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10 months ago, Western AF unveiled a video of Willi Carlisle singing “All of the Redheaded Stranger” in a barn full of skulls at the Prairie Monarch Buffalo Ranch in Laramie, Wyoming. It’s a clip that’s just three minutes long, but it does something to me that I still can’t quite properly articulate, not even nearly a year later. When he sings “She’s six beers deep in the throes of that poetry, making me a vow she can’t keep,” his voice quivers and his eyes well up. Carlisle—this cowboy in a fringe leather jacket—is far away from all of us at this moment, unafraid to be deep in his own soul on camera, singing about a love grown unhappy in the heart of a woman with a sharp tongue. I write a lot of profiles on musicians, because I’ve come across a lot of music I just adore from the ground up. But Willi Carlisle is unlike any musician I’ve come across in my lifetime as a journalist.
Carlisle was introduced to American folk music through his family. They kept Tony Rice and cowboy revivalist records and R. Crumb & His Cheap Suit Serenaders LPs in the house, and Carlisle’s dad was a musician who played in a polka band (lederhosen and all in Kansas when he was a teenager. “He would occasionally sit with folk singers, and he also played the classical trumpet,” Carlisle explains. “My dad was a really well-rounded musician but, by the time I was a kid, he didn’t play anymore—because he had moved on to other enthusiasms.” Those new directions included becoming a cook and then, when he decided he wanted to be the best cook around, he went and studied to become a chef. But when Carlisle was growing up, all he ever wanted to be was a working artist. His family would host parties when he was little, exposing him to the lifestyles of aging hippies in the quiet, Midwestern suburban world.
He was always drawn to, as he calls them, “the rumors.” There were these local, folklorish whispers about smoking pot and playing banjo, and that was something Carlisle wanted to chase down. At the same time, he was also getting really in-tune with poetry. “It was this emotional life that I had never really gotten to live in a reasonably, socially conservative environment in Kansas that I grew up in,” Carlisle says. “It was this big, deep pool of emotional life I didn’t have much access to, so I turned to poetry really hard. And the moment I started really reading it, I started to really like people like Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg and John Steinbeck—really what we think of, now, as ‘classic’ American authors.”
When Carlisle was 18, his favorite writer was Herman Melville and, in the middle of that, he discovered that he could pull so much folk music off of LimeWire and Napster. It was still a time when the Internet was young enough that collectors were still uploading old 78 RPM records onto their blog. Between him starting a huge 78s collection and stealing his grandmother’s Pete Seeger songbook, Carlisle’s life revolved around folk music. He was particularly influenced by pickers like Lead Belly, Blind Willie McTell—big voices and fast talkers. “I liked Woody Guthrie, but I liked the ‘talkie’ stuff better, and that got me into Slim Whitman and early country music and ragtime,” Carlisle notes. He takes a pause and lets out a sigh, acknowledging that he doesn’t want to exaggerate anything too much. “I’ve wanted to do this for as long as I can remember,” he continues. “I remember, back when I didn’t know what a folk singer was, I was like, ‘I just want to be a singing poet.’ When I was really into drugs, it was like, ‘I want to be a shaman that sings.’”
13 years ago, Carlisle moved from Kansas to Fayetteville, Arkansas, and he’s adamant that it was the best and hardest thing he’s ever done. To grow up on bluegrass and then relocate to a place like the South—especially a place so ingrained in Ozark hill songs and a troubadour landscape—is not an easy change to make, and Carlisle recognizes that. “I’m still recovering,” he says, “because, to understand the tradition as if it was something to be read, is one thing. But, the amount [of tradition] where I lived previously, where I was able to engage with it, was significant. I could sit down with excellent, old players—and I knew a good number of hippy revivalists that played on the coffee shop circuit. But, when I got to Arkansas, it was this explosion of people that either learn from their grandparents or learn from people who learned from their grandparents, and so on. It became really available and, instead of having it be something I was seeking out, it became the fabric of my life.”
There would be old-time jams every week at a coffee shop and a square dance every weekend. If Carlisle wasn’t playing music at home or with his friends, he was still playing music six or seven hours a week. It’s an education you can’t pay for; it’s bigger than money. “Discussing the differences between a Southwestern Missouri fiddle player’s version of ‘Leather Britches’ versus a Central Arkansas player’s version of ‘Leather Britches’ played at roughly the same time in the ‘60s, people don’t throw money at hearing that amateur musicology lecture,” Carlisle muses. “But it still deepened our understanding of the craft. And I do think of folk-singing as a craft. It was invented by the peace-seekers of the world who were able to take older leftist—or, maybe, even organized singing traditions—popular singing traditions and mix them into this performance style that we think of as folk music today.”
