Listening to Willi Carlisle’s sophomore album, Peculiar, Missouri, is like speeding through a folk music history exhibit curated to critique contemporary culture. Peculiar honors not only traditions, but also characters who don’t quite fit in because of their economic status, sexual identity or profession, letting the listener know: It's okay if you're a little weird; Carlisle is too.
Out July 15, the album opens with a simple message of love over anger before shifting into a series of portraits and meditations: a poignant exposition on the pain of a closeted queer man; a rollicking satirical romp about life in a van; several a-typical cowboy stories; new and traditional folk tracks; and one spoken-word meditation on an existential crisis in Walmart. It features a veritable cacophony of instruments, including the banjo, fiddle, guitar, accordion and harmonica, which Carlisle himself contributes.
Growing up in Kansas and Illinois, Carlisle was raised on folk and bluegrass music and his father’s stories about his time as a musician. Around age 18, he discovered the Harry Smith Anthology, a seminal compilation of folk music, which launched him on a mission to learn about as many parts of the genre as possible. When he moved to Arkansas, he fell in love with the folk music traditions he found flourishing there, incorporating them into his writing.
Peculiar, Missouri draws inspiration from Carlisle's own past and experience as a queer man, as well as works by Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, e.e. Cummings, Utah Phillips, and square dance and folk music gatherings in the Ozarks. Rejecting any one influence, Carlisle prefers to call himself a genre-chameleon. The artist spoke with GRAMMY.com about his radical message of love, the dangers of nostalgia and why "Honky Tonk Bedonkadonk" is actually a masterpiece.
First of all, I know you've been on the road for a while. Where are you right now?
I'm currently on the way to Bristol, Tennessee from Atlanta, Georgia, to record a direct-to-vinyl session of a couple of folk songs on a very small pressing, just for fun.
I don't like to take days off; I really like to work, we've pretty much been on the road since last December. And the feeling of people knowing the songs when they come and bringing all their friends, the novelty hasn't worn off. I kind of hope it never goes.
Can you give me the overview of where you grew up, and your first interest in music, and then how you got interested in people like Utah Phillips and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott?
I grew up in a fairly musical family listening to old music — to folk music and bluegrass in particular. Most of the music I chose as a kid was classics, or it was pop country in private. I had Charlie Musselwhite, Shania Twain, Baha Men, and Sam Cooke, that was my earliest CD collection. More or less, we were a family of intellectual aspirants that still loved all this old stuff from the country.
And as soon as I got to college and had a measure of freedom it was like, you're buying a guitar, we're gonna learn everything. I wanted to be some kind of folklorist; I went to the Smithsonian on my first hitchhiking trip, had my pocket knife and harmonica confiscated, that sort of thing. I was really roaming around looking for it.
There's this line in your bio that says you’re a product of the punk-to-folk pipeline, which is one of those fascinating, counterintuitive music phenomena. Can you tell me what it means for your career?
It means a commitment to a do-it-yourself and f—all the haters way of thinking about it. It also means that we value some kind of community that's based around something other than sheer money or popularity, against the music industry's — or just general people's ideas — that music should be pretty and make us feel good.
Punk and a lot of folk music can be very difficult to listen to. And is also sometimes just as much about the people getting together as it is about the music itself.
Folk music and punk music both have a long history of protest. And you've said you see protest music as rooted in love rather than anger, which is a concept that, particularly in the moment we're at right now, might be hard for a lot of people to grasp.
I was raised to be angry; I think a lot of young men are. And so I say this only from my own personal perspective: to me, finding a self-developing compassion, cultivating silence, and cultivating a rare and free affection felt more like a protest than [being angry].
And I would like for queer people, and people that love differently or that are capable of loving in a lot of contexts, to be thought leaders inside of moments of pure rage and alienation. I certainly want there to be space for bricks to be thrown through windows. But I also think that more of us are on the same side than we currently comprehend. And that a big tent is going to be a lot more useful.
Which brings us to the album, which starts with "Your Heart’s a Big Tent," a track which poses a kind of thesis statement arguing for love above all else. What do you want listeners to take away from what is really an album of protest music, couched in this idea of love?
It might be so simple that it's stupid. I don't trust myself to be simple a lot of the time. And so starting off with something that feels simple and true is what I wanted to do. It keeps seeming like the idea that we should love everybody is a liability. There's not a lot that I feel like I know with much certainty, I try to "leave six inches for the Lord," as they say, on a lot of stuff.
But I can say, in traveling across the country, that there are so many people worthy of love that don't feel it and that want to be just invited, and haven't ever been invited, or have intentionally been excluded. And that's one of those rare things that goes both ways. That isn't ideological, but is emotional. Which is to say, I think everybody feels like they need something.
The second verse of that song, "I saw the devil in a used bookstore / ripping up and spitting on Catcher in the Rye" is intended to be something about rejecting youthful anger. And that's what I personally want to do. There's a pervasive lie that folk and country music is standing for regular people in some meaningful way. And I don't think we always do; I don't necessarily think that I am in the best possible way. But I think that we could.
