Willi Carlisle, William Matheny

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Emma Delevante

A close-up of Willi Carlisle.

Willi Carlisle

The folk tales of seekers of all sorts on Willi Carlisle’s 2022 album, Peculiar, Missouri, are poetic and funny and heartbreaking and hopeful in equal measure. (If you’ve lived in and left a small town — and have any feelings for it — prepare yourself for the title track.) Carlisle is back on record racks in November with The Universal Bubba, a double album produced by Tyler Childers and featuring his band, which should give Carlisle the chance to experiment with some new sounds to go along with his inimitable storytelling. With William Matheny.

media release: “It feels like getting drunk at the Civil War reenactment, or cruising at the cattle auction, or doing molly at the square dance.” -Willi Carlisle on The Universal Bubba

Folksinger Willi Carlisle will release his new double album The Universal Bubba on November 6th via Signature Sounds. Carlisle reaches new heights with the added accelerant of first time producer Tyler Childers. In an all-time DIY effort, Childers and his band convened to a makeshift home studio nestled in the Bywater District of New Orleans for two weeks to cut 17 tracks that expand Carlisle’s sonic scrapbook and capture the off-kilter characters living in his songs. 

“I think this one goes to outer space,” says Carlisle. “I think this is the widest range of influences that I’ve ever had. It touches on funk, it touches on Americana, Cajun, oldtime, and experimental music.” With Childers’ band behind him, Carlisle embraced the freedom to wander across genres both familiar and new, testing out instrumentation and toying with the surreality of traditions being turned on their head. “It feels like getting drunk at the Civil War reenactment, or cruising at the cattle auction, or doing molly at the square dance,” says Carlisle. “It’s the first time I’ve ever used synthesizers and double electric guitars. There’s also more fretless 19th century style banjo on it than any record I’ve ever made.”

Exploration aside, Carlisle’s mission as a folksinger largely remains the same - documenting the stories and struggles of the people and balancing the humor and hope of existence. “I want to make a universal folk music. Songs for all kinds of weirdos,” says Carlisle. “With the idea that there is nobody that doesn’t have folk songs and everyone deserves folk songs. I want to write songs that prove the old weird America didn’t go anywhere, that we are living and dying for it everyday. I believe there’s noble work to do in that context. That if we feel despair, we don’t need to because there’s so much good work to do.”

Filled with banjo and fiddle, album opener “The Mason Jar at the Center of the World” arrived well traveled - being written while on tour with Childers across six shows in Australia as the whispers of their collaboration were just beginning. Following a conversation with soon to be featured multi-instrumentalist Jesse Wells (affectionately called “The Professor”) about traditional musicians back home, completion of the track was aided by a snort of moonshine in an Australian motel room and an old poem from Wallace Stevens. “Smash three or four folk songs against a poem and add some hard traveling, you get a song,” says Carlisle. “Stuff’s intertextual like that.”

Serving as the last gasp before intermission and first howl into the homestretch of the record, Carlisle introduces “the universal bubba” in two parts: “The Universal Bubba, Part One” - “for the booty-shakin’ rock and rollers and their pals” and “The Universal Bubba, Part Two” - “for the small town hell raisers, the unofficial mayors.”

“The universal bubba is somebody who can fix anything,” says Carlisle. “Somebody who is good for just about anything. Everywhere I go I meet these giant people - and what I mean is these men and women and folks who can do it all themselves. Something that’s really struck me about traveling around the world is that everywhere you go there are people who are tirelessly working to make things a little bit better without succumbing to modernity’s pitfalls. They’re somebody who has enough, and if it wasn’t enough they would make it enough.”

A top candidate for encapsulating the energy of The Universal Bubba, “Gas Station” is a driving recollection of life on the road with a sing-along chorus. Other standouts include the rocking of “Hare-Krishnuts” on the absurd and smoky groover “Marlboro Vinyasa” (“Yoga breathing exercises and cigarettes,” says Carlisle. “What an American thing, to find the wheel of samsara in a pint glass!”), while “She Only Loves Horses” is a comical but forlorn Western about unrequited affection for a horse-obsessed woman.

Taking on a project of this size with Tyler Childers as debut producer requires hard work, camaraderie and supreme self confidence. Also the otherworldly talent of musicians like the aforementioned Wells, guitarist CJ Cain, bassist Craig Burletic and many other supporters and players. Undeterred by the challenge and grounded in his beliefs, Carlisle has proved that it really does “take a Universal Bubba doin’ it for themselves.” 

“You don’t need permission to make something beautiful,” says Carlisle. “You just need kindness, pals and elbow grease.”

Carlisle will tour North America extensively in support of the album, beginning in Minneapolis in September and running through mid-December.