Willi Carlisle
Mississippi Studios
∙
Portland
Friday, October 11 at 9 pm PDT
Concert Venue
Friday, October 11 at 9 pm PDT
Concert Venue
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Description
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w/ special guest DUG
For folksinger 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 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.
Produced by the GRAMMY Award-nominated Darrell Scott and to be released Jan. 26, 2024 by Signature Sounds, 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.
"In many ways, the suffering that has gotten us here is going to control us. Our superstition and our prejudice is going to control us," Carlisle says. "But in another way, we're physiologically set up to be instantaneously expressive of all of those feelings. And what comes out in moments of collectivity, is not just singing, but what I'd hope is a national reckoning with these various different kinds of suffering."
Throughout Critterland runs Carlisle's unease with the tension between love and the reality of an often painful world. He's adamant that everyone should find and feel love, including queer love, love with no reproductive purpose, and love of ourselves; "I think at the heart of the record is the conflict between those two things, between doomed love and the possibility that that love creates," he says.
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