Folk singer-songwriter Willi Carlisle will release his new double album, ‘The Universal Bubba’, on November 6th, with Kentucky legend Tyler Childers serving as producer.

The ‘Cheap Cocaine’ hitmaker shares, “I think this one goes to outer space…I think this is the widest range of influences that I’ve ever had. It touches on funk, it touches on Americana, Cajun, oldtime, and experimental music”.

Carlisle also adds, “It feels like getting drunk at the Civil War reenactment, or cruising at the cattle auction, or doing molly at the square dance”.

With first-time producer, Childers, at the helm, the band cut the 17 album tracks in two weeks at a makeshift home studio somewhere in the Bywater District of New Orleans. Here, Childers and Carlisle breathed life into Carlisle’s stories and characters, curating what is now ‘The Universal Bubba’.

The duo spent time on the road together during Childers’ The Mule Pull Tour in 2024 and 2025 across North America and Australia. It was during those Australia dates that the album’s opener, ‘The Mason Jar at the Center of the World’, was written. Carlisle says about the track, “Smash together three or four folk songs against a poem and add some hard travelling, you get a song.”

Carlisle will take his new album on the road later this year, hitting venues across North America from September through to December 2026.

“The universal bubba is somebody who can fix anything,” says the Kansas native, “somebody who is good for just about anything.”