When Brandi Carlile was 12 years old, living in a mobile home in an isolated community 50 miles outside Seattle, she begged her parents for a piano. She'd fallen in love with her mum's Elton John albums and wanted to play along. But when she broke her tiny Casio keyboard out of its Toys R Us box, she had to face an uncomfortable reality. "I was just nowhere near talented enough," she laughs. Instead, she put on Bruce Springsteen's Streets Of Philadelphia, dialled up the keyboard's "synth