Brandi Carlile was rousing and emotional – her apparent nerves never showed ...Middle East

“I’ve wanted to stand on this stage since I was 12 years old,” says Brandi Carlile, now 44, addressing London’s Royal Albert Hall.

You’d think the 11-time Grammy Award-winning artist would be used to playing impressive venues filled with adoring fans, but the American singer seems genuinely over-awed to be here.

Though that might also have something to do with who’s sitting in a box at the back of the hall, as Carlile does not hesitate to tell us that Elton John, her collaborator on this year’s Who Believes in Angels? album, is in the audience. “I have to play the Royal Albert Hall for the first time in front of my hero,” she says, explaining her nerves.

Gladly, her nerves are not in the least bit audible as Carlile leads her six-piece band – featuring guitarist/bassist twins Phil and Tim Hanseroth, the SistaStrings duo Chauntee and Monique Ross on violin and cello, alongside drums and piano – through a rousing set of songs from across her 20-year career, criss-crossing country, rock, folk and pop.

Carlile’s forte is in her emotional and sonic range, and live, these troughs and peaks are triumphant. “You and Me on the Rock”, a spirited love song, is an early highlight, before she takes it way back to “The Story”, from her 2007 album of the same name.

Her lyrics tend to fall back on soppy cliché (“Because even when I was flat broke/You made me feel like a million bucks,” she sings here), but she gets away with it by keeping things musically interesting, crunching the previously pared-back song up into an urgent rock number.

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Another high point comes later, as she elides two songs about her daughters – “You Without Me” and “The Mother” – into one heartfelt reckoning of parenthood, introduced with an anecdote about the family eating Thai green curry with Elton John the previous evening, of course.

In recent years, Carlile has been credited for her role in bringing Joni Mitchell back to the stage, leading “Joni Jam” performances in the US.

Tonight she honours Mitchell with a soulful rendition of the 1971 classic “A Case of You”, showing off her natural storytelling abilities as she sings it as much with her hands and face as her affecting voice.

Carlile is rightly celebrated as an activist, admired for being one of very few out queer people in country music and for her work campaigning for humanitarian issues.

But, bar a smattering of fist pumps from the crowd every time her lyrics refer to continuing “the fight”, tonight is not a political show. When you have a repertoire this engrossing, you can let the music speak for itself.

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