Carlisle learned how to play guitar first and then banjo shortly after. The fiddle came third, and then accordion and squeeze boxes. The harmonica was always in his life, too. Carlisle is pretty transparent about where he’s at right now with his musicality: “I’m kind of a better player than I ever meant to be,” he admits. But what he’s saying is that, he’d always meant to be a primitive player, because the work he was interested in was simple. “Almost anybody can play guitar fairly similar to Lead Belly, with a little practice,” he adds. “But you can’t be Lead Belly. Nobody can. People have tried and failed. Led Zeppelin couldn’t do it with six people on stage that are plugged in. What I mean to say is, I got this idea from folk singers that you can play an instrument simply and, if you can try to figure out how to do that well, then you might be in business. But there’s a lot more complexity in being simple than you might think.”
I first discovered Carlisle’s music like many folks probably did, through the black-and-white Western AF video of him performing “Cheap Cocaine” on the night-soaked streets of New Orleans way back before COVID hit in 2020. And then, after chewing on that song for a while, I got hooked on “Angels” and “What the Rocks Don’t Know” and “Boy Howdy, Hot Dog.” At the time, he’d only had one album under his belt—To Tell You the Truth—but that “Cheap Cocaine” video (which currently sits at 1.6 million views on YouTube) opened up a brand new avenue of momentum for Carlisle, though he had some initial hesitations about being on camera.
“The music industry is not a meritocracy, but it is really nice when something comes in and breaks down barriers of entry,” he says. “I’d been touring pretty hard by the time I ran into Mike [Vanata] in a bar that I was playing at. I didn’t know what day it was, I was so tired from being on tour. I was heaving my way across the country for a couple of gigs that didn’t even pay very well but I’d agreed to do. I was already pretty much living in the car and doing the whole thing. It was with a great degree of skepticism that I let anybody record me at all, but it turned into one of the best things I ever did.”
Carlisle wrote “Cheap Cocaine” when he was 20 years old. The song was one of his “conversion moments,” as it’s about him being a drug addict and being in a punk band and not wanting to be a part of either anymore. “I had always really liked folk music, and it was what I did at home, for joy, in private and on the porch and at a party when somebody passed me an instrument,” Carlisle says. “It’s nice that my conversion moment got caught on camera, it was the song I probably wouldn’t have played unless Mike had told me to—just because everybody thinks their most recent material is what is the best, and I think it should be that way. But Mike told me to sing it.”
In turn, 2023 has been a dream year for Carlisle—and “Cheap Cocaine” is partially to blame. In the age of shortened attention spans for digital material, it’s rare to get an opportunity to have views online turn into bodies at in-person concerts. Right now, country, folk and roots music doesn’t have the touring problems that other genres are facing. “We can still sell a bunch of tickets in Omaha and get people to spend hard-earned money on a live show,” Carlisle explains. But that truth doesn’t come without its hitches. When he was on tour with Sierra Ferrell, someone came up to him and said “Man, I love that cover of that cocaine song,” and it was a moment where Carlisle realized he’d written a somewhat popular song. “Sometimes, people haven’t listened to the rest of your catalog,” he continues. “On the other hand, sometimes there were over 100 people in a town I’d never been to in a state I’d never played in. And then you get to spend all night proving to them and, sometimes, even have them all know all the words to every song. So, what I mean to say is, it’s a complicated blessing and it gives me compassion for songwriters today that blowup based on one or two videos.”
Between “Cheap Cocaine” and now, Carlisle has remained busy. He’s written three plays—a one-man show about a folk singer’s last concert that included masks and puppets, a cross-dressing, horror play for him and another actor and, then, a one-woman show for somebody else—and put out the record Peculiar, Missouri in 2022. When it came to making that album, he launched a record label out of a Kickstarter campaign—a mutual aid financing adventure that allowed him to put an infrastructure in place to keep touring and pressing vinyls. Carlisle refers to it as a “giving prizes to people who are supporting my weird, probably foolish, career choice.” But opening the door to other people and having strangers and friends lend a helping hand in getting a project across the finish line has made Carlisle braver and has given him the assurance that his art means something to others.
“You don’t ever have any idea of who’s going to stumble across your work on the wide series of tubes,” he explains. “I think it’s almost entirely a good thing because, well, hell, I’m not Starbucks. I’m a hot dog stand. And I used to run my hot dog stand out of my truck. Now, I run my hot dog stand out of my truck, but I’ve got two employees that help me run it and I also live in a small house. That’s the only difference. I’m still running a fucking hot dog stand, and it better be the best hot dog and I also better know my customers and love them properly. I think it provides a meaningful alternative to an Oscar Mayer wiener. I really want my music to do that, and I think it’s encouraging to find that people will pay for that.”
