Photo by Madison Hurley. Design by Joe Frontel
The cover of the May 30, 2024 issue of Creative Loafing Tampa Bay.
After that, the kid born in Kansas and based in Arkansas stepped outside of Crowbar and got cat-called for one of the first times in his life. Seventh Avenue was more of a party than he had ever really witnessed. A line about the scene made it into the lyrics of “Tulsa’s Last Magician” from his 2022 album Peculiar, Missouri.
“Then he wandered down to Tampa, blew everybody’s mind. ‘Cause the crowd was cheap and easy there on beer and blow and wine,” Carlisle sings on the tender ballad.
Reviews of “There Ain’t No More” were positive, and the day after playing Tampa Fringe, Carlisle quit his job as a teacher at Northwest Arkansas Community College. “They wanted to let me go anyways, but I told them to frigg off just shortly after that,” Carlisle said. “It was a new career for me.”
This week, the 34-year-old does a four-show run through Florida opening for Tyler Childers. Carlisle hasn’t played to more than 4,000 people, but in Tampa, up to 19,000 fans could fill the venue. What constitutes a small show, however, is debatable.
“I’d say that there’s no small shows, only small performances, And that intimacy is a quality that can scale, especially with modern technology,” Carlisle, who’ll play solo for the gig, said.
“My plan is to project my voice to the back of the stadium, to sing to the person sitting farthest away,” he said, adding that in the day’s before amplified sound, opera singers hit the cheap seats while big orchestras filled concert halls. Now, music sometimes exists on an inhuman scale, so he’s working with the crew to adapt.
“The professionals that are there to make you Herculean, or rather gargantuan,” Carlisle added.
But the songs, like his tall, broad-shouldered fame, are plenty big on their own.
Peculiar, Missouri was one of the best roots records of 2022 and offered folk music that captures all sides of Appalachia from barns to back alleys. Critterland, released last January, cuts even deeper on tales of human suffering, off-limits love, addiction, generational trauma, and joy—things he’s seen a lot of driving coast-to-coast at least twice a year since first visiting Tampa.
“The thing that you learn is that so much of America is homogenous, regardless of geography. So much of the conditions that create crushing poverty are the same nationwide,” he said.
And while analytics tell Carlisle that he needs to write more angry songs for young men ("Cheap Cocaine"), the show is fruitier than that, complete with those puppets, dumb little dances, and singalongs. In real life, the crowds reflect a plurality of the lived experiences that Carlisle, who identifies as bi-or-pansexual, brings to his records.
“We’ve got punk kids and crispy hats and square toes and cis folks, trans folks, young folks, old folks,” he said. Onstage, where his songs are meant to live, Carlisle gets to see people he might not have loved when he himself was an angry high schooler. “That’s probably the best part for me, feeling like I’m talking to a younger version of myself with some understanding, and compassion.”
Empathy is something that Carlisle’s songs create at every turn.
“Life on the Fence,” is a heartbreaking reflection on bisexuality in the poetic vein of James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room.” It’s not an explicit song by any means, but could still get a Florida elementary school teacher fired if they played it in a classroom. Carlisle sings the cut in towns that need to hear it, and changes his banter about the tune in cities where audiences might think they’re better off because the laws are less fascist than they are in Florida.
“Instead, have some compassion, solidarity and a sense of duty to the people that are fighting the good fight in the part of the world that you might look down on,” Carlisle said.
Creating togetherness, it turns out, is one of his superpowers.
On “Your Heart’s a Big Tent,” Carlisle unleashes a straight up anthem of self-discovery. It’s a song that’s juxtaposed to the parts of his catalog that are about drugs and hard times. Instead, the rising Ozarkian folk hero sings about happiness, loving everybody and how hard both can actually be.
“Gotta let everybody in,” he sings. “Doesn’t matter who they are, if they do right or where they’ve been—everybody gets in.”
It’s the kind of song that changes somebody’s day, and maybe their life. For Carlisle, that catharsis is the price of admission; he only wants to write songs that make him feel better after singing them.
“I don’t want it to merely be about feelings. I want it to be a release of something I struggled to say normally,” he said.
Carlisle wrote the lyrics to “Big Tent” in full earnest with no irony, but he’s since added an addendum to the way he lives its message.
“I think for a while I thought that that meant that everybody got first in line at the buffet, and they got to leave a mess in the tent,” he said, adding that he’s been learning boundaries in really hard and practical ways. Wanting to be there for and and around everyone regularly leaves him feeling a little wrung out and wet doggy.
“My issue has never been with welcoming people. It’s actually been not knowing when to say, ‘Alright, the buffet line is closed,’ or ‘No, you can’t come in first,’ and so on,” Carlisle added. “Now I see it with a little bit more human clarity. And that human clarity, I hope it helps me to do better by more people. And that will be a lifelong process.”
A life of song, we hope, too.
Tickets to see Tyler Childers, Valerie June, and Willi Carlisle play MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre in Tampa on Wednesday, June 6 are still available and start at $49.50. Subscribe to Creative Loafing newsletters.
Follow us: Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter
