Photos by Sebastian Timm (@Sebastian.Timm.144) from a recent show in Arnhem, Netherlands.
I am drunk on the brand-new Willi Carlisle album, just like I was so hooked on the last one that was released 17 months ago.
With each Willi release, it gets clearer & clearer to me that he is the consummate folk singer, who understands the river in which he stands & swims & sings, maybe with just a little more depth & integrity & understanding than everyone who claims the contemporary “folk” label. As much as anything he has released, the brand-new Winged Victory is such a statement of the folk ethos & communal values, as it is an expression of Willi’s gorgeous gifts & exalted exuberance.
Let me explain via much context & many examples. Let me share a little about this long lineage of the folk-song community for whom Willi is not just one of its stellar artists, but one of its finest ambassadors & dearest siblings & collaborators.
When I was young, I absolutely adored the song “Draft Dodger Rag” by Pete Seeger, an antiwar anthem & formative peacenik singalong experience, direct out of my parents’ record collection. It was years before I figured out that it was actually a Phil Ochs song.
Long before the phenomenal folksinger Ondara migrated from Africa to Minneapolis, his teenage self lost a bet with a friend about who actually wrote “Knockin’ On Heaven's Door.” Ondara went from dying on the hill that it was a Guns & Roses original to becoming a Dylanologist who had to move to Minnesota.
When great songs become part of the American songbook or the global songbook, when they become part of your body-bone existential & essential reality, they become folk songs. Folk songs are for the folk, inherently communal & the sung currency of a gift economy traded around the campfire. When an artist chooses to cover a folk song, not just in concert, but on an album, they are conveying something of this shared depth & its dynamic spark to spread its glory like weeds on the side of every American backroad.
Back in the days of the folking folks like Carl Sandburg, Alan Lomax, & Harry Smith, we were all also song catchers & song collectors, whether we were singers or fans or scribblers in folk music newsletters that preceded the genre of the fanzine.
Back then, there was effort in digging & discovering before the back porch of the effervescent sharing, it was not always there at a simple click or keyword search. Now we talk about lost & not-always-attributed oldies as part of the “public domain,” but in some sense for true folkies, everything is the public domain. Everything was public domain, right up until the end of the last century, like this dirty dusty old Hootenanny songbook that was produced & passed around between squats & train-hops & Earth First gatherings in the glorious folk punk plagiarism of the 1990s.
Don’t get me wrong, I think songwriters & singers should be paid & deserve to eat. If there are royalties to be paid, then do so. I also see this folkie thing as a sharing different than downloading & file-sharing & even ripping things to cassette & CD, as we have always stolen & shared recorded music to some extent. But when a folksinger learns a song from another folksinger & then shares it with yet another folksinger & then that folksinger passes it on to yet more folksingers & fans, when some transcribes lyrics & notes & chords along the way, the energy grows in this wanton contagious & chaotic fashion.
But knowing all this, I have to confess when I first started to unpack the advance-listen & press-pack for Winged Victory, I had a gut impulse, “Wow, that is a lot of cover songs.” To be fair, it’s only 4 songs from the 11 tracks. But then, I reflected & felt a strong “no, we don’t even need to call them covers.” They are folk songs in the communal songbook. I am excited for this album as a true folk album, not just as a new Willi album.
So stupefied we are by the cult of originality we want everything to be as singularly raw & real as Springsteen’s Nebraska (or whatever important album comes to mind) with only original songs & now we want the unedited, deluxe, bootleg, uncut edition with something like 30 or 70 songs & original samples of the napkin & notebook scrawls & the artist’s sweat bottled in the extra-deluxe edition. Like how the Sylvie character scoffs at Bob Dylan & his first major label disc, when she says to the Timothy-Chalamet-version-of-Dylan in the new biopic: “Those are other people’s songs.” Of course Dylan would write amazing songs directly to the canon, but maybe he was a folksinger first, learning Woody Guthrie songs. See, the folk song community shares songs, it doesn’t own them, per se.
This is all some deeper context as to why I love, love, love that Willi Carlisle is our Utah Phillips & Willi Carlisle is our Pete Seeger. Non-gender-binary god-goddess knows, this world needs a generational folksinger with this depth, with this intensity, integrity, & curiosity. We need artists with a sense of their communal & collective purpose & Winged Victory seems to belong to all of us in that sense.
Because Willi Carlisle is also a folk scholar & fan who wants to scrounge around the dusty bins at a mile-long yard-sale in some bleached-out backwater of rural America, just to find a B-side or deep cut that we have never heard. Then Willi will learn that song & teach it to friends & put it in the setlist, fuck-all if nobody knows it. Maybe by the next time Willi comes to town, everyone knows it, & we will be screaming for that song.