Now, Carlisle is gearing up to release his third album (and his best LP yet), Critterland. It was recorded in February 2023, and many of his favorite tracks were written in the November, December and January prior. It was a more intense and condensed period of creating, but it gave him a body of work he’s beyond proud of. Carlisle is quite a prolific writer, scrawling in his journal every day—even if it’s only a few sentences. And he sings every day, too, even if it’s just a snippet of a song. A lot of Carlisle’s music stems from aggregation, as he continues building his own treasure trove of language that he can return to and pull fragments out of ad infinitum. “What I end up doing is trying to find my best little ideas and expand on them, or following long-held desires,” he says. “I have a goal to write a long song just about butts. It sounds really stupid, but I’d really like to write a really funny song that’s, fundamentally, trying to say ‘Everybody shake your butt.’ That’s really stupid but, even an idea like that, I’ve been cooking on it for about a year. And I get a line every now and again that’s just dumb enough to make it into a song that may never see the light of day.”
With Critterland, the task at hand was a matter of Carlisle trying to answer the question of what he wanted to create ideologically. It wasn’t so much a matter of everyday thoughts being transposed into music, but an elaborate attempt to make a cohesive project. The result is a vibrant, heartbreaking and necessary collection of 10 songs about drug use, lovesick futures and the unavoidable, often-devastating convergence of both worlds. A song like “Dry County Dust” is centered around the POV of someone who retreats to their home to get clean, while “When the Pills Wear Off” is, plainly, about losing a friend to overdose. “Thank God forgiveness comes in so many shapes,” Carlisle sings on the former. “I been travelin’ in anger, tryna ditch the shakes. If you go blind in Texarkana, can you still wake up in grace?”; “I lost friends to heroin, plenty more to lovin’ them,” he croons on the latter. “Strung out on the highway like we couldn’t read the signs.”
“I want a record to be like a book,” Carlisle says. “Not just a smattering of different drawings on pages but, rather, something with chapters, a beginning, middle and end. I had a bad year, I went through a bad breakup. I tried to move out to an intentional community [in Stone County, Arkansas] and really failed to do it—and it was partially because I couldn’t do a lot of the tasks involved. They really needed skilled labor to maintain a lot of the buildings. I worked a lot of construction, but I didn’t have the requisite skills and couldn’t teach myself fast enough. I wanted to die for a part of the year before making Critterland, and I had all of these songs about wanting to die. I also, over the course of my life, have lost some friends to hard drugs and I realized that, maybe, I needed to write some songs to end that chapter—or to better conceptualize what that chapter meant and how to move on.”
You can trace Carlisle’s relationship to drugs all the way back to “Cheap Cocaine,” which came from him only beginning to understand his own relationship with substance abuse, friendship and love. What it’s turned into now is the realization that, while Carlisle is not an addict and never really has been, he tends to befriend people who are and he tends to treat them with ample amounts of love—and, while everyone around him isn’t always going to make it, he, himself, has the power to continue living. “That’s a little tragedy in and of itself,” Carlisle continues, “so I wanted to make a record that was dealing with that stuff and really, actually, dealing with a decision that I made that I wanted to live.”
Something I’ve always appreciated about Carlisle’s work is how it examines the grim, relentless world we live in with a very kind and honest eye. There’s a lot of beauty juxtaposed with darkness and grief. On a song like “Two-Headed Lamb,” he sings about the titular God-made fuck-up—lamenting a life too strange to survive—while also reveling in the beauty of persimmons and singing robins; on “I Want No Children,” Carlisle ruminates on whether the measure of a man is made of love, and what it means to pass down a bloodline. Language is a gift, and he has crafted his own on Critterland, an album that is as forgiving as it is painful. “Somebody told me a long time ago that, without aggression, there’s no passion. Without mourning, there’s no celebration,” Carlisle says. “At the heart of celebration is also something pretty sad. And, at the heart of sadness is something pretty fundamentally joyous. I believe that the human spirit is flat and that everybody reaches the same highs and lows and that, if they haven’t yet, it’s coming for ‘em.”
