Brandi Carlile Burns the Setlist: An All-Requests Tour Built on Total Recall

Brandi Carlile played 22 songs chosen entirely by her audience on November 7 at the Fox Oakland, the second night of her 19-date "Burn the Setlist!" tour — the first all-requests outing by a proven headliner in recent memory.

For roughly two hours and 40 minutes, Carlile and her bandmates Phil and Tim Hanseroth performed nothing but spontaneous audience picks, drawn from a recorded catalog of close to a hundred original songs plus a repertoire of proven live covers. The reviewer called it possibly a historic first for an artist of her stature.

How does an all-requests show actually work?

Carlile set the ground rules at the top of the night. "I can see your signs all the way back, and I will call on people all the way in the back," she told the 2,800-capacity crowd. "Everything is pretty much fair game — any song that we've ever done."

One limit applied: no songs never performed before. "So we're not gonna be able to 'Free Bird' or 'Sweet Home Alabama' this shit," she said. At 45, she added, "if there's a song I don't want to do, I will just say no."

She framed the format as an invitation, not a quiz. "Don't feel like this should be a 'stump the band'-type deal," she said. "I'm a deep cuts girl. I love track 7 on everyone's album. I'm a last track gal." And she left the hits open too: "If you want to hear the fucking 'Story,' just request 'The Story!'" Nobody in Oakland did.

What carried the show?

Preparation, not luck. Tim Hanseroth posted an Instagram video of himself strumming through the band's studio albums before the tour. Carlile said in a pre-tour livestream that a lyrics monitor would be on hand if needed — but at Oakland she barely glanced at it. She knew her gear cold, calling out capo positions and guitar choices ("Kalamazoo, capo 7") after every request, and timed the Hanseroths' four-minute instrumental absence in "I Belong With You" to within ten seconds.

Phones went into Yondr pouches — a first for Carlile's shows — for intimacy and to keep any flubs off YouTube. There were no blatant ones.

The picks swung wildly. "Raise Hell" opened with literal stomping; "The Mother" followed, prefaced by an extended story about her eldest daughter Evangeline and a mantra from her wife Catherine's pregnancies: "I have to tell myself I'm a mother so that I can believe I deserve to call myself that."

What were the standout moments?

Alanis Morissette's "Uninvited," performed as an acoustic trio for the first time without strings or piano, became what Carlile called a "pure guitar-and-bass rock 'n' roll scorcher," capped with "We don't need no stinking strings!" "Folsom Prison Blues," a cover unplayed for seven years, required the twins to relearn the licks in real time. Dolly Parton got "Jolene" ("She had a temper, she had a dirty mouth, and she had the biggest heart in the world"). Joni Mitchell's birthday earned an E-major "River," with Carlile recounting a two-and-a-half-hour Halloween phone call with Mitchell: "I got to listen to Joni Mitchell play solitaire and tell me her stories. She's not lying. I'm not even sure she's capable of it."

One mystery solved itself: "Heart's Content," requested in Portland and again in Oakland, turned out to feature in the film "Safe Haven." "A bunch of romcom fans up in here," Carlile laughed.

The closing stretch — "The Things I Regret," "Most of All," "That Year," "No One Knows Us," "That Wasn't Me" — lifted the show from travelogue to something heavier, ending with a rare cover of Led Zeppelin's "Going to California."

Each night, Carlile also livestreams one song from the makeup chair for fans at home before taking the stage. The reviewer ranked it among the best shows he has seen from anyone, out of untold thousands — and with only four of Oakland's 22 songs repeated in Tucson, every remaining date promises a different show.