“Willi Carlisle speaks his truth … reminiscent of folk singers like Woody Guthrie” – NPR Music
For folk singer Willi Carlisle, singing is healing. And by singing together, he believes we can begin to reckon with the inevitability of human suffering and grow in love. On his latest album, Critterland, Carlisle invites audiences to join him: “If we allow ourselves to sing together, there’s a release of sadness, maybe even a communal one. And so for me personally, singing, like the literal act of thinking through suffering, is really freeing,” he says.
Rooted in the eclectic and collective world of his live shows, Carlisle’s third album, Critterland, Produced by the Grammy Award-nominated Darrell Scott, takes up where his sophomore album, Peculiar, Missouri left off, transforming Peculiar’s big tent into a Critterland menagerie and letting loose the weirdos he gathered together. The album is a wild romp through the backwaters of his mind and America, lingering in the odd corners of human nature to visit obscure oddballs, dark secrets and complicated truths about the beauty and pain of life and love.
Critterland considers where we come from and where we are going. On the album, he takes on human suffering through stories about forbidden love, loss, generational trauma, addiction, and suicide, believing that by processing the traits and trauma we inherit, he can reach a deeper understanding of what it means to succeed and to exist.
“Brilliant slice-of-life Americana.” – Sing Out magazine
“One of the Top 10 ‘Best Things We Saw at Newport Folk Festival 2023’ ” – Rolling Stone
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Carlisle's special guest, Justin Golden, believes that blues isn’t just twelve bars and a hard luck story. On his debut record, Hard Times and a Woman, guitarist and songwriter Golden showcases the full breadth of the genre and its downstream influences, everything from country blues to Americana, soul, indie roots and beyond. Golden was raised on the Virginia coast and is steeped in the distinctive, fingerpicked Piedmont blues of the central part of the state. He’s studied country blues and names influences from Blind Boy Fuller to Taj Mahal, but his key inspirations have always come from the indie guitar realm: Phil Cook and J Roddy Walston, with a little Hiss Golden Messenger, Daniel Norgren, and Bon Iver mixed in, and maybe a hint of James Taylor.
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