I first learned & loved the album-opener “We Have Fed You All For 1000 Years” from Utah Phillips, but as Willi explains in his extensive & excellent liner-notes, it was written by an anonymous Wobbly/IWW worker somewhere around 100 years ago. But Willi also learned it from Utah, when Carlisle was riding a bus to DC to visit the Smithsonian Folk archive. One of the other breathtaking covers contained here has been in Willi’s live show for a while, “Beeswing” by Richard Thompson. Both of these tracks pair nicely in terms of the record’s overall message with the first single “Work is Work.” It is a bluegrass anthem for the hourly laborers in the late-capitalist hellscape & I hope that it gets covered by others & put on their albums. My takeaway is that it also smacks down the reality that AI is not doing the shit jobs for us, so why should we pay it to write emails & draw pictures because we are too numb from narcotics & Netflix? Another page from the collective songbook closes the set, it is “Old Bill Pickett” by Mark Ross, about a legendary black rodeo cowboy, who died from a fatal kick by a bronco.
Maybe the most important of the four previously recorded songs on this record is “Crying Those Cocksucking Tears” by Patrick Haggerty & Lavender Country. In the liner notes, Willi describes his version as wanting “to sound like a drag queen in a horny vaudeville act.” In late 2023, I first heard some of the songs for the Critterland album at a packed variety show of queer artists during Americanafest in Nashville.
So Willi hasn’t exactly been in the closet, but I feel like I heard him say something in an interview or on a podcast that he also wasn’t about marketing the rainbow brand, so to speak, by which I heard him say having his queerness pigeonholed or commodified. The way he described himself gave me the vibe of bi- or pansexual as opposed to other identities on the vast continuum. But with this album arriving at the end of Pride month when the right’s war on queer folks seems as cruel & unflinching as any time in the last several decades, this feels like Willi’s lustiest, wildest, out-est, & gayest album, to put it one way.
But if Willi’s “Cocksucking Tears” is bold & provocative, brace yourself for the bootylicious track buried on the back-end of the record. “Big Butt Billy” is pure unadulterated unfiltered R-rated queer poetic genius of the kind that Allen Ginsberg gained notoriety for. It’s a folk song for sure, but also spoken-word-confessional & sermon of the most salacious & incisive & inclusive kind. “Big Butt Billy” is some brilliant vocabulary & visionary humanity celebrating all of us in all our most carnal & culinary ways, taking place in a diner & name-checking the menu items, as it does. Lust & appetite never had such wordsmithing genius & genuine silliness. A track for the ages.
Just as the song “Critterland” had the hardy air of thesis statement & manifesto on the last one, title-track “Winged Victory” sets us up with some core proclamations & parameters. The declaration on this one, as needed as the critters & big tents of his previous efforts, is this: “I believe in the impossible/that no one is expendable.” Ever the poet, Willi weaves his utopian flair in the mercurial & mundane contradictions that would make Walt Whitman blush. To make it clean, it gets dirty. It is never good, if it doesn’t acknowledge its shadow, & by the final stanza, the curtains are on fire. Willi is not singing this anthem of hasty inclusion at the church or protest rally but in the crazy-ass confines of the memory-unit at the old-folks facility. Not that the lofty aims of other scribblers of folk-anthems ever lacked the earthiness that Willi wields, it’s just that the Willi Carlisle take on love & activism & “everyone” has such a naughty fringe, a colorful freaky flavor that resists being flattened into gentrified postcards recited at the funerals of politicians.
Willi’s influence (& mine), Utah Phillips loved to say that the Wobblies stole the hymns because they were pretty, but changed the words so they made sense. Willi Carlisle’s albums are deeply spiritual to me because of their sheer glorious honesty & humor & radical politics & joy, but Willi is not by any stretch a gospel singer. Yet the catchy & corny communal hymnody of gospel is in the depths of all great folk & rock & soul, & this is why Willi concerts are also anarcho-communist church & why I am an acolyte & apostle. So after several spins of this amazing album called Winged Victory, the song that is stuck in my head is the acapella hymn “Sound and Fury” (performed as a quartet on the disc), which is an utterly intoxicating holy earworm about, as Willi puts it in the liner notes, a way to “explore the dualities and contradictions of so many ideologies in this world.” On this glorious track, the narrator gets nectar from the “udder of angel.” Willi’s music is the ecstatic, glorious audio of the angels.
I didn’t think I could love Critterland as much as I loved Peculiar, Missouri, so I definitely didn’t think I could possibly love Winged Victory as much as Critterland, but the more these songs burrow their bawdy truths into the vast holes of my soul, the more that the Willi Carlisle songbook becomes us, it is so much deeper & wider than albums to rank & review. In the radical surrealist sense, Willi Carlisle breathes & becomes the poem-song itself, because Willi bleeds a manifesto of messy, hopeful, humorous, riveting, radical life-itself. So in a world of so much tragic & unneeded loss, count these songs as victory.
-Andrew/Sunfrog
scribbling essays about music on stolen land
Winged Victory is out everywhere you stream music on Friday, June 27th.
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