The spirit of “the universal bubba” revealed itself to Willi Carlisle a few years ago while at his grandmother’s house. In that very space, the folk singer-songwriter had witnessed the matriarch prepare a lifetime’s worth of meals — dicing, mincing, julienning onions with effortless skill — often with a telephone cradled between her shoulder and a listening ear, all while tending to a babe under her care.
“My grandmother was the glue of our family — labor-wise and socially,” Carlisle explains. “She was the one who held everything together and also worked to take care of everybody. I just realized, here was somebody who could do everything, and that, over the last 10 years of traveling, I’d met a lot of people who could do everything.”
He recognized the same dexterity in wizened mechanics performing their millionth radiator flush and among ditchdiggers who could philosophize and swing their pickaxes with equal panache. These quietly impressive types, these everyday giants with a seemingly reflexive capacity to nurture, repair, and fathom all things, came to be known in Carlisle’s worldview as “universal bubbas.”
Carlisle bottled their essence inside a handful of lyrics over the years, with one particular lone chorus saluting roadside preachers and barroom pickers, but held these amorphous characters safely in his back pocket. They were with him through the complex menagerie of 2024’s Critterland (ND review) and the erudite traditionalism of Winged Victory (ND review), released the following year, but it was evident that the “universal bubbas” of the world deserved a spotlight all their own.
He says, “I just knew that this was a concept that could hold a whole record and that I had a lot to say about it, or at the very least, a lot of characters whose stories that I wanted to tell, either totally fabricated or totally real.”
With his new album, The Universal Bubba, out last Friday via Signature Sounds, these characters become the protagonists, and that solitary chorus from years prior has been both fleshed out and blown apart. Now, it properly introduces listeners to that titular spirit and anchors the hefty 17-track collection with a two-part epic about someone working the first shift at a hardware store, a shade tree mechanic-Vietnam veteran, a Catholic school rebel with heavy metal dreams, and other small-town revolutionaries putting in the work to better their communities. Throughout The Universal Bubba, listeners commune with those that make the world go ‘round, peering into the vast cosmos that exist within these remarkable, sometimes absurd, but wholly essential commonfolk.
“I knew that this [album] had more of a celebratory vibe, had a lot more goofiness in it — as much goofiness as I could get — and a lot more jokes that would make me and a lot of the characters on the record laugh,” Carlisle shares. He continues later in the conversation, “I am a pretty politicized person, and I’m certainly a political folk singer, but that’s more of an undercurrent in these songs that are primarily about these big questions from a variety of perspectives.”
Alongside “The Universal Bubba, Parts 1 and 2,” there’s the full-bellied waltz, “Good Morning, Midnight,” which honors the late-shift vampires and last-call ghouls who toil under the cover of nightfall and neon. There’s the wind-whipped “Ditchdigger's Song (Dust and the Devil)” that recognizes the dirt-caked spirituality saturating the soul of a heavy-hearted laborer. Listeners become acquainted with hometown heroes, down-and-outers, and habit-addled in-betweeners along the way, knowing there’s the rollicking “Marlboro Vinyasa,” a paradoxical homage to third spaces, ready to welcome them all in with open arms after a day’s work navigating love, sex, death, and back-breaking employment.
