Brandi Carlile stands singing and strumming her acoustic guitar on the plaintive and triumphant title track of new album “Returning to Myself.” She could be alone on the tiny stage of Cambridge folk club Passim. Well, she could if her silhouette wasn’t being projected 30-feet tall on a curtain.
Two hours later, Brandi — yes, like Dolly or Willie or Madonna, she’s earned the mononym — would call back “Returning to Myself” and the intimate opening of her TD Garden concert: “Our job was to make a really big place feel small,” she told the sold-out crowd.
On her first full arena headlining tour, Brandi showed she’s been working toward this moment for two decades — she reminded the thrilled Garden that she’s been in love with Boston since she played Passim 20 years ago (and got married here a few years later). She demonstrated she has the charisma and catalog to hold an audience of this size in the palm of her hand with quiet ballads, epic rock songs, and a dozen moods in between.
A Pacific Northwest kid at heart, Brandi reveled in her rumbling, noisy roots on 2015’s “Mainstream Kid,” a driving jam somewhere between early ’90s Seattle and ’70s Nashville. She sprinkled a little pop sugar on that outlaw country twang on “Swing for the Fences” (arguably the top track on “Who Believes in Angels?”, from last year’s collaborative album with Elton John). She stretched further than ever before on new song “Church & State,” a rage-filled, electronica-touched indie rock thump.
Swinging to the other extreme, Brandi showed off her acoustic Americana side so many fans fell in love with when she and twins Phil and Tim Hanseroth started playing together 25 years ago. With a couple guitars, a bass, and those tremendous harmonies, the trio gave the rest of the eight-piece band a break to take a few fan requests. The stunner was “Wherever is Your Heart,” a boot-stomping barnburner that sent those vocals rising to the rafters with thousands singing along to a song many were hearing for the first time.
But the best songs of the night came from Brandi’s unique voice. A heartland rocker who loves Elton John ballads, a gentle folkie who indulges in thundering productions, an old-school country singer who can do Queen bombast, Brandi writes (often with the twins) and performs like no one else.
There is no substitute for the crackling energy when, with her climatic, endless and impossible vibrato, Brandi stretches out the line “It wasn’t right,” on “Right on Time” — or “The joke’s on them” in “The Joke,” or the title refrain from “Hold out Your Hand” — before the whole band crashed in behind her. Brandi’s unmistakable vocal delivery with a towering band, her strange and perfect songs done with all the drama they deserve, her infectious enthusiasm for performing, all combined to prove she belongs in this big place. Even if she can make it feel so small.
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