Amigo The Devil

AMIGO THE DEVIL BIO

Danny Kiranos, the Austin-based songwriter behind the Amigo the Devil project, has somehow managed to meld the worlds (and fanbases) of traditional folk, country music, rock, and metal into one.  The sonic experience is morbid, yet poetic and oddly romantic.  His unique artistic perspective and ability to connect with audiences has allowed him to amass a dedicated, cult-like fan-base. Loaded with sing-alongs – and an unsuspecting dose of humor to make otherwise grim topics accessible for fans of every genre – the songs still remain deeply rooted in the tradition of story-telling…something that seems to be a lot less common nowadays. Attending an Amigo the Devil show is an experience: you become one with a wildly prophetic man, armed only with his entrancing voice and a banjo, and bear witness to an astounding performance that will stick with you for a long time.

A key figure in the U.S. ‘murder folk’ scene, Kiranos was initially influenced by the likes of Tom Waits, Nick Cave and Godspeed! You Black Emperor.  Following a number of well-received single and EP releases, the debut album by Amigo the Devil ‘Everything Is Fine’ was produced by Ross Robinson, renowned for his work with major league hard rock/metal acts such as Korn, Slipknot, At The Drive In, and Glassjaw. The album also features drummer Brad Wilk (Rage Against the Machine, Audioslave, Prophets of Rage) sitting in on the entire recording session. 

His follow-up record and latest release, ‘Born Against’, reveals him to be more than a one-trick pony stylistically. “Every new record is an opportunity to sit and think about how much has changed in your life and the world around you,” Kiranos says. “It’s a new opportunity to bring in both new and old influences. I really wanted to dive into ideas that I’d either been avoiding or ignoring within myself and figure out ways to align them with music I grew up listening to. Influences that may have been set aside in our older recordings.”

Kiranos, who grew up in Miami in a multicultural household, decamped to Dallas to record the album at the venerable Modern Electric Studio with Beau Bedford (Texas Gentlemen). This marked the first time Kiranos had explored some of the world music he'd long loved, including Eastern European folk and Australian country (“It has such an amazing sound to it,” he says of the honky-tonk of Down Under. “The rhythms are so dry and brutal.”) Kiranos felt Bedford was the only producer who could draw those sounds out of him. Together they entered the studio with merely the skeletons of the songs Kiranos had written. One by one, they fleshed them out in wildly inventive fashion. To say they threw the kitchen sink at this album would be an understatement; these guys threw the whole damn shack.

“The Fellowship” – as Amigo’s die-hard fans refer to themselves – continues to grow with each new show played and album released.  His continued connection with audiences and unique, empathic lyrics are sure to carry Amigo the Devil into the hearts of many more. There is hope in the volatile, peace in the macabre, and light not just inside the tunnel but all around, and Amigo the Devil is here to tell us how.

---

Willi Carlisle is a poet and a folk singer for the people. Like his hero Utah Phillips, Carlisle's extraordinary gift for turning a phrase isn't about high falutin' pontificatin'; it's about looking out for one another and connecting through our shared human condition. On his anticipated second album, the magnum opus Peculiar, Missouri (coming July 15, 2022 on Free Dirt Records), Carlisle makes the case across twelve epic tracks that love truly can conquer all. Born and raised on the Midwestern plains, Carlisle is a product of the punk to folk music pipeline that’s long fueled frustrated young men looking to resist. After falling for the rich ballads and tunes of the Ozarks, where he now lives, he began examining the full spectrum of American musical history. This insatiable stylistic diversity is obvious on Peculiar, Missouri which was produced by Grammy-winning engineer and Cajun musician Joel Savoy in rural Louisiana. The songs range from sardonic trucker songs like “Vanlife” to the heartbreaking queer waltz “Life on the Fence.” The album also imbues class consciousness in songs like “Este Mundo,” a cowboy border ballad about water rights, and the title track’s existential talkin’ blues about a surreal panic attack in Walmart’s aisle five. Though Carlisle's poetic words evoke the mystical American storytelling of Whitman, Sandburg, and e e cummings, ultimately this is bonafide populist folk music in the tradition of cowboys, frontier fiddlers, and tall-tale tellers. Carlisle recognizes that the only thing holding us back from greatness is each other. With Peculiar, Missouri, he brings us one step closer to breaking down our divides. If Carlisle’s songs are full of salt-of-the-earth heroes, it’s because he grew up deep in the rural, small-town life of the American Midwest, in Kansas and Illinois. Captain of the football team in high school, he was also secretly queer and interested in poetry and singing, living in those culturally contradictory spaces as a 6'4'', 300lb gentle giant. He came to music in Illinois through punk, screaming out his angst into a microphone at the roughneck bars in his town that had filled up with out-of-work Maytag plant workers. Like other punk rockers looking to branch out, he turned to folk music. Different scenes, perhaps, but they often met in the same DIY community spaces. Enamored with the written word, he moved to the Ozarks on a fellowship to teach literature, and fell in love with the landscapes of these ancient mountains. “In the Ozarks,” Carlisle says, “I acclimated to the specifics of the land, like the feel of a dogwood flower, the crush of a magnolia leaf. The way that everything is full of human blood and buds. Pretty much the first moment I got in the Ozarks, I was transported.” An oft-ignored region rife with generational traditions, the Ozarks became the fertile land that incubated Carlisle as a poet and songwriter. Though Carlisle came to the Ozarks to teach poetry, he quickly realized that the mainstream literary world had little appreciation for the earthy traditions he came from. “I wanted to be involved in something that was high-falutin’. I really did. My parents and my family struggled to reach the middle class. It defines their generational and epigenetic perch. The American Dream incarnate.” Hanging out in New York off a poetry award, rubbing shoulders with Pulitzer winners, Carlisle was shocked to realize they all came from privilege and knew each other from Martha’s Vineyard. Worse, when they learned he was from the Ozarks, they assailed him with hillbilly pig-fucking jokes. Carlisle had turned to poetry in his youth looking for queer voices, soaking up the subtle homoeroticism of