Folksinger Willi Carlisle holds tight the conviction that love is bigger than hate, and no-one is expendable. Carlisle’s music has always been a dance between absurdity, spectacle, and philosophy. On his fourth studio album, Winged Victory, Carlisle returns with his signature blend of traditionally-rooted folk music and kaleidoscope of oddball characters to confer with his core tenets in more overt and provocative ways.

“These songs feel poised on the edge of the apocalypse, or at least at the beginning of a great transformation in America,” Carlisle says. “During this borrowed time, the weirdos, cowboys, and dreamers in these songs dare to love, and often pay for it with blood.”

Carlisle delivers Victory as the next chapter in his long-running direct address to the hope that by understanding our collective suffering, we might be free of it. He’s intent on creating art and a well-rounded life in a broken world. The idea began with 2022’s Peculiar, Missouri when Carlisle proclaimed “your heart’s a big tent, everybody gets in.” After gathering together all the world’s weirdos and misfits under the big tent, with 2024’s Critterland, Carlisle let them loose into the world. Now, on Winged Victory, they speak for themselves, unencumbered by social expectations.

Victory, Carlisle’s first self-produced album, will be released June 27 via Signature Sounds. It both indulges several of his wildest dreams and feels like the inevitable sequel to Critterland’s charismatic menagerie of chaos. Though occasionally raunchy, and routinely provocative, Victory is not afraid to make a spectacle for the sake of a point. Victory should be understood as a reflection. It revels in the beauty of tiny, monetarily-worthless moments and things, offering with them a consideration of our innate humanity.

To set the stakes of the story, Carlisle opens with a cover of protest song “We Have Fed You All for 1000 Years.” Written by an unidentified Industrial Workers of the World member (IWW) for an early union strike, the song lays out one of the many ways the working class sustains the world.

“I can think of no better way to set the terms of any argument that I'm going to make than, ‘if, blood is the price of your cursed wealth/ by God, we've paid in full,’” Carlisle says, quoting the song. “I love that it’s a voice from time immemorial that is singing out about one of the oldest issues in all of history. These stories are almost always written by the victor, but here is a rare exception–a possibility.”

Carlisle has a knack for delivering a message through absurd scenes. To his eccentric cohort of weirdos and misfits, he adds a donkey named, ‘Winged Victory,’ on the album’s title track.

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