Back in early 2025, when Willi Carlisle was on tour with Tyler Childers in Australia, the two artists fostered what would become a creative partnership. Fueled by talks about the musicians they loved and some Wallace Stephens poetry, Carlisle was inspired to write “The Mason Jar at the Center of the World, the first single from his forthcoming double album, The Universal Bubba — which features Childers in the producer’s chair.
Due this November, it’s the first record that Childers has produced (other than his own), and finds the endlessly creative Carlisle honing and expanding his brand of folk music that leans into quirk and tradition in equal measure. Listen to “The Mason Jar at the Center of the World,” a banjo and fiddle-driven existential meditation, below.
“This record came together by luck, passion, and circumstance,” Carlisle tells Rolling Stone. “Tyler and I had talked a lot about songs while I was opening for him. We sat down and played old-time fiddle music together, too, which was a big joy. I played banjo, Tyler fiddled, and we just gabbed on this and that. We talked about ‘Tomcat and a Dandy,’ his song on Snipe Hunter, and played it through a few times together. It truly was just a fun time, an Appalachian and an Ozark guy picking tunes, sharing folk music.”
Despite their kinship, it didn’t seem the timing to make a record together would work — until a short opening in their schedules appeared, and Childers signed on to produce. Carlisle, whose vibrant 2024 album Critterland was a Rolling Stone staff favorite, decamped to New Orleans with Childers and his band, the Food Stamps, to cut The Universal Bubba in a DIY home studio. Fresh off of making Snipe Hunter in a similar fashion, where he crafted a recording space in the living room of a rental home in Hawaii, Childers knew how to track an album in a way that lets the intimacy and live urgency come through. It’s the perfect environment for Carlisle’s songs, which paint vibrant stories of misfits and oddballs — of the beauty of an America that shines when we embrace, not fight, our differences.
“Minor moments of difficulty led to real moments of brilliance,” Carlisle says of their time in the makeshift studio. “In many cases, we accomplished songs in just a couple takes. In some other cases, we built and talked for hours.” Carlisle and Childers also found a kinship in their studies of Eastern Religion, an exploration that is deeply threaded through the journey of Snipe Hunter. On Universal Bubba, Carlisle finds the humor in a flawed embrace of his spirituality on songs like “Marlboro Vinyasa.”
“To say that Eastern Religion has had a profound effect on my life would be an understatement,” Carlisle says. “I know that’s the case for Tyler, too. He recommended I read the Bhagavad Gita and I’ve been working my way through it and returning to my meditation cushion. Anybody who is as literate and thoughtful as Tyler is inspires me. Hell, the live show he and the boys are doing seems to me to be a gospel show about the human spirit and the power of love.”
Carlisle comes from a similar place. His songs seek to highlight the people putting in the work — the work to love whoever they want to love, the work to make an honest if not glamorous living, the work to care for others out of community, not obligation. And, like Childers, he’s here to do the work to make country and folk music a place of inclusivity and empathy.
“I really do think that our shared values helped us make The Universal Bubba as good as it is,” Carlisle says. “And frankly? Those values are universal and hard to practice in show business.”
Born in Kansas and residing in Arkansas, Carlisle will embark on an expansive tour this fall. The Universal Bubba is out Nov. 6th via Signature Sounds.
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.rollingstone.com ’
