If you’ve never listened to Willi Carlisle, I hate that for you, but good news: Winged Victory is a good jumping off point. Traditional folk music has always been a mixture of protest, tongue-in-cheek, and snapshots of the world in that moment. Pick from folk songs throughout history to remind the world that when the heat turns up, you should grab whatever you have around you that makes sound and go scream with - or at - anyone close enough to listen. Mix that in with Willi’s songwriting and you have something special.

There’s some overt absurdism in the choices on the record, and some beautiful moments, all of which co-mingle in a menagerie of tracks that throw commercialism a curve ball, and as the youngins say these days, “stand on business.” There’s not one drop of pandering, no begging for anyone to treat Willi like the “next big thing” and instead it’s obstinance brought to life in sound. If you don’t follow Willi on social platforms, I can’t stress this enough, you are missing out. There’s little left to the imagination for Willi’s stance on the world. Love is love, everyone is worth it, there are no disposable people, and we’re all in this together. There’s a low tolerance for intolerance in the world of Willi Carlisle, and he isn’t what I think anyone would consider subtle about it.

When I think about the role of folk music and the people who make it, there are snapshots throughout history where a lone minstrel with both conventional and unconventional means pipes through the world. Case in point: Willi set goals and achieved them, four separate squeeze boxes (accordions for the laymen among us), multiple banjos, some brass, some bravado, some love, some anger and a thirst for the march forward for All, not Some.

Winged Victory can be abrasive at times. The messaging, the sound, the absurdity of an album named after a donkey… you did not misread that: a donkey named Winged Victory. The humor in that alone expresses the lens that Willi tuned to see the world. But it’s also worth noting that there’s some real messaging in the record. The working class, wage-bound average working men preached to from golden thrones have had just about enough. “If blood is the price of your cursed wealth, by God, we’ve paid in full”.

Winged Victory lands June 27th where you consume music and media. Take a moment, go outside, take a boombox and make everyone around you listen to the tone and tunes of the quickly disappearing middle of America. Folk isn’t dead: at least not while Willi Carlisle is still on this side of the dirt!

Find out more about Willi at the links below: