On his 17th full-length album, singer-songwriter Anders Osborne describes Picasso’s Villa, “a condensed story about living in America between 2018-2021, the fears, confusion, deep joy and peace achieved through true friendship, family, community, hours of meditation and detachment from ego. Bewildered, the first track released from the album, is an impressionistic reflection on four decades of American politics and culture, from the Reagan era through the digital world of the twenty-first century. Osborne says, “Bewildered began as an exercise in historical observation but it was engaging in a fun way to deep dive into the stories of the past that created instant cultural shifts. All these basic human rights issues have been made into divisive political issues. But at the core of everything is the bewilderment of suffering and the basic human longing for bliss. We are all playing a divine, eternal game with Brahman, this world's duality prevents good nor bad from prevailing. We are bewildered and beguiled by love and fear.” The song Dark Decatur Love, describes a time in Osborne’s early twenties when he was living and working down in the French Quarter of New Orleans, “I was feeling very sentimental and missing my youth. It brought me back to a very romantic time. There were five or six years in the lower French Quarter where we had started our own little scene of artists, pool sharks, and dancers that all congregated together there. All we thought about every day was being ourselves—trying on different costumes to discover who we were, seeking for truth in the darkest places. It was a joyful exercise in reminiscing in a beautiful way.” The song Le Grand Zombie is Osborne’s response and tribute to the passing and influence of his friend and New Orleans legend Dr. John. The title song of Picasso’s Villa evokes the lives and work of legendary as a vehicle to express some of the contradictions of a musician’s life (Osborne is also a prolific painter himself). “Picasso’s Villa attempts to describe the music business and the jester like role performing musicians have. We’re a currency used, adjudicated, negotiated, transacted, valued and sometimes discarded.” The album was recorded in New Orleans with an all-star cast of backing musicians, including guitarist Waddy Wachtel, drummer Chad Cromwell bassist and Bob Glaub. Sonically, the album captures a balance between the heavy, Crazy Horse-inspired rock present in Osborne’s live shows, while simultaneously leaning into the more contemplative singer-songwriter roots that inspired his music from the very beginning. “My process is so rough and free form,” Osborne explains, “but on this record, we managed to capture all that dirt with the right amount of polish on it.” For Osborne, who has been in a twelve-step program for fifteen years, “The biggest change in getting sober was the focus on meditation and prayer, just looking more inward. When I’m sleeping in 140 different beds a year, eating unhealthy foods, the meditation is what keeps me centered. Holding myself in that sacred space for a while is what makes it possible for me to do all this.” ******************************************************** Anders Osborne was born in 1966 in Uddevalla, Sweden and at a young age knew that he spoke the language of music and poetry well. He fell in love with everything from Vivaldi, Chopin and Black Sabbath to Robert Johnson, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison and Cat Steven’s to John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan and Bob Marley. “Blues connected everything together for me," Osborne recalls. "The early rock, the R&B, the jazz, the singer-songwriters. Blues was like a thread running through everything." He began playing in open D tuning which gives his fretwork a signature sound and feel. "I first heard Open D on Joni Mitchell's Blue, and my fingers just fit the tuning.” Osborne travelled around Europe in his late teens and in 1986, when he was nineteen years old, he visited New Orleans. He fell in love with the city, and never left. Osborne released his first album Doin’ Fine in 1989 and as would be the case on is future releases, he wrote virtually all of the material. His songs have also appeared on recordings of other artists including two he co-wrote with Keb Mo for the latter’s Grammy winning Slow Down, and Tim McGraw’s number one Country hit Watch The Wind Blow By. Others who have recorded Osborne’s songs include Brad Paisley, Aaron Neville, and Trombone Shorty. After living and performing there for almost four decades Osborne has become a fixture of the New Orleans musical community. Guitar Player called him “the poet laureate of Louisiana’s fertile roots music scene.” New Orleans' Gambit Weekly has honored Osborne as the Entertainer of The Year. OffBeat named him the Crescent City’s Best Guitarist on three occasions, and the Best Songwriter twice. He has appeared at Jazz Fest for 35 years and will perform at the festival again in 2024. In addition to his solo shows, Osborne has performed with the North Mississippi All Stars with whom he recorded the album Freedom and Dreams in 2015. He has also toured with and played with Toots and the Maytals, John Scofield to The Meters, No Derek Trucks, Warren Haynes, Stanton Moore Phil Lesh, Jackie Greene Bonnie Raitt, Dr. John and Taj Mahal. Osborne appeared as himself in an episode of the HBO series Treme and he has taught a course about art and the music business at Tulane University. Since 2019, Osborne has collaborated with Steve Earle at the annual Camp Copperhead songwriting camp. Osborne works closely with the “Send Me A Friend” foundation and through writing music for New Orleans Children’s Museum. He has additionally worked closely with Million Strong, Love Rocks NYC, Stand Together, Trombone Shorty Foundation and Phoenix. Photo: Zach Smith

