-Photo by Craig Toney
@ctoney519
(The Universal Bubba, a 17-track album by Willi Carlisle, produced by Tyler Childers & featuring The Food Stamps, is out everywhere on November 6, 2026)
When I first saw Willi Carlisle in Charlotte, North Carolina in October 2021, I had just discovered “What the Rocks Don’t Know” from his 2018 record “To Tell You The Truth,” & it was love at first listen. I sprinted to catch a show, just spontaneously snagging tickets for a thing a mere days after hearing him for the first time. A special corner in my brain & a vast chasm in my heart opened to receive these gifts.
When I met Willi at the merch table at that first Evening Muse show, he still had the academic folklorist & scruffy poetry professor aura of someone perhaps still contemplating a career in the hallowed halls of a university, a quality that immediately attracted me to him. Just as his new record makes reference to the “old weird” of Harry Smith, Willi-of-five-years-ago gave me traveling song-hunter Alan Lomax-vibes. Maybe that was his secret backup plan if the singing of his raw confessions & shredding on every acoustic instrument & touring-in-a-van thing didn’t work out.
But a few years later it was clear to me that the ribbons of heartland highways he’d been traveling in his vanlife had carried him far far away from all that intellectual wage labor in the imploding neoliberal university. Yet a successful vocation as an indie-folk troubadour is no easier to achieve than the tenure track. But Willi Carlisle has done it. His latest full-length “The Universal Bubba,” a dense double-album of cosmic calibrations & revolutionary ramifications, is finally out for all to dig.
Willi’s work ethic these last few years has produced a remarkable catalog of compassionate earworms that celebrate the funky fringes of the working class in an age of tech-bruh apocalypse. Then Willi tours relentlessly behind all these & hangs out with his audience to build-up in the fans the kind of dedication & admiration that keep us coming back & back for more & more shows.
The anchor for this latest outing that everyone can finally hear is the main motif & two-part title track of “The Universal Bubba.” The chorus from part one really lays down the thesis:
Cause the roadside preacher saves the right souls
The barroom picker shake the right bones
The folks know enough’s as good as wealth
And most the things worth doin’ in the age of Babylon
Take a Universal Bubba workin’ for himself
Each stanza carries on in the spirits of the Wendell Berry & Walt Whitman expansive American poetic tradition that Willi calls on from the stage.
I could pluck more from any section of either song, but I really like this from part two (with a nod to John Prine):
Sayin’ open up your chest and whaddaya get?
A whole cosmos blowin’ up your tv set!
Down between your guts and what the old folks said:
A wholelotta good nobody thought of yet!
Just about every time I write about Willi, I mention the torch he has taken from Pete Seeger & Utah Phillips, because that deeply grounded obligation of lefty folksinger values is my lineage too. It’s too important to forget these tangled & rooted ties. This honorable but entirely scrappy lineage mitigates against unmitigated careerism with a mutual aid mindset.
But as Willi’s poetic songcraft stands out more-&-more as the absolute best there is, I feel he needs to be mentioned as more than the carrier of the American songbag, but as an author of the next great American songbook. Willi is an emerging generational voice of original songs with soul-slaying lyrics, with the impact & instigation of a Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen, a Jason Isbell or Tyler Childers. “The Universal Bubba” is the kind of masterpiece that requires an assessment of this stature.
That last name of course hails from rural Kentucky & has crossed-over to mainstream country success, selling out stadiums & arenas. It was on an Australian amphitheater tour that Willi Carlisle got to hang out with Tyler Childers, when Willi was the opening act. A friendship forged around a deep passion for their callings, then after some back-&-forth dreaming & scheming, they suddenly found themselves building a temporary studio in a modest shotgun house in New Orleans. With Tyler producing & the Food Stamps as the backing band, “The Universal Bubba” was born.
Even before hearing it, I knew this album was a dream fulfilled for my Willi Carlisle fandom, but somehow, it still exceeded expectations. The hippie-meets-redneck renegade hilarity of “Marlboro Vinyasa” is not only an addictive jam you can listen to on repeat, it captures the seeming contradictions that makes a project like “The Universal Bubba” so appealing. Yoga classes in a smoky dive bar? Sure thing.
The universal bubbas are regular folks with an irregular funky side, & these peccadillos include an oversized passion for unreasonable hope & outsider art in these strange & scary times. In interviews & from the stage, Willi has talked extensively about how we are all universal bubbas, as he namechecks the jobs & hobbies & passions of his fanbase. We teachers & teamsters, farmers & foragers, we all feel so seen when he does this.
A feature of a 17-song double-disc is that different tracks are really going to dial into your mind & drill into your spirit on each & every listen. For all the many traditional traditions that Willi gives a revival & rendering, I am wowed & wondrous by how backwoods gospel hymns find their way to the front. Said simply, a Willi concert has a pentecostal side, complete with an altar call, but not in a gross way.
All that to say, the standout hymn on this record is “The Master’s Hammer,” & it is such an unholy stunner, as its verses blend the implied racism of working class history & then take an apocalyptic approach to ecology & eschatology. Whoa doggy & holy crap & amen.
Right now I think “The Master’s Hammer” is the best damn folk song that’s ever been written, but of course I said that about “Your Heart’s A Big Tent” & “Vanlife” & “Critterland” & “Higher Lonesome” & “Work Is Work” (I could go on & on & on) when they came out.
I feel like I have barely scratched the surface & just started this review, & it is already a few paragraphs past TLDR. The thing is this, we are more than fortuitously fortunate to simply share air in these wild days with the likes of a Willi Carlisle. I am just so damn grateful he ditched the academic career & embraced the vanlife of endless touring of small venues. Those venues are often selling out these days, & I expect they may get bigger in the years to come.
That ascending arc of success just tickles every tent pole in my vibrating big tent, because Willi Carlisle is not an artist you want to hoard in your private collection. You want to gift his albums to every stranger you meet.
-Andrew Sunfrog
