The Grand Design

All I asked of you, was your better years…

Music was my first artistic passion. Growing up I was convinced that I would make it my life. I sang, played multiple instruments, and spent a lot of time practicing and studying to become a recording engineer. That dream died for me in 2008. It would take a few more years to realize it and even longer to recover.

In 2014 I began making a yearly playlist. I did this to help bring myself back to music. The playlist had to be at least 10 songs long and all be released in the prior year or from artists that were new to me. 12 years later, I’ve recovered my love for the art form and am once again engaging with it on the same level I did in my youth.

All I know how to do is waste them.

In 2024 I first started to engage seriously with the music of Willi Carlisle. I fell in love in a way I hadn’t since I first heard Smile by Brian Wilson. The earnestness and raw character of Carlisle’s performances are the kind of thing record producers go their entire careers trying to capture. I was hooked.

The song The Grand Design off the album Peculiar, Missouri is a very special piece of music for me personally. Since I high school I’ve kept a mental list of songs I wanted to have played at my funeral. No ceremony or service, just a playlist. The Grand Design was the first song I added to a new playlist after using the old one to put a period of my life to rest.

We’ll philosophize on the grand design….

The song is a masterwork of what I think of as ‘The Great American Popular Music Tradition’. Predating, but crystalized by the likes of Stephen Foster, the American popular music tradition is marked by a particular emotional quality. Where the lyrics and arrangement are often superseded by the way the artist lets their emotions control their performance. This has often been tempered by the demands of the recording industry and formal attitudes toward music from academic and patronage systems. The best example I think I can point to is compare the studio recordings of Sam Cooke to recordings of live performances such as Live at the Harlem Square Club.

Taking this stance, it might confuse people to know that I prefer studio recordings to seeing music live. Well, that is partially because most live music settings are sensory nightmares for me that keep me form being able to engage with the music (which is a large part of the appeal of live music). The other part is that you can do things with a studio that you can’t with a live performance. If you want to hear Dave Grohl’s drumming on a recording with Dave Grohl’s guitar playing, you need a studio recording.

Letting emotions take over the studio recording is difficult. It is a completely unnatural environment for most musicians, who often rely on an audience to feed them the energy that makes for a truly magical performance. When working in the role of a producer in a recording studio I always saw it as my job to act as the buffer between the artistic and technical, the musician and engineer. I failed more often than not, but it deepened my respect for the studio recording.

And mourn all of creation.

Where Peculiar, Missouri, and the entire discography of Willi Carlisle, really shines is the energy. A queer country kid with a masters in poetry. A former school teacher and hardcore musician. Someone deeply steeped in the tradition of the Ozarks’ particular flavor of Old Time music. Willi Carlisle is both a miracle and the inevitable creation of 250 year of American music.

Influence

Willi Carlisle has recently been one of the most influential artists on my work. Songs like The Grand Design blend the exact kind of comfort, nostalgia, and vulnerability that I’ve been chasing in my forest and nature photography. His work is unabashedly blue-collar, no-collar, and red-neck, yet has more care and artistry behind it than most of what I’ve seen in the high-brow. His blend of sensitivity, vulnerability, grief, humor, strength, courage, and love is deeply engaging, while remaining true to his roots and the traditions of American popular music.

I aspire to that level of authenticity and vulnerability in my art. I’ve been very insecure in that vulnerability and have often written about the struggles that inspired my work as a kind of justification for it. Carlisle’s music has been the soundtrack of those years and it has slowly worked on me, building a strength in my vulnerability that I am slowly bringing forward in myself.

This song means a lot to me because it is the song I wish I could sing to my past self. For much of my past I was the person in the locked room that Carlisle mentions ahead of the recording linked above. I’ve spilled my guts about the darkness in my past in posts like this before, and that isn’t something I’m interested in doing anymore. But that is the background of grief that inspires all of my art, and I cannot separate my art from that grief anymore than I can separate myself from my past.

I have no idea if any of this comes across in my photos. With all of the authenticity and vulnerability I try to put into my images, I often doubt if I’m speaking a language anyone else can understand. I hope that at least some of it is in there.

Anyway, you should probably give Willi Carlisle a listen. He is very good.