With the sound of a jolly story in the style of Cash’s ‘Boy Named Sue‘ or ‘One Piece at a Time‘, Willi Carlisle takes a satirical scalpel to the unravelling of the American Dream – surely the dream was never to be so poor that you had to live in your vehicle? ‘Vanlife’ is the frenetically told tale of a dive to the bottom which all starts when Willi decides to “quit my job making minimum wage” and descends through minor inconveniences like nowhere to eat and nowhere to wash, to the rather more serious “guy who’ll put a brick through my glass and rob me blind and syphon the gas.” There’s no life to compare to it.
Born and raised on the Midwestern plains, Willi Carlisle is a product of the punk to folk music pipeline that’s long fueled protest music of one form or another. ‘Vanlife‘ is a cut from Willi’s new album ‘Peculiar, Missouri‘ (out July 15th, 2022 on Free Dirt Records),
