A little more than eight months after Willi Carlisle released his critically acclaimed second full-length Peculiar, Missouri, the Arkansas singer-songwriter’s career just keeps gathering speed. During a brief quiet moment between sets at the Back Porch Festival in Northampton, Mass., the poetic storyteller reflects on the response to his record, laughing with bewilderment.
“It’s been absurd,” says Carlisle. “I’ve been surprised by it, because sometimes I run around with my middle fingers up as if they were six-shooters or something. It’s been really wonderful.”
Carlisle says there were “zero compromises” in making Peculiar, a collection of 12 tracks that runs the stylistic gamut from honky-tonk waltzes and fiddle tunes to country-rock and Mexican folk music. Carlisle also pulls absolutely no punches with the rawness of his narratives, whether they’re stories from his life or others he’s reflecting through his lens.
As a youngster in the Midwest, he performed in musicals and sang in the choir, and his ears were further opened when he discovered punk and folk music in college. He took a position teaching at the University of Arkansas, and began to explore the region’s deep creative roots and the way they organically relate to living.
“When I got to the Ozarks, I really wanted to sing ballads and play old-time music,” he explains. “Their hangouts were so wonderful and organic. For example, I was somebody that couldn’t cook at all, but I could go to the best potluck that the county was having, square dance and meet a bunch of new people.”
With a gentle twang in Carlisle’s voice, the unfussy but magnetic power in his language and his focus on marginalized people, it’s easy to compare Carlisle to icons like Woody Guthrie. But Carlisle has worked hard at finding his own way to tell stories that need to be told despite it being more convenient or comfortable to cast your eyes somewhere else. In “The Grand Design,” he holds himself accountable for saying a lot while doing little. In “Vanlife,” he observes all the things you lose when you don’t have a home — and how capitalism has made the circumstance appealing to people who have a choice in the matter. Carlisle is queer, and he sings profoundly about sexuality as well. In “Buffalo Bill,” he brilliantly transforms a segment of an e.e. cummings poem that admires the Old West figure’s handsome features.
“There’s a lot of different ways to call up those ghosts,” he says. “And I kept thinking about ideas for songs from forgotten people or from places unknown. By trying to set that [poem] to some polyrhythmic stuff that would’ve been done in the 19th century on the banjo, that’s me trying to make that ghost dance a little bit.”
In “Este Mundo,” Carlisle shares the story of a Texas farmer named Antonio Lopez, who lost his land to a water company. A poet documented Lopez’s reflection on industrialization, which was then translated and set to music by two cowboy songwriters decades later. Carlisle says he hopes to one day create a documentary film to give listeners a deeper understanding of the song’s origins.
“If I could get away with that,” he says, “I would visit the archive where they found the song with the two original songwriters and go through those photos.”
Making Peculiar, Missouri into everything Carlisle knew it could be required some creative risks. He credits the crew at Free Dirt Records for giving him the opportunity to dig in.
“I literally met those guys at a square-dance camp,” Carlisle recalls. “That connection was so organic that I knew I wanted to try to fire on all of those fronts. I knew I had a group of people that wouldn’t view putting a honky-tonk number next to a banjo number as somehow incongruous.”
With a trove of songs in hand, Carlisle headed to Grammy-winning musician and producer Joel Savoy’s remote Louisiana home studio. A stream of talented players from across the region dropped by to contribute to the songs.
“I left that session thinking that we had done our best work — I don’t believe I’ve ever felt that way … and I may never again,” says Carlisle with a slight laugh. “Joel was from a line of Cajun musicians, and the visitors that were coming to the house were kind of royalty to me.”
Although Peculiar, Missouri is a phenomenal, widely praised record that’s currently getting a second vinyl pressing, Carlisle has already been hard at work on a new album. And the road that he’s come to know so well continues on in front of him. Aside from getting to play the songs that have so quickly connected with listeners, Carlisle says he finds joy in seeing just how wide a reach Peculiar has.
“I knew that we had a fan base, but I think that working with American Aquarium, Lost Dog Street Band and Amigo the Devil last year has meant that the fan base is, like, really varied — between people in Charley Crockett shirts, folk-punk kids and folk-music-loving adults that might listen to WMOT or Mountain Stage all the time. It’s been a really gorgeous cross-section, and I think that’s been my favorite part of it all.”
