In his first go-round as a producer, Childers oversees Carlisle’s forthcoming album The Universal Bubba
Back in early 2025, when Willi Carlisle was on tour with Tyler Childers in Australia, the two artists fostered what would become a creative partnership. Fueled by talks about the musicians they loved and some Wallace Stephens poetry, Carlisle was inspired to write “The Mason Jar at the Center of the World, the first single from his forthcoming double album, The Universal Bubba — which features Childers in the producer’s chair.
Due this November, it’s the first record that Childers has produced, and finds the endlessly creative Carlisle honing and expanding his brand of folk music that leans into quirk and tradition in equal measure. Listen to “The Mason Jar at the Center of the World,” a banjo and fiddle-driven existential meditation, below.
“This record came together by luck, passion, and circumstance,” Carlisle tells Rolling Stone. “Tyler and I had talked a lot about songs while I was opening for him. We sat down and played old-time fiddle music together, too, which was a big joy. I played banjo, Tyler fiddled, and we just gabbed on this and that. We talked about ‘Tomcat and a Dandy,’ his song on Snipe Hunter, and played it through a few times together. It truly was just a fun time, an Appalachian and an Ozark guy picking tunes, sharing folk music.”
