Willi Carlisle Announces New Album Winged Victory, Shares “Work is Work” and Tour Dates
The album arrives June 27 via Signature Sound.
Photo by White Stone
On the title track of his acclaimed third album, Critterland (which landed at #39 on our year-end list in 2024) Willi Carlisle proclaimed, “I’m here for all the love that I can stand!” If that isn’t his artistic mission statement, I don’t know what is. The Kansas-born, Missouri-based singer-songwriter’s songbook is a hymnal of folk gospels so full of heart they nearly pop at the seams; weeping with wisdom and brimming with radical empathy, they’re like arms you could fall into at your weakest, your worst. They are fiercely, fervently life-affirming in a world increasingly undone by hate—songs that we need now more than ever.
Time to rejoice: Today, Willi Carlisle has announced Critterland’s follow-up, Winged Victory, forthcoming on June 27 via Signature Sound, along with North American and European tour dates in support of the release. The troubadour’s first self-produced effort compiles covers of traditional folk staples and original compositions, one among them the raucous lead single “Work is Work.” Over a wayward banjo run, Carlisle delivers an incisive critique of capitalism—“Cash and heaven are inbred friends” is a particularly deep-cutting line—but refuses to let the man get him down. As the landscape around him crumbles into disrepair, he erects a monument of hope to the downtrodden, extending encouragement and compassion: “Haul the ashes, fire the clay / Love grew 10 feet tall in the time you were away,” he sings in a warm, weathered lilt on the chorus. “Work is Work” is a paean to resilience and a prayer that we each may reap the fruits of our labor, however dispiriting it can be—as Carlisle assures, “Work is work, or it wouldn’t pay.” If that ain’t the truth.
“With ‘Work is Work,’ I wanted to write a bluegrass tune, and I wanted to try to make a direct address of my own [à la the album’s opening cover of ‘We Have Fed You All For 1000 Years’ written by an anonymous Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) worker],” Carlisle says. “I believe that after a certain point of creature comfort and stability, money doesn’t make you happier. So what are we doing with our precious time? I wrote it in a motel room along the Mississippi River. The room was full of bedbugs, and I’d just left New Orleans, a city that seems to be thriving even as it falls into the ocean. I finished the song in about an hour. I want people to know that they aren’t free from the terrible things that work does to people, from the awful transmutation of labor into money, but that the sacrifice isn’t meaningless.”
Check out “Work is Work,” the Winged Victory artwork and tracklist, and see Carlisle’s upcoming tour dates below.
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