For folksinger Willi Carlisle, singing is healing. And by singing together, he believes we can begin to reckon with the inevitability of human suffering and grow in love. On his latest album, Critterland, Carlisle invites audiences to join him: "If we allow ourselves to sing together, there's a release of sadness, maybe even a communal one. And so for me personally, singing, like the literal act of thinking through suffering, is really freeing," he says. Rooted in the eclectic and collective world of his live shows, Carlisle's third album, Critterland takes up where his sophomore album, Peculiar, Missouri left off, transforming Peculiar's big tent into a Critterland menagerie and letting loose the weirdos he gathered together. The album is a wild romp through the backwaters of his mind and America, lingering in the odd corners of human nature to visit obscure oddballs, dark secrets, and complicated truths about the beauty and pain of life and love. Produced by the GRAMMY Award-nominated Darrell Scott and to be released Jan. 26, 2024 by Signature Sounds, Critterland considers where we come from and where we are going. On the album, he takes on human suffering through stories about forbidden love, loss, generational trauma, addiction, and suicide, believing that by processing the traits and trauma we inherit, he can reach a deeper understanding of what it means to succeed and to exist. "In many ways, the suffering that has gotten us here is going to control us. Our superstition and our prejudice is going to control us," Carlisle says. "But in another way, we're physiologically set up to be instantaneously expressive of all of those feelings. And what comes out in moments of collectivity, is not just singing, but what I'd hope is a national reckoning with these various different kinds of suffering." Throughout Critterland runs Carlisle's unease with the tension between love and the reality of an often painful world. He's adamant that everyone should find and feel love, including queer love, love with no reproductive purpose, and love of ourselves; "I think at the heart of the record is the conflict between those two things, between doomed love and the possibility that that love creates," he says. But for Carlisle, finding the possibilities that love creates is often tinged with profound sadness, and he describes Critterland as "more of a Sunday morning crier than a Saturday night banger." On "The Arrangements," he speaks as a son ruminating on the traits he's inherited from an imperfect father as he prepares for the man's funeral; in "Dry County Dust," he revels in the simple trappings of country life he loves intimately, like home-made jam and backyard chickens, all while considering the shackles of expectation; in "The Great Depression," a dust bowl ballad heavy with implications for our current era, Carlisle leans on the term's double meaning; with "I Want No Children," he unapologetically requests that his family name die with him; and in the album's final track, "The Money Grows on Trees," he crafts an outlaw tale into a seven-minute indictment of capitalism and greed. Carlisle wants not only to process pain, but to seek meaning in it. In the middle of the album, in "Two Headed Lamb," Carlisle riffs on a poem by Laura Gilpin, in which the doomed lamb [4] lives for a short, bittersweet moment in a world that reflects its abundance: "and I know scattered o'er the cursed world / there are frightening bones to find/ bones of people born too soon, lambs too strange to survive," Carlisle sings, "and as he walked out that mornin,' the old man didn't look to see /out of season sweet persimmons in the old-growth tree." By adding a farmer who's failed to grasp the beauty of the moment, Carlisle raises the story's stakes to meditate on who and what the world allows to thrive and how we perceive what falls outside of our expectations. For Carlisle, the album's also an opportunity to strike a tricky balance. Acutely aware that his song "Cheap Cocaine," resulted in some of his early success, he's careful now how he talks about drugs. Older and wiser, he wants to consider addiction and its destruction without completely eschewing drug use. "I want to be able to write about drugs in a way that isn't glorifying, but has a social purpose. And I don't feel like we're doing that with Americana music much," he says. Treading lightly along that line, Carlisle penned the album's penultimate track, "When the Pills Wear Off," with Billy Keane. Thriving on a haunting, sweet refrain that braids illicit queer love and drug addiction into one story, Carlisle searches for the nuance in his character's pain and shame: "I lost friends to heroin, plenty more to lovin' them / Strung out on the highway like we couldn't read the signs / Now that I am older and burn a little colder / I know how to read between the lines." In between the lines Carlisle finds life's lessons, insisting that complication is important and cautioning listeners not to take his exploration and quest for understanding as a recommendation: "I don't want to hit rock bottom. I'm not advocating to not have children. I'm not advocating to be a drug addict," he says. "I'm saying that you got to shine a light on the worst impulses to see where they go to, so that you're not afraid of them, and so that you can guide yourself into more love with greater certainty." And as always, living in a world whose politics seek to divide and control, Carlisle comes back to one essential question: "How do we save love from hate?" Sing along and find out.