Album Review: Brandi Carlile Shines Bright Through the ‘Canyon Haze’

By Dale Henry Geist

Americana’s first superstar, Brandi Carlile, just dropped a deluxe edition of her epoch-making 2021 album In These Silent Days that appends another eleven tracks and carries its own title, In the Canyon Haze. Since everything that’s to be said about Days has already been said, we’ll concern ourselves here with Haze.

It’s a strange beast: an acoustic reimagining of the original album, nominally filtered through the colitas-tinged lens of the legendary late-60s/early-70s Laurel Canyon folk-rock scene (Joni, Neil, CSN, Byrds; Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles following close behind). Amounting to what’s essentially an unplugged bonus disc, Haze is squarely aimed at existing Carlile fans.

Evaluating the album presents a bit of a dilemma. The songs aren’t new, so there’s little point in taking a microscope to songcraft. We could measure how close Carlile gets to sounding like iconic Laurel Canyon albums like Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon or CSNY’s Déjà Vu, (not that close, as it turns out), but that seems like a purely—painfully?—academic exercise.

In the end, despite Haze being intended for fans of Days, the fairest approach was simply to evaluate how it works as an album. If I were to play it for someone predisposed to acoustic music and new to Carlile (yep, those folks exist), how would it hit?

And…it works. Quite well, actually – with one exception. (More on that later.) 

These songs, written during lockdown, concern themselves with intimate relationships; nearly to a one, they’re addressed either to a partner or a child; the tenderness of the delivery sometimes makes it hard to say which. As such, they lend themselves superbly to these lush acoustic treatments. That even includes the soaring Eltonesque pop-rock ballad, “Right On Time”, wisely approached here with a modicum of restraint and a welcome country inflection.

There’s hardly an electric instrument in sight, save for the whine (they always whine, don’t they?) of a pedal steel and the soft thump of a (presumably) electric bass; there’s damn little in the way of percussion, either. But the production is richly textured, featuring layers of picked-and-strummed guitars, harmony vocals, and, frequently, beds of strings. Carlile produced Haze in tandem with her longtime bandmates, the Hanseroth twins, and we can assume that they account for most of the sounds. Catherine Carlile adds vocals on the single, “You and Me On the Rock,” and the strings are supplied, we assume, by Monique and Chauntee Ross (Sista Strings), who have been touring with Carlile.

Primarily through the contribution of Carlile’s wife Catherine, “You and Me On the Rock” manages to untether itself from the obvious “Big Yellow Taxi”-isms of the original, morphing into a charming testimony of mutual devotion. Though it’s more a case of different production choices rather than less production value, there is often a sense of being closer to the root of the songs throughout Haze. The tracks that work particularly well are the ones that originated as folky numbers on Days, “This Time Tomorrow,” “Mama Werewolf,” and “Throwing Good After Bad,” chief among them. Comparing the new versions to the originals mostly boils down to a slightly mellower vibe—a more relaxed delivery. Carlile is prone to cranking up the noise by the finish of even her most sedate ballad—a tendency, by the way, which I love—but she resists that inclination here.

And then there’s “Space Oddity.”

Carlile has an impeccable instinct for 70s heroes, famously including Elton John and Joni Mitchell, so it’s not much of a surprise that some of her vibe—notably including her look—on In These Silent Days nods to gender iconoclast David Bowie. “Space Oddity” has been a setlist staple throughout her summer tour. As a big Bowie fan, I heartily approve.

But this is a puzzling choice here; if you’re going to add a cover to a Laurel Canyon-inspired acoustic album, why choose something by Bowie, whose unstated mission was to take a platform shoe to the ass of the very sort of mellow, self-absorbed vibe purveyed by the Canyon’s denizens on their worst days? And why add a song that features a distorted electric guitar and thundering drums to an album whose charter is ‘unplugged’? And if you’re going to go ahead and do that, why approach it as a fairly straight-ahead cover, rather than completely reinterpreting it? For my money, “Oddity” could have been left off without reducing the many pleasures of Haze by one iota.

Save that one, er, oddity, In the Canyon Haze would could stand as a perfectly credible album in its own right. Though I now take this for granted, I shouldn’t fail to mention that Carlile is simply masterful as a writer, singer, player, and producer: whatever she releases will always be very good, indeed. Haze included.