The Shapeshifting Bard

Revelatory weirdness, idiosyncratic creativity, and disorganized development with folk singer Willi Carlisle.

BY NICK MCGREGOR music@indyweek.com

Willi Carlisle is a man of many angles. Call him a folk singer, a raconteur, a humorist, a poet, or a punk, and you’re speaking equal amounts of truth. Thoughtful and impulsive, hilarious and heart-wrenching, bluntly profane and profusely kind, the Ozark native—born in Missouri, now residing in northwest Arkansas—has spent the last decade perfecting a raucous blend of old-time tradition and modern vernacular.

His best songs bounce between belly laughs and tearjerkers, just as the virtuosic Carlisle glides between acoustic guitar, banjo, fiddle, accordion, and harmonica. Potent quotables litter the lyric sheets of his three albums—2016’s Too Nice to Mean Much, 2018’s To Tell You the Truth, and 2022’s Peculiar, Missouri. But it’s the wild-eyed emotion baked into his baritone boom that has Carlisle catapulting to success.

Early singles like “Cheap Cocaine” and “Boy Howdy, Hot Dog!” celebrated the unhinged side of Americana, but Carlisle flipped that script with a compelling mix of originals and arrangements on last year’s release on Free Dirt Records. He voices complicated queer desire on “Life on the Fence,” authentic acceptance on “Your Heart’s a Big Tent,” and the tragicomedy of the open road on “Vanlife.” He charts a neurodivergent performer’s poignant rise and fall on “Tulsa’s Last Magician” while retrofitting everything from conjunto classics to cosmic cowboy laments and the absurdist verse of e. e. cummings. He even anchors Peculiar, Missouri with a titular seven-minute talking blues about suffering a panic attack in the cosmetics aisle of a midwestern Walmart.

Carlisle’s sharp character studies reshape the way we view America’s misfits—those tender hearts and tough cases so often left behind while struggling to learn to love themselves. It’s an iconoclasm that comes easy for the former football player turned theater nerd, who makes it clear that you can revere rural life while rebuking its revanchist tendencies—and celebrate urban inclusivity while bemoaning its performative radicalism.

But all this brainy folk-geek arcana buries the lede about Willi Carlisle: he’s one of the most dynamic live artists operating in America today. Last year, he was playing house shows and dive bars, admitting in a moving personal essay for No Depression that “down and out is only a few mistakes away in this profession.”

This year, he’s selling out midsize venues on a marathon two-month run, even as his concerts promise live-show fellowship and communalism. Ahead of his March 12 stop in Durham, INDY Week caught up with Willi Carlisle on the telephone one Friday afternoon in February as he prepared for his whirlwind tour.

INDY WEEK: How are you getting ready for the road, Willi?

WILLI CARLISLE: Well, last night I was up all night. I have not yet gone to sleep. I was working on the next record. There’s a song on it that’s an epic—it might even be seven or eight minutes long. [It’s] a badman ballad that’s a true story about this marijuana moonshiner in rural Arkansas 20 years ago. So yeah, I should be getting ready for tour, but you know what? That’s a form of getting ready.

That’s a perfect example of interpreting older folk traditions through a contemporary lens. Has that blend changed as you’ve grown?

Me and my buddies used to just sing the Pete Seeger songbook cover to cover. I also used to just play old-time music, period. If it wasn’t old-time fiddle music, it was like, “What is this garbage Americana music?” Then I started to play something closer to Americana. So it has been really twisty, and the combination comes out differently every time.

How about your craft as a songwriter?

Some songs take years to germinate based around random notes in commonplace books that eventually coalesce by accident around a melody. Or they’re the intentional work of a few days or a few minutes of manic energy that occur unbidden. I will take a walk, then slug a whole pot of coffee, then do too many push-ups, and then take a four-hour nap. I tend to work on other hobbies, too. I fix accordions, and I like to read about things totally unrelated to folk music. I’m very disorganized in that way. Some of it has to be grit, too. You need to be interrupted. There needs to be too little time [laughs]. It really helps when there’s a deadline for me.

Let’s talk about performance style and stage confidence. You clearly know how to command an audience. How long did it take you to reach that point?

My parents wanted me to go to business school because they said I had a line of shit a mile long and an inch deep. I was the classic performer kid … you realize that, if you’re funny or charming, you can get love. To tell the truth? That’s scary. Right now, it’s just trying to stay surprised. [To] stay off-balance so that the truth is still real, and it’s not just some truth-y shit that I’ve grown accustomed to saying. Actually be honest and maintain a purpose—a “why” for being there. I love vaudeville and silent films and clowns. [There’s] something about people that can make you laugh just by doing something stupid—and then creating some deep pathos with that. I’m informed by the calculated stupidity. I like that I have theater in my blood. Because in theater, you make a whole world, right? Sometimes in music we believe that just creating the sound is enough. And I like to build a whole damn thing.

You’ve admitted to code- switching for different audiences in different places. Will that continue as your tours and audiences grow?

I’m trying to lean away from being actively inflammatory. Everybody has so much more in common than they have apart. When we’re talking about folk music, everybody has access to their history—to a vernacular that they’ve been deprived of by the moneyed interests of corporations that want you to buy who you are instead of just being that thing.

I want our explorations of history to look with revision and revulsion and reverence at old things with an eye toward taking them on fully. I personally find that healing, revealing, and wonderful.

So yeah, I will absolutely code-switch. But that’s because in New York City I’ve been at a poetry reading where somebody finds out I’m from Arkansas and asks me if I fuck pigs or own shoes. There’s just no reason for any of us to put up with any of that shit.

I wonder what kind of commentary you’d deliver on North Carolina, a Southern state where rural reverence, deep musical history, and rapid urbanization rub shoulders—often at the same concert.

It is wild as hell. God, in Raleigh, it’s like all these weird high-rises—miniature down- towns springing up all over downtown. A beautiful thing about North Carolina is that all the venues are old. Going to a concert that isn’t at an arena, there actually is a plurality of people. Whereas playing in San Francisco, not a single person there was in an income bracket that I can understand [laughs]. I actually feel like I can be myself in North Carolina. Honestly, I would live in the Triangle—or just outside the Triangle, ’cause I couldn’t afford to live in it—if I wasn’t already in a very quickly gentrifying Southern area on the outskirts of town in northwest Arkansas.

2023 really feels like a pivotal year for the development of your career. How are you dealing with that, and how have your future plans changed because of it?

The growing pains have been real. I can’t always respond to every message. I was so proud for years that I got back to every email. I’m making zines to sell at shows because I want to be able to talk to people more. It used to [be I] was just trying to write to get something off my chest. Now I feel like I can be of service to people, and that’s a huge honor. That’s what makes me hungry. In the next couple of years, I want to make a couple more records. The next one is going to be darker and more intense. I want to continue to be a shapeshifter. I want to keep keeping it weird. I want to make music that people have to actually engage with—not something that’s just catchy. Which I know limits your audience immediately. And that’s OK. W