Brandi Carlile: Gay Role Model with Great Pipes!

Singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile had quite a weekend.

Touring to support her third studio album, Give Up the Ghost, Carlile sold out Los Angeles' Wiltern Theater on Saturday night and the same day, finally came out of the closet in a wonderful interview with the Los Angeles Times.

"I hope that somewhere in Small Town, USA, a 15-year-old kid looks to me as a role model the way I looked at the Indigo Girls and Elton John as role models," Carlile says in the interview.

And really, the folk singer whose song "The Story" was featured on ABC's Grey's Anatomy as well as a GM commercial, really is to the new generation of baby dykes what the Indigo Girls were to previous generations.

Carlile, referring to why she hasn't spoken on the record sooner about her sexual orientation, added: "And I hope they also recognize that the reason why I don't have to have a lot of formality around it, the reason why I don't have to wear it on my sleeve and make a spectacle of it, is because there were people before me who paved the way so I wouldn't have to."

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While most in the community have known which team Carlile played for long ago, there's no better time to rejoice than now, as "Ghost" - which debuted on Oct. 6 - was a hit right off the bat and made it into the iTunes top 10 album downloads during its first-week.

And if you were among the sold-out crowd Saturday at the Wiltern, you caught quite a show. Greeting fans with an acoustic number and performing hits including "The Story," "Turpentine," and more off her last album and cracking jokes with the audience between numbers, the set featured a number of great songs off Ghost, including "Dreams," "I Will" and "That Year," which she said was her reaction to, at age 16, her friend's suicide.

As for what she wants next now that she's out? "I wanna go on Ellen," she quipped.

Hear that Ms. DeGeneres? Hope you can make that request happen.

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