Whit Stone / Courtesy of Fortunate Chicken Media
The songs on Willi Carlisle’s new album are filled with cowboys, dreamers, weirdos and misfits. There’s additionally a donkey, after whom the album is called.
On Winged Victory, the Kansas native employs greater than half a dozen devices, addresses points of sophistication and pulls from each childhood recollections in addition to Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
The 11 tracks on the album are a mixture of originals and canopy songs — drawing from conventional, uncredited folks songs (“We Have Fed You All for 1000 Years”) to trendy classics from the likes of Richard Thompson (“Beeswing”) and American folks singer Mark Ross (“Previous Invoice Pickett”). Delicate moments can rapidly flip towards stream-of-consciousness surrealism.
Carlisle’s various vocal fashion — which he says “verges from singing like a drag queen at a vaudeville present” to “a fragile whisper” — performs a key function. “I realized to sing by being in choirs in Kansas and in rural Illinois and likewise by calling sq. dances,” Carlisle explains. “So, I’ve obtained a giant voice and just a little one.” And he makes use of each, to full impact, on Winged Victory.
On the donkey named “Winged Victory”
Carlisle was on the Smithsonian Folklife Competition in Washington, D.C., with a bunch of associates who had been representing the Ozarks, enjoying conventional tunes with “outdated people and conventional artists and weavers and cooks,” he says.
“I used to be being a real dangerous folklorist,” Carlisle says. “I used to be drunk on moonshine, but in addition was taking copious notes.” The group was speaking about animals with humorous names and one in every of his notes mentioned: “A donkey named Winged Victory?” He’ll by no means know if that donkey is actual or imagined.
“And I simply thought it was so humorous,” laughs Carlisle, “that I needed to write a music about it.”
YouTube
On delivering a message by his songs
“I consider {that a} folks singer ought to be a dreamer with a protracted reminiscence,” Carlisle says.
Labor struggles and the working class have lengthy been themes in Carlisle’s repertoire. The primary music on his new album is “We Have Fed You All for 1000 Years.” Initially written by an “unknown proletariat,” it is a conventional music from the labor motion that dates again to the start of the twentieth Century.
“It is the primary folks music I actually fell in love with,” says Carlisle. “It comes from … a time when staff wished to coexist with different wild leftist actions that had been taking place across the globe. When Zapatistas and miners is perhaps sharing the identical pamphlets.”
He was a young person when he first heard the tune, sung by anarchist folks singer Utah Phillips. And it caught with him.
“It type of began me down a pathway of studying about these working class folks songs,” Carlisle says. “And in a world of huge cowboy hats and dangerous politics, studying about folks that had been about kindness, unification and fairness.”
On his vary of devices
Carlisle performs — and excursions with — various devices: guitar, fiddle, harmonica, banjo, accordion, concertina, bouzouki and rhythm bones. So how does he select?
“I attempt to let the instrument do the work,” Carlisle says. “There is not any cash previous the fifth fret.”
By which he means, he tries to maintain it easy always.
“I’ve type of come to consider that easy is difficult, easy is sweet,” he says. “I play a whole lot of devices however I might by no means declare to be an professional in any of them.”
On “Wildflowers Growin,'” Carlisle let the bouzouki take the lead. “On this case, I used to be utilizing one in every of my quietest voices,” he explains, “and so a candy, double course lute — it feels like a giant mandolin — was the correct alternative.”
On giving a nod to Shakespeare
In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the title character, upon studying of his spouse’s demise, says: “It’s a story instructed by an fool, filled with sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Carlisle says he all the time thought of that line. “What if it is signifying nothing and it is nice? What if it means nothing and that is fantastic?”
He wrote “Sound and Fury” as a four-part bluegrass gospel-style music.
“If you are going to attempt to make one thing new out of one thing outdated,” Carlisle explains, “why not use the outdated great things, proper?”
His philosophy? Take the most effective components of bluegrass, slap some Shakespeare on it and have enjoyable being an fool about all of it. “Attempt to discover pleasure in what generally feels stodgy,” Willi Carlisle says. “Even when it is stunning.”