Carlile has that kind of power now. After a methodical two-decade rise – she and her longtime collaborators, the twin brothers Phil and Tim Hanseroth, first played the Boston area at Club Passim, which just barely fits 110 people – the big-voiced songwriter is on the road for her first full-fledged arena tour. (She first played the Garden in 2022, which was one of her biggest shows to date at the time.)
Carlile opened not with a boom but her own acoustic guitar, on “Returning To Myself,” a reflective ballad about perhaps giving too much away to the public as an entertainer. It’s the title track of Carlile’s latest album, which provided about a third of the two-hour setlist on Thursday.
Soon enough, she was joined onstage by her jet-fueled, seven-piece band, which included the Hanseroth brothers on bass and guitar; sisters Chauntee and Monique Ross, collectively known as SistaStrings, on violin and cello; and new drummer Terence Clark, who brought the deft bombast we expect from a large-scale concert experience.
Carlile’s main calling card is her knack for writing epic ballads. Her two biggest, “The Story” and “The Joke,” were properly treated and received. But she also has an unmuted love of classic hard rock, and the band dug into that instinct at various points throughout the show.
Brandi Carlile performed at TD Garden Thursday night.Ben Stas for The Boston Globe/The Boston Globe
Introducing “Who Believes In Angels?,” she rambled about getting to make the 2025 album of the same name with her childhood hero, Elton John. Five members of her band stepped forward without their instruments to sing the song’s grand backing vocals.
Fellow Seattle-area natives the Head and the Heart opened the show with a tight set of their stomp-and-holler optimism. Co-frontman Jonathan Russell recalled playing “a rich person’s ranch” alongside another up-and-coming artist from the northwest – Carlile – when both acts were still finding their footing.
As “Returning To Myself” strongly suggests, Carlile has now built a world that obligates her. She’s outspoken about LGBTQ+ rights (“Brandi Made Me Gay,” read the most popular T-shirt at the merch table), and there are songs on the new album that directly address the American turmoil of recent years. “Church & State,” which showed up as the first song of her encore, was accompanied by black-and-white projections of protesters.
But her strength lies in personal storytelling. A brief interlude in the middle of the show involved Carlile and the Hanseroths taking two requests from fans. They played “Downpour” (2007), which she said she wrote for her parents’ 25th wedding anniversary, and “Wherever is Your Heart” (2015): “Wherever is your heart, I call home.” That bit featured dozens of adorable pictures of the three of them mugging for the snapshots in their younger years.
The set featured two prominent covers, a gorgeous rendition of Linda Ronstadt’s “Long Long Time” and, during the encore, an unsettling version of Alanis Morissette’s “Uninvited,” underpinned by a horror-movie piano plink.
But Carlile brought the evening full circle when she closed with “A Long Goodbye,” another understated track from her latest album. It’s about the fragility of life, and the things that truly matter, addressed to Carlile’s partner and their two kids.
After the lights went down, Carlile continued to sing in the dark, borrowing lines from Boston’s beloved James Taylor in her highest register: “The first of December was covered with snow / And so was the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston.” She may have felt the need to look inward of late, but she sure does know her audience.
BRANDI CARLILE
With The Head and The Heart. At TD Garden, Thursday
James Sullivan can be reached at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com.
Brandi Carlile performed at TD Garden Thursday night.Ben Stas for The Boston Globe/The Boston Globe
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