Willi Carlisle Drops New Single "Gas Station" from Tyler Childers-Produced Album

Willi Carlisle's Tyler Childers-produced double album The Universal Bubba is shaping up swimmingly. We've thus far heard the old-school folk reel " Mason Jar At The Center Of The World " and the barroom rocker " Marlboro Vinyassa ." This week Carlisle added another new single that comes with an extremely fun music video.

"Gas Station" is a Southern-fried road-trip rambler about subsisting on food from your local petrol hub. It's already so much fun on a strictly musical axis, but then Carlisle went and added a music video in which he and a crew of Muppet-like puppets drive to the gas station to eat hot dogs for dinner. It's a blast, quite literally at the end.

Carlisle shared some notes about writing "Gas Station" with Childers and co-producer Kenny Miles:

> Coming into the recording session, this song felt like a strong draft, like something left in the fridge to proof or set like a dough. I liked it though: my whole life summarized. All this work, hauling, beating up the highway, singing for hours, just to eat dinner at the gas station. It was late in our two weeks of recording before we got to this song, and I kept wondering if we would cut it. But Tyler came into the studio, wild-eyed, guitar in hand, no shoes, a little haggard. He had an idea, and took my kinda simple blues progression and changed the feel. It became a lot more direct, less tongue-in-cheek. More honest. We stood, started singing, changing words here and there, agreeing and disagreeing. We cut a take with the drummer. We sat in a circle with pen, paper, instruments. Tyler suggested, “goodle days” instead of “good old days.” Kenny kept nodding, fixing mistakes. We kept shaping verses, agreeing that my choruses were working. Suddenly I realized, this was a cowrite! But the red light was already on, the tape rolling. We were writing and recording at the same time. Wild as hell. In the long run, it felt like we should both be singing it, so we doubled up on the choruses. Tyler’s joke at the top captures some of the energy we had there— getting in a “knife fight at apple day” might be the spirit of this whole record. It’s a record that should sound like getting drunk at the Civil War reenactment, cruising for tail at the cattle auction, dropping acid at the square dance.

Yes, that's Childers' voice in there along with Carlisle. And yes, that's a Childers lookalike among the puppets! Mike Vanata directed the video, which you can watch below.

_Originally reported by [Stereogum](https://stereogum.com/2513251/willi-carlisle-gas-station/music/)._