Willi Carlisle: The Critterland! Tour
Mercury Lounge
Tulsa
July 11, 2024
In Willi Carlisle’s song “Tulsa’s Last Magician,” an aspiring trickster lives and dies on the side streets of America’s side cities: Tulsa, Reno, Santa Fe, Tampa and inevitably Tulsa again. The protagonist goes from idealist savant, with talent beyond understanding, to a dying computer fixer, yelling at his television. It’s the most streamed song on Carlisle’s 2022 album Peculiar, Missouri by a country mile, and it certainly strikes a chord with Tulsans — especially those who have left Oklahoma and returned.
If Carlisle felt any heavy emotional debt towards Tulsa when he took the stage on a swampy Thursday night at Mercury Lounge, he didn’t show it. He cold-opened the night with naught but castanets and a harmonica, diving into “What the Rocks Don’t Know,” a raucous, mostly-a-cappella song that not only details instability with its stumbling, stuttering and crying, but also enacts it, with wild lyrical swings and gorgeously incongruent couplets (“Damn I found Jesus in a barbecue line/Damn I found Jesus in a barbecue line”) that follow, ostensibly, Carlisle’s life on the road. Immediately he was on the crowd’s side, whipping through his set with the edgy lucid grace of an Adderall binge and a psilocybin sidecar.
If you’re not familiar with Willi Carlisle yet, you’re missing out on some of the most energized folk songwriting happening in this part of the country. Carlisle works out of the Ozarks, and he sounds it. Think Pete Seeger if he grew up listening to punk in the internet age, railing against Walmart, transphobia and Elon Musk. There’s a homespun quality to Carlisle’s work, pushing old melodies through new, encyclopedic lyrics that would stymie a lesser singer. He should have been on a Tiny Desk last year.
“Embarrass your neighbor,” he urged the crowd in his baritone, leading us to sing along with “I Won’t Be Afraid Anymore,” a hymn whose title tells you lyrically what you need to know. He played “Tulsa’s Last Magician” early in the set, and played it fast, telling us that, actually, the song was about Louisville, but Tulsa sounded better. I’m not sure if I believe him, but it’s a good story — and that’s a sentiment I feel about much of Carlisle’s tremendous work.
Even his inconsistencies I find interesting; “Critterland,” the title track from his newest album, falls flat for me, even as its grandiosity pushes me to listen, while “Higher Lonesome,” the mellow sixth track, stops me in my tracks every time I hear it. Both songs worked well in the dank, beer-soaked Merc, with a sold-out crowd gathered to listen.
If I had any criticism of Carlisle’s show, it was his handling of “Tulsa’s Last Magician,” which came about too early and was too rushed to allow the crowd to feel the sadistic depth to which it sinks to deliver its emotional payload. I wished he would have saved the song for somewhere near the end, but maybe he doesn’t feel about the song the way that I do, the way that likely many Tulsans feel: that it’s a little too close to home. And I suppose not everyone is trying to get closer to home. Some are content with a manic, impressive folk performance, with powerful vocals and brainy lyrics, brash and talented multi-instrumentalism, and just a little accordion. Luckily, they got that too.
Next at Mercury Lounge: Bluegrass Brunch with Johnny Mullenax, July 21
