Brandi Carlile at CMAC | August 20, 2026
There is a version of Brandi Carlile’s career that gets reduced to award tallies and critical superlatives. That version misses the point. What she has built over twenty-plus years is something rarer in contemporary music: a live performer whose audiences expand not through algorithmic push but through people telling other people, urgently, that the show did something to them. She brings The Human Tour to CMAC in Canandaigua on Thursday, August 20, with doors at 5:30 PM and showtime at 7:00.
About Brandi Carlile
The tour draws its name from the world Carlile has been inhabiting on record. Returning to Myself — her eighth studio album, released in 2025 and her first solo effort since 2021’s In These Silent Days — debuted at #7 on the Billboard 200, a significant number for an artist who built her following in rooms rather than on radio. Produced by Aaron Dessner, Andrew Watt, and Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, the record moves through themes of aging, mortality, and self-reckoning. Variety called it “frequently moving, occasionally spellbinding.” Rolling Stone UK placed her “at her most philosophically engaged.” Multiple outlets named it among their Albums of the Year for 2025. Whether the live show amplifies or complicates that record is what the Canandaigua date is for.
Carlile is a Grammy-winning artist, and it shows in how she constructs a concert. The emotional architecture of her sets is deliberate — not a greatest-hits delivery but something more like a performance that asks its audience to stay present with it.
Special Guest: I’m With Her
Canandaigua is one of a select handful of Human Tour dates where Carlile is joined by I’m With Her — the folk-Americana trio of Sara Watkins, Sarah Jarosz, and Aoife O’Donovan. The group arrived at the 2026 Grammy Awards carrying real momentum and left with two: Best Folk Album for Wild and Clear and Blue and Best American Roots Song for “Ancient Light.” They also released a live album, Sing Me Alive, in April 2026. As an opening act at this point in their trajectory, they are not warming up the crowd — they are setting a standard for it.
A secondary note worth knowing: $2 from every Human Tour ticket goes directly to The Looking Out Foundation, Carlile’s philanthropy platform dedicated to LGBTQ+ and social justice causes. You are paying for the music. You are also paying for something else.
About CMAC
The Constellation Brands–Marvin Sands Performing Arts Center sits on the grounds of Finger Lakes Community College in Canandaigua with a layout that rewards arriving at doors: 5,000 covered pavilion seats in front and 10,000 hillside lawn spaces behind them. Opened in 1983 and renovated in 2005, it functions as the summer home of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra — an institutional relationship that says something about the venue’s acoustics and its ambitions. For an artist whose primary instrument is her voice, CMAC is a good room to be in at dusk.
Tickets
Brandi Carlile at CMAC is on sale now. Buy tickets here.