That's the roots of folk and country music, but that has largely been forgotten in the interim, at least in terms of the cultural perception of what that music is now.
Yes. I think nostalgia is dangerous. I think that it's political nostalgia, and we have to be really careful. There’s no new history, only new historians. Utah Phillips used to say that we could leap into the river of history and purify ourselves. I have a different way of thinking of that metaphor. Which is that you wash in the river of history, the dam breaks, you go downstream, you know where you're headed, and it's directly towards a cliff. And you find yourself in the meantime in all of these marvelous little quirky backwaters that nobody has bothered, that nobody has seen. And those are the places that I want to bring people to, these little parts of history that might be forgotten.
The album covers a wide spectrum of music and nods at these different points in music history, it's almost like a tiny folk anthology. I’m wondering if you can say a bit more about how it came together as a cohesive unit.
With huge amounts of pain and my guts unspooling alone in a small apartment in Saint Louis, during COVID. I want to be a genre chameleon and I also have a lot of songs. I decided that I wanted to make a record that talked about love in this way. And then also directly addressed being a queer person in a way that was anthemic as opposed to half-assed. So I’ve got maybe half a dozen that I like, they're not about queer joy, which I hear a lot about, but they're all about queer misery, peculiar misery, if you will. And also I needed to have other songs about people that don't quite fit in.
So these folk songs, "The Goodnight Loving Trail" and "Este Mundo" [for example] are these two cowboys that don't fit into their own world and their own experiences. The "The Goodnight Loving Trail" is a cook on a wagon train who is pissed off. I love that opening bit, "Too old to wrangle or ride on the swing / You beat the triangle and you curse everything." It's like, just awful sounding. "Este Mundo" is a guy losing the rights to his own land. And so he doesn't even really have work.
So the record is intended to be full of that kind of discomfort, the discomfort of wandering, the idea that everybody wants to find a home, no matter how much they're rambling, but it can be hard to find.
And then some of the songs are to me delightfully subversive, in that if you're listening casually, they sound like traditional folk, country, or maybe trucker songs, but if you listen to the words, they touch on these concepts that are not usually parts of those songs, like being queer, like poking fun at Instagram influencers and having an existential crisis in the middle of a Walmart. Did you set out to make these subversive songs?
Yes. But I'm certainly not trying to trick anyone. You know, the album is pink. Of course I'm trying to be subversive, but I'm trying to do it with my tongue in my cheek. I think it's only life and death. So why not have a little fun with it.
Also, Walmart is expanding their corporate headquarters in Arkansas, where I'm from, and they really piss me off a lot. And so I certainly have existential crises in Walmart. But I also think everybody does, I think that it's really f—ing miserable, the experience of going to a regular superstore. And I've been so lucky in my life, to go to as many farmer’s markets as I have. And to experience rural food justice, people taking care of 100 percent of their own food needs. But they're having to build it entirely on their own, when in the meantime, there's a supercomputer in your pocket that knows more about you than you know about yourself.
We're talking about the album's title track, "Peculiar, Missouri." It strikes me as an interesting choice for a title track. It's this spoken-word contemplation of a very disorienting experience in a fluorescent-lit superstore, that to somebody who's been on the road a lot, is an immediately relatable experience. But as an album title, it's kind of an odd choice.
Well, I liked the idea of it being a weird misery that you were in, that facility. It came to me in a dream. And I know that a title track could probably just be a banger. But I fell in love with the few tracks in the American folk tradition that I think are just perfect: tracks like [Arlo Guthrie's] "Alice's Restaurant," also "913 Greens" by Ramblin’ Jack Elliott.
And was like, if I don't check this box, I'm not a folk singer. If I have a career in folk music, I want it to be because people are listening to the things that are harder to listen to, which is a big ask. It's a big f—n' ask for me to say, "Here's a 7-minute-long talking blues [song]." But if I've got you there, well, then maybe I've got you for next time.
Can you rectify for me the idea of the album being about love with the idea that it also takes place in this misery?
Yeah, I can. It's that there is relief from it in each other and in recognizing our impermanence, and insisting on burning brightly for the time that we're here. I think it's cheesy. I don't necessarily know that I believe that forever. But I love that I get to for a minute.
I want to talk about the song "Tulsa's Last Musician." It reminds me of Townes Van Zandt and Bruce Springsteen’s wildest character songs. Can you tell me the story behind it?
In this line of work, you meet a lot of weird people. And it's the best part. And I came to realize that I really liked clowns, acrobats and puppeteers. But I didn't like the magic shows that I saw. And one night in Orlando, I got cornered by a bunch of magicians — can't make this up. And I was pretty deep in my cups. And they were showing me rope tricks. And I was so bored.
