Willi Carlisle - The Universal Bubba Review
Willi Carlisle has always made records that sound like he cut them in your kitchen at two in the morning. Peculiar, Missouri. Critterland. Winged Victory. The songs carried everything, and the recordings were mostly there to catch them before they got away. We loved every one of them for it.
The Universal Bubba is the first time the sound is as big as the songs. It's the best thing he's ever made, and we already wear out his back catalogue, so believe us when we say that's saying something.
Childers in the producer's chair
Tyler Childers is in the producer's chair here, his first time doing it for anyone else's record. He brought his touring band, The Food Stamps, and together they built a makeshift home studio in the Bywater District of New Orleans. Two weeks later they had 17 songs.
That band changes everything. You can hear it from the first reel. There's a polish here that none of Willi's other records have had, and we were half expecting that polish to sand the edges off. It doesn't. Everything on this record sounds REAL. It sounds like a room full of people who can really play, all leaning into the same songs at the same time.
Willi says there's more fretless, 19th century style banjo on here than on anything he's made. He also says it touches on funk, Cajun, old-time and experimental music, the widest spread he's ever gone. The old-time stuff he's always been great at is still front and center. It just finally has a band big enough to stand behind it, and to follow him wherever he wanders off to.
Childers doesn't stay behind the desk the whole time, either. He sings with Willi on "Gas Station", and the video for it is a puppet show, complete with a puppet that looks a whole lot like Childers.
Seventeen tracks, zero skips
Double albums are a gamble. Most of them have a great single album hiding inside, padded out with stuff that should've stayed on the hard drive. We went into this one braced for that. It never came. Start to finish, the whole thing is just... god, it's so good.
The songs are full of the people Willi's spent a decade meeting on the road. "Good Morning, Midnight" is a waltz for the late-shift workers and whoever's still around at last call. "Ditchdigger's Song (Dust and the Devil)" follows a laborer carrying a heavy heart and a down-to-earth kind of faith. "Marlboro Vinyasa" is a love letter to bars, and every other place that takes you in after a long day.
And the weird Willi we love is all still here. He calls this his goofiest, most celebratory record yet, stuffed with jokes meant to make him and his characters laugh. You can hear it. Any record with "Marlboro Vinyasa" and "Golden Dragon Buffet" on it hasn't been tidied up for radio.
The two title tracks sit right in the middle like an intermission, and that's where the whole cast shows up: a first-shift hardware store worker, a backyard mechanic who served in Vietnam, a Catholic school kid with heavy metal dreams, and the rest of the small-town folks who keep everything running.
So what is a "universal bubba"? Willi says it's somebody who can fix anything. The idea started with his grandmother, who could cook, work the phone and look after the kids all at the same time. After 17 tracks, we'd say he's one too.
Our picks:
"Mason Jar at the Center of the World": the opener, an old-time reel Willi wrote while touring Australia with Childers. It's where this whole partnership started, and you can hear it.
"Use Me Up": a ballad about hard work and hard-won love, and the one we keep going back to.
"The Universal Bubba" Parts One and Two: Willi says Part One is for the booty-shakin' rock and rollers and Part Two is for the small-town hell raisers. We're both, so we're not choosing.
"Bigger'n Dallas": Featuring powerhouse Amanda Shires, and proof the back end of this record holds up just as well as the front.
Verdict: PRESS X
This is Willi Carlisle's best work to date. If you already love him, this is the record you've been waiting for him to make. If you've never heard him, start here.
We're not the only ones losing our minds over this one, either.
The Universal Bubba is out now on Signature Sounds.