This week, states that most people never imagined could ever turn blue did just that, as part of a massive Democratic sweep in the midterm elections. Most people, that is, except for the residents actually living in them. Texas, Kansas, Iowa, possibly even Mississippi. No place is a monolith, and our country is a rich, vibrant, and diverse place in every corner, where real people rarely line up with the stereotypes we thrust upon them. They may not all be Instagram-glamorous, but they believe in meaningful work, family (chosen, born or both), and a good joke. They love hard, they struggle, and they get shit done.
That’s who Willi Carlisle, the Kansas-born and Arkansas-residing country songwriter, is singing about on his new Tyler Childers-produced double album, The Universal Bubba. It’s the place he is writing from, the stories he tells with equal parts craft, tenderness, and a lot of humor, and it proves that celebrating our differences is what helps us live in harmony. “I sing America old and weird, wide open borders and pioneers,” Carlisle sings on “The Universal Bubba, Part Two,” one of a pair of glorious Southern rockers. “Sing on a doubleshift ‘til I’m outta breath, a song about freedom, a song about death.”
America old and weird is the story of the brilliant Universal Bubba. It’s folk songs for the people in the Ozarks and Appalachia and hollers in between who get their story sung thanks to Carlisle’s endlessly vibrant mind. Recorded in a makeshift studio in the Bywater District of New Orleans with Childers and members of his ace band, the Food Stamps, The Universal Bubba feels both otherworldly and hilariously real, maybe because so many of us can easily be both things at once. You can explore Eastern religion and still top your yerba mate with a splash of bourbon on “Marlboro Vinyasa,” but you better be able to laugh at the absurdity. You can love your country but still think it’s brutal as hell as he does on “Master’s Hammer,” a folk offering to any wayward souls ready to rip it all up and start anew.
“I’m filled with grief, but I’m wild enough to win,” Carlisle sings as the harmonies ring like a wavelength we can all tap into to, humming out of the darkness. None of these things are actually paradoxes, unless you think people can’t be complex, strange, surprising. Carlisle sure as hell does, and he wants them all to shine.
The Universal Bubba was the first time that the equally complex and probing Childers has produced a record other than his own, and it’s a delightfully perfect fit: the two artists met while Carlisle was on tour supporting Childers in Australia, and they quickly found a musical and spiritual kinship. Carlisle is a skilled picker, but he he’s not married to tradition — nor does it feel like he’s trying to intentionally escape from it either. Banjo and fiddle (on one song, “Bigger’n Dallas,” via Amanda Shires) are the record’s heart, but never its casing. It grooves, swings, it dances to the accordion on “Old Milwaukee Onestep.” And it all ends at the Chinese food buffet.
“I wish you luck and health in business, in passion and divorce/I wish you imitation crab, wish you moo-shoo-pork,” Carlisle sings on his end-of-life prayer “Golden Dragon Buffet,” where his last request is to be sliced up and tossed in a pile of fried rice. It’s both absurd and heartbreaking, but maybe he has a point: How many of us spend more hours hunched over a greasy meal than we do with our fingers in the dirt? Life is dead serious, life is a total joke. Somewhere in between is what makes us human, and that’s where The Universal Bubba lingers.