But because they had a captive audience, they were all trying to one up each other. And there’s one of them who's a particular talent. He has autism and he can't always tell if you understand the trick. And he's brilliant, he's really, really good at sleight of hand and a wonderful liaison to his neurotype and his craft. But also you had to bring some of the magic to it. You have to go like, "Whoa," "Wow!" because he's not good at reading your facial expression. So it felt polite for me to exaggerate a little bit. Because both he and the other three magicians were like, "Are you with me? Do you get it?" And I didn’t get it, I was fully checked out. I got to thinking about the tragedy of how badly they need an audience.
I was also hanging out with a mentalist and he just wouldn't stop kvetching about how nobody cared about his work and he could be making thousands of dollars somewhere else. And the ego that we have when what we do is so silly. I wanted to write something that was funny and sad, that did some honoring of those kinds of personalities in the world.
But then at the end, you turn it outward on those same people that you want to feel included by saying, "If you've ever felt like you don't fit in, then maybe the song is for you."
It's a common folk trope; it's a rhetorical turn that felt really intuitive. I can't stop writing like, "hey, it's okay, if you feel weird." Because that's what I want to tell myself all the time. That's my private self soothing.
"Vanlife" reminds me of Red Sovine and C.W. McCall truck drivin’ anthems, but the lyrics are nothing like those songs, which celebrate the lifestyle. You're critiquing van life and van life influencers and the idea that anybody would aspire to that. So then who is the love for in that song?
Well don't get me wrong, it's a lot of fun. We made a music video that was essentially 10 vans romping around Wyoming having a blast. And the truth is, that living on the margins can be an incredible experience. There's also people that don't ever get to come back from it. And that is one of those things that’s unacceptable to me about the social contract in its current condition. And about the housing crisis. Late capitalism takes all forms and eats them up and spits them out as something that somebody could buy. And when it does that with van life in particular, it makes me sick.
At times I was fashionably homeless, you know, "oh, I'm going through a breakup and I'm going on tour for the next six months, why would I rent an apartment," or "I'm a little short on cash, I'm gonna move my stuff into my buddy's basement and live in a van for a few weeks." I would not want to position myself as somebody who's familiar with being truly unhoused.
Anyhow, the love is for the people that are out there, living that way and understanding the contradictions that are inherent: that on some level it's pretty fun to be a little wild, but on another level it makes everything a lot more difficult. And the number of times I've been pulled over just for existing, and I'm a tall white guy and I can code switch right away into American hillbilly vernacular and be just fine. It's for the people that can't do that.
There's also some bravado that I want people to be able to feel in their s—ty situations. There's a wonderful sensibility in country music that can do things like glorify a long day's work with a s—ty boss and a few light beers that I think is really evolved. [Garth Brooks'] "I've got friends in low places" might be an ultimate example. I think the "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk" is a masterpiece. It's hard to write things like that. I want to be able to write stupid as well as smart and to glorify what's fundamentally good about our togetherness.
Okay, just for fun can you lay out for me how you see "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk" as a masterpiece?
Well, so it's four writers in the room. And they've decided they're gonna go as low as they can and as high as they can at the same time. That double direction-ness feels essential. People talk about Song of Songs [book in the Old Testament], right? "My lovers hands are dripping with the purest myrrh. My love, put their hand through the keyhole and my bowels shook at her touch." [Carlisle quotes from memory, then references Trace Adkins’ song]"Whoee slap your grandma, how's she gonna get those britches on?"
I'm serious, it's just dirty poetry in praise of butts. I think that we should admit that we like sexy things and dumb things.
You are a huge Utah Phillips fan. And in fact, his core tenant of "long memory" is in your Instagram bio. So, where does an album like this fit into Phillips’ idea that without knowing your history, it's hard to go forward?
I don't trust folk music that isn't intentionally materialist — something that's looking at history, the real lives of people who bled, sang, lived, died. And is dealing with those ghosts in a very serious way. I think that having meaningful encounters with those histories can heal, or at least balm epigenetic wounds.
There is some deeply unsettled thing inside of a lot of us. And I think that a lot of it has to do with a total loss of mental freedom that's been taken away from us by advertising schemes and ticky tacky houses. I think that taking our own history, and our own songs into our hands is a somewhat radical act of freedom. It's saying, in the era of TikTok, I choose three chords of the truth. I believe that everybody can do it for themselves.
It's sort of an individual mandate for self examination. What does that look like in practical application for a random fan coming to your show?
Well to be honest, I don't know. But I think that just to sing along is one of those experiences of self reflection, just to hear your own voice lifted with others. Also every time I'm talking about my own pain on stage I try to situate it in a way that is general but that also acknowledges how I feel about it now. In fact, I begin a lot of love songs with "now I've totally forgiven this person but…" and I go through the stories a little bit with people, I hope it's an invitation.
The beautiful thing about music is that it opens the door wide for people to think deeply about what they want from life, what they need.
I want to remember this phrase, the individual mandate for self reflection. I feel like I'm gonna get a tattoo this evening.
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