Joni Mitchell Joining Brandi Carlile For Summer 2023 Shows
Joni Mitchell will join Brandi Carlile onstage at a special concert weekend at The Gorge Amphitheatre, Washington State, in June 2023 for a pair of shows they’ve called Echoes Through the Canyon.
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Carlile revealed the news on an episode of The Daily Show. In the wake of this summer’s surprise Mitchell concert at the Newport Folk Festival, Carlile said that Joni told her, “I want to do another show. She said, ‘I want to play again.’”
The pair chose the 27,000-capacity Gorge, which Carlile noted is “one of the most beautiful venues in the world.” Brandi will play the first night, 9 June and Joni and the Joni Jam — line-up to be announced — will headline the second night (10 June).
“Joni Mitchell is going to play. No one’s been able to buy a ticket to see Joni Mitchell play in 20 years,” Carlile noted of the artist who hadn’t performed a full live set since 2000 before Newport and hadn’t appeared in public much since suffering a brain aneurysm in 2015. “So this is enormous… and she is going to crush it!”
“I still can’t believe that happened,” Carlile told The Daily Show host Trevor Noah of the performance in the summer. “It was just a few months ago and the fact that it was at Newport Folk Festival, which is such a monumental and historic place. She [Mitchell] always has a plan. She knows what she wants to do even if she doesn’t say it.”
“We thought it was a jam. We didn’t know that she was going to sing all the leads on those songs,” Carlile said of Mitchell’s performance. “She just started singing. We had rehearsed the songs ourselves. And we didn’t know whether we should stop or what we should do, you know, so we just sang with her.”
Carlile went on to describe how Mitchell just “completely took over” the gig and became the “performer that we all know that she is.”