Brandi Carlile just canceled her scheduled Stagecoach Music Festival performance due to a positive COVID-19 test. Carlile recorded and posted a video for her Instagram page Wednesday night expressing her sadness and frustration with the current situation.
“It finally happened. I have the COVID,” Carlile said in the video. “So I won’t be able to come to Stagecoach. It’s horrible.”
The singer did say, though, that she thinks her health is improving and is looking forward to getting through the illness unscathed.
“I’m a few days in and I have a chest infection but I think I turned a corner today and I’m starting to feel a little bit better,” Carlile said. “I just want to let everybody know that I’m devastated to miss you and I hope you have a wonderful time out there with all of my freaking friends. See you on the other side of this trash.”
Carlile was originally set to perform Friday night at the California-based festival. Stagecoach always follows mega-festival Coachella each year at the same desert venue east of Los Angeles. For the first time ever, Stagecoach will offer a live stream of the show for remote viewers hoping to avoid too much crowd interaction. Carlile’s performance was slated to appear on the stream alongside other popular country and folk acts like Midland, Breland, and Tanya Tucker.
Thomas Rhett, Carrie Underwood, and Luke Combs will headline the three-day festival on successive nights.
Brandi Carlile will miss Stagecoach because of COVID-19, but the virus won’t stop the festival
In February, both Coachella and Stagecoach announced that they would lift all COVID-19 restrictions ahead of the festivities. Music fans need neither a negative test nor vaccine cards in order to enter the venue. Both festivals canceled the two previous years’ festivals in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic.
The two festivals share the same promoter, Goldenvoice, but service very different audiences, so it’s no surprise that each event rolled out the news in different ways. Coachella announced the policy via their website without much fanfare; while Stagecoach proudly took to Twitter to assure all country fans that COVID-19 would not affect their experience in 2022.
“Festival Admission Update. As we prepare to spend an incredible weekend in the desert together we are announcing that there will be no vaccination, testing, or masking requirements at Stagecoach 2022, in accordance with local guidelines,” Stagecoach tweeted in February.
The Coachella update did share certain conditions and warnings, mostly applicable at the time to rapidly-changing California health regulations. The festival’s policy was apparently always subject to change according to “applicable public health conditions as of the date of the event.”
Per federal, state, or local government policies, the event could have made changes in the months leading up to Coachella; but opted to keep restrictions away.
