Born in Ravensdale, Washington, about 30 miles outside of Seattle, Brandi Carlile has expertly bridged pop-rock and Americana. In the mid-2000s, she emerged as a powerful voice with the driving, against-all-odds love song “The Story”. Her gritty but nimble pipes fuel her poignant, down-home songwriting on tunes like “The Eye”, where she howls to a troubled lover over sparse, fingerpicked guitar. The weepy strings and rolling piano of “Turpentine” are a heartbreaking backdrop for its tale about people growing apart, while “The Things I Regret” is a mighty, shuffling folk song with rousing energy. In 2018, Carlile put her finger on the pulse of America, emerging with a collection of outsider anthems, By the Way, I Forgive You. One of them was “The Joke”, a prescient song for the times about not giving in to bullies or pessimism and staying the course. Boosted by her flawless vocal performance and a heavenly string arrangement by the late Paul Buckmaster, the song earned her 2019 Grammy noms for Record and Song of the Year.