Brandi Carlile and KT Tunstall

Musical pretty much since birth, Brandi Carlilie grew up listening to the likes of Johnny Cash and was encouraged to perform regularly by her mother. Learning the guitar in her teenage years, Carlilie began to take her craft more seriously and even dropped out of high school to pursue her musical passions.

Moving to Seattle, Brandi Carlile was picked up by Columbia Records in 2004 after she was seen performing at a series of music clubs throughout the city. A year later, the singer released her eponymous debut album with the label. The record was well received and won Brandi Carlile a large fan base after the album peaked at number 80 on the US Billboard 200 chart and hit the number one spot on the US Folk charts.

It wasn’t long until Brandi Carlile followed up the success of this first album with her 2007 release, “The Story”. The album peaked at number 41 on the US Billboard 200 and sold over 300,000 copies. Multiple tracks from the album were used in commercials and on television shows such as “Grey’s Anatomy”. She was also named one of Rolling Stone’s “Top 10 Artists to Watch in 2005”.

These opportunities introduced Brandi Carlile to a wider, commercial audience and this in turn helped her next two albums, 2009’s “Give Up the Ghost” and 2012’s “Bear Creek”, hit the top 30 on the Billboard 200 and the top five on the US Folk chart. “Bear Creek” actually hit the number one spot on the US Folk chart.

Brandi Carlile has toured alongside Ray LaMontagne, Hanson, Indigo Girls and Tori Amos. In 2014, Brandi Carlile was invited to sing the National Anthem at the NFL Playoff game between the Saints and the Seattle Seahawks.

Strangely enough for a musician of her magnitude, KT Tunstall did not grow up in a musical household. Her parents' only tape was a Tom Lehrer album on tape, leading Tunstall to discover the world of music entirely on her own while she spent her late teens travelling the world. Once she hit her twenties she had learnt enough about performing to start playing in a number of indie bands, where she developed a particular interest in songwriting. By her mid-20's she had struck out on her own as a singer/songwriter and after a brief dalliance with an American major label, she signed with the British indie label Relentless Records. #

Wisely, she and the label decided to spend a few years working on her material and her live performances before she debuted, and in 2004, her debut album “Eye To The Telescope” was released. The album received warm reviews from the start, but it was in danger of slipping under the radar until Tunstall was tapped to be a last minute replacement performer on a Later... With Jools Holland episode after Nas (of all people) cancelled. The solo performance of “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree” that she played with only a guitar, a tambourine and a loop pedal utterly upstaged everyone else on the show, which included The Cure, Embrace and The Futureheads.

Relentless re-released the album soon after the episode aired, and the album rocketed into the charts at number three, the single also became one of the biggest radio hits of the year in the U.K, and on its release in the United States, became a top 20 hit on the Billboard Hot 100. She also had huge hits in the form of the singles “Other Side Of The World” and “Suddenly I See”, both of which actually bettered the chart performance of “Black Horse...”, charting at number 13 and number 12 respectively. That kind of success has stayed with Tunstall ever since, with her debut certified five times Platinum and three of her other studio albums certified Gold. More so than any sales certificate, however, she is an artist well on her way to national treasure status, and for that, KT Tunstall comes highly recommended.