Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Brandi Carlile: In the Canyon Haze – Live From Laurel Canyon’ on Max, An Intimate Mini-Concert Emanating From The Hollywood Hills

Brandi Carlile: In the Canyon Haze – Live from Laurel Canyon is the concert film version of the set the Grammy(s)-winning singer-songwriter and her band performed in September 2022 as a live stream to 200+ IMAX theaters across North America. Timed to accompany the release of In the Canyon Haze, the bonus album Carlile recorded with acoustic versions of the songs from In The Silent Days, her award-winning 2021 release, this Live from Laurel Canyon is exactly that, with the musicians perched in the Santa Monica Mountains on a scenic overlook; like the acoustic versions themselves, the mini-concert is meant to, as Carlile says, complement the “beautiful, strange, and trippy Americana music that was made here.” So let’s conjure some spirits.

Brandi Carlile: In the Canyon Haze – Live From Laurel Canyon: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: After a brief intro that finds Brandi Carlile tooling down Laurel Canyon Boulevard in a vintage Mustang convertible, she arrives at the concert site, where her band’s already set up in a cozy tree-filled corner overlooking a deep ravine. “We are live,” she says, “beautifully, terrifyingly live. Truly anything could happen, ‘cause that’s what rock ‘n’ roll is. It’s a risk.” And what happens first is a rendition of the Grammy-nominated single “Right on Time,” featuring her harmonies with longtime collaborators (and twins) Phil and Tim Hanseroth. It’s a warm, acoustic-led sound, fitting for the environment, and it sets up the Joni Mitchell-indebted “You and Me on the Rock,” for which Carlile brings out her wife Catherine to accompany her on vocals and guitar. “I wrote this song about you, and it’s been my dream to get you to sing it with me.” 

The version of “You and Me on the Rock” featuring Catherine Carlile was released as a single to promote In the Canyon Haze and this live set as it streamed out to theaters on the day the album was released, so it’s a draw. But it’s not the last we hear of Catherine, because throughout Live from Laurel Canyon she “calls” Brandi on an old-timey phone set on a nearby stool. It turns out she’s offstage monitoring the IMAX viewers’ question hotline, and there are periodic pauses in the action as she submits caller queries. It’s a tiny bit hokey and certainly played better when this concert was actually live. But Carlile invariably delivers gracious, thoughtful answers between the songs.

The remainder of the set follows the track listing of Canyon Haze exactly, from the rousing full band Americana rocker “Broken Horses” and a version of “Letter to the Past” arranged for three-part harmonies, to the heartening “When You’re Wrong” and “Sinners, Saints and Fools,” which both include the fine work of a string quartet, adding its cellos, violin, and viola to the guitars, drums, keys, and supporting vocalists of Carlile’s touring band. The lighted globes in the trees take effect as night falls over Laurel Canyon, and soon enough it’s time for the set closers. Electric guitars are broken out for a starry-eyed and crackling run through David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” and things stay electrified for the finale, a terrific version of Joni Mitchell’s 1970 classic “Woodstock.”

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The 2018 film Echo in the Canyon was a little muddled – it couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be a hangout film featuring Jakob Dylan shooting the shit with Tom Petty and David Crosby, or a concert film with Dylan and friends interpreting the iconic music that emerged from the region. It might best be considered as a companion piece to Allison Ellwood’s two-part documentary series Laurel Canyon, which offers more insight into the scene that Croz, Joni, James Taylor, and the Eagles made famous, and better embraces the golden smog aesthetic that Brandi Carlile explores with her In the Canyon Haze material.   

Performance Worth Watching: Brandi Carlile is a force, as thoughtful and eloquent a speaker as she is a wonderfully talented singer, songwriter, and performer. And it’s a part of her steady presence here that she continually highlights the work of her band, both her regular unit and the additional string players. “Stay Gentle,” with a new arrangement from violist Kyleen King, really shines with its dual cellos. 

Memorable Dialogue: Introducing “This Time Tomorrow,” Carlile says it’s actually the song from In These Silent Days where they most accessed the Laurel Canyon sound. “We did this CSN style on the album, and we were fighting the urge to be Laurel Canyon on a lot of that album, just the lushness and some of the sounds we wanted to do, but we also wanted to dive into glam rock ‘n’ roll as it intersects with Americana, so we did a different thing.” “Tomorrow,” therefore, required a different interpretation for In the Canyon Haze, and Carlile, having moved to the piano, says they went for the opposite. She sings a few impromptu bars of Queen’s lush “Love of My Life,” and leads in on the keys.

Sex and Skin: What? No way.

Our Take: Brandi Carlile’s adoration for the music and mystique of Laurel Canyon in the 1960s and ‘70s, with its chiming 12-string guitars, lush vocal harmonies, and organic and collaborative sensibilities, is well known. (In recent years, Carlile’s become a close musical interlocutor of Joni Mitchell; last spring, she emceed and performed at the legendary singer and songwriter’s Gershwin Prize ceremony.) But it’s a really classy bit of fan service to revisit one’s latest hit record and release an entirely new acoustic version of it that channels that whole scene, and In the Canyon Haze – Live from Laurel Canyon is reverential like that, too, for both the sound it inspired and the fans clamoring for more Brandi. Instead of a Spotify Sessions, or a Zoom concert, she took time out of the tour to mount an on-location boutique concert complete with even newer versions of the already revisited material from In These Silent Days. That is, as they say, a pro move.

There is a kind of pandemic hangover quality to Live from Laurel Canyon. With no live audience, only a phone-in IMAX audience, it occasionally wrestles with an isolated quality, like it’s happening in a weird vacuum. But that largely dissipates once Carlile and her band really start to cook, and the direction of Sam Wrench (Billie Eilish: Live at the O2) never stays static, employing a continuous live shot that drifts from wides into searching, Steadicam-style individual closeups so effortlessly, it’s easy to put aside the concert’s livestream trappings and become immersed in the performance. The whip pan to the night sky above Laurel Canyon during the quavering electric guitar riff at the outset of Bowie’s “Space Oddity” is a particularly nice touch.

Our Call: STREAM IT. For superfans who attended the original IMAX livestream, Brandi Carlile: In the Canyon Haze – Live from Laurel Canyon is a commemorative document. But it also stands alone as an intimate, physically present love letter to a source of inspiration for Carlile and the 60s/70s folk-rock zeitgeist.    

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges