed everything about the song I had only heard in rotation on The Spectrum. She would sew the buttons back on Brandi’s jacket, Catherine told her, when she arrived. The buttons on Brandi’s blazer were getting caught in the fray of her thrumming, rockabilly strumming so she had cut them off earlier right in front of us. That button simply would not get in the way of a talent and musicianship so alive you can see the scratch marks on her guitar that no pick guard could protect it from.

The night was still young and we hadn’t yet heard about the most “lesbianic” night of her life, being guests at Ellen and Portia’s surprise wedding vow renewal, singing for them, singing later on, around—her favorite—a campfire, with Melissa Etheridge as the sun went down. Singing, yes, Tracy Chapman’s “The Promise” for everyone then and singing it now again for us, with Catherine, in harmony, smack in the middle of a rock and roll show everyone in there will remember for a lifetime.

She famously says in her multi-register, mind blower of a song, “The Story,” that “these stories don’t mean anything when you’ve got no one to tell them to.” It’s true.

The night socked me in the stomach the way live music is meant to. And I was thinking the whole time about Joni Mitchell saying in her stoned, Cali girl drawl, before she sang “The Circle Game” on Miles of Aisles, “you know no one ever said to Van Gogh, paint a starry night again, man.” I was thinking about that when Brandi played a deep track she wrote early in her career that her band, who she calls the twins, told her was a little wordy. It didn’t matter to her, she recorded it anyway. She played it for us anyway. It became a track number 7, a slot reserved she said, for little indulgences like this one. You got the feeling she staged this whole wild show just so she could sing us this song. Such is being the kind of performer whose songs, any of them, all of them, you want to hear again and again while she smiles broadly at you from the stage.

And then, as if she knew, she started talking out loud about Joni Mitchell. Saying that she didn’t like her. That her lyric, from “All I Want,” I wanna shampoo you, made her want to shut the whole damn thing down. Like, she hated it.

She was at the beginning of telling us a story about her connection to Mitchell’s music but of course I didn’t know that yet. I should have known. I’m a writer. I build essays out of moments like this all the time. You plant an idea in the first act, my husband said on the way home, it’s gonna show up in the third. I should have known she would tell us soon after, that her wife would bring the album Blue to share as her favorite on their weeklong first date. Should have known that she would later on tell us that Mitchell’s prayerful poem of a song “Little Green,” about giving up a baby she couldn’t care for to adoptive parents, is the most punk rock song ever written. That Brandi came to all of this as part of her shedding of her own protective skin. That she was starting to understand all the different ways you could be a woman, all the different ways that you could love and be loved and write about love.

I should have known then, that in the encore, after blowing the roof off the theater with the lyrical and mind-bending vocal perfection of “The Joke,” that she would encore with a song, “Party of One,” I’d never heard before. That she would sit down at the piano and calm us all down. I should have known that she would, at the tail end of that song, slip into the first line of a song so important to me, the needle would have pushed clear through to the other side. Just before our love got lost you said, I am as constant as the Northern Star.

The air got thin for me, and I was in my Honda Civic, using my 19-year-old left arm to crank the window down so I could breathe. And I said constantly in the darkness, Where’s that at, if you want me I’ll be at the bar.

I could drink a Case of You and still I’d be on my feet, I would still be on my feet.

What is it like to be rooted in the present and transported elsewhere, to a different version of yourself, at once? To be told a story and to be part of the story? To be in the presence of Van Gogh as he paints Starry Night right before your eyes? It starts with the smell of popcorn and tequila and promise.

I have been to the movies, I’ve seen how it ends.

It ends, I think, with a 19-year-old girl, cutting new grooves into the vinyl black, streaming this live show with the windows down. And then it begins again.

Behind, from where we came.