“I believe that, if you’re trying to write honestly about the mortal coil, you better be diverse,” he continues. “My favorite songwriters have always done it. The way John Prine could make you belly-laugh and then break your heart and not change keys, the best writing, to me, is able to capture a wide spectrum of what it means to be alive. And to be able to do that in two, three, four minutes, that has always been something I have wanted to do far more than just scoot boots. I sometimes wish that I was writing—maybe—things that were more catchy, maybe even more danceable. I come from a dance tradition—it’s not even country dancing, it’s square dancing—and that might be my only regret about it, that I’m trying to write things so tightly and so densely packed and intense that it has a different value set than something that’s a little more booty-shaking. But, also, I don’t think I’d change it.”
As Critterland is set to arrive next Friday, I remain adamant that its title track might very well be the best country song of the decade thus far. On “Critterland,” the world brims with possibility through Carlisle’s banjo and harmonica. It decays and begins again. “‘Cause why have a god if no one is saved? I think love is a burden if it isn’t brave. I’ll live and die forever there, right in that divide,” Carlisle sings. When I covered the song for our semi-regular and not-so-aptly-named Daily Dose column months ago, I wrote about the push-and-pull of being a leftist, closeted queer kid in a small town populated by Appalachian transplants and displaced, blue-collar folk who exile their own if they don’t fall in line. I wrote about how “Critterland” is for the voiceless folks just itching for their moment to push back. Carlisle has been pushing back for years, too. On Peculiar, Missouri, songs like “Life on the Fence” and “I Won’t Be Afraid” interrogated the spectrum of doubts and desires that queer people have to live with.
What Carlisle sings about—this deep consideration of what life he might be allowed to live in a place where the animals are kinder to their kin than the folks and strangers he and his lover call neighbors—struck a chord deep within me, and I wrote about why it feels like the necessary queer country anthem we (or, at the very least, people like me) deserve. Someone on Twitter caught that sentiment and replied, “But why does it have to be queer or any label at all, honestly? This evokes feelings of me and my wife before she passed so much. Why can’t love just be love for fuck’s sake. Just love each other, fuck me, it’s not that hard.” I’ve heard it before; it’s a pretty normal defense taken by straight folks. It’s a direct example of why Carlisle is singing about what he’s singing about; to make people change their perceptions and accept that love is too complicated and diverse to endure as a general catch-all term, you have to fight tooth-and-nail to make it so.
“When I was trying to move out into this intentional community—and the time I’ve been in Arkansas—is a lot closer to reality than I think I’d ever been,” Carlisle says. “And by reality, I mean things like growing and cooking your own food, digging your own ditch, cleaning up after your own. And what I found there was that my great deficit was, in some ways, just not [being] trusting enough in that kind of world. I think we get a little obsessed with our little corners of the world, and it was those places that always brought me back to myself. And I wanted to write a song that was in praise of those possibilities and, also, a song that would say ‘This is where I make my stand.’ It’s not a place that’s rooted in ideology, even though there’s ideological conflict out here. ‘They might think I’m a queer or a communist, but I’m gonna go along to get along because it feels so right.’ It takes bravery to love and to defend something, and I also think that people should be allowed to redeem themselves and to change and to become the person that their most fundamental energies want them to be.
“I believe that we are all born into the world with a deeply-ingrained purpose,” Carlisle continues. “I think that there’s energetic experiences worth chasing, and I think that there’s a lot of energy hidden right outside the door that we end up missing in modernity. Ways of life that are more in touch with the way things were 100 years ago have a lot of lessons for a generation that was raised by SpongeBob Squarepants and Nintendo 64—and those are lessons in self-reliance and tenacity that I think we could use for the benefit of everyone in a world that is on the brink of, like, total ecological disaster and war. There are well-maintained traditions and ways of thinking and being and interacting with each other that can guide us to peace, equity and return to our materiality to end our alienation.”
Peculiar, Missouri found Carlisle doing a lot of genre-switching and a lot of intentional embraces of different folk traditions and stylings. At its core, it’s a 12-song pastiche of what was possible for Carlisle at that point in his career—where he was outlining a bunch of possibilities that were attractive, interesting and joyous for him. He had a lot to prove then, in his Vaudevillian and theatrical and talkie musings draped in the architecture of romantic poetry. But, now, Carlisle is just trying to show us where he’s currently at and how much he wants to live to see what comes next. The Darrell Scott-produced Critterland lingers in a definite place, one that is a lot sadder and rife with melancholia—but it’s a necessary burden of grief, and listening to it will make you a better person. It’s the kind of record that documents a life you might not know, but one you sure as hell still remember. As Carlisle puts it, Critterland is “a bit more ‘writerly’ with a capital W.’” It’s a Sunday morning crier record, not a Saturday night banger record. “I just entered that phase of my life where I am more of a Sunday morning crier than a Saturday night banger,” he concludes. “I know that will change, and I can’t wait until it changes again.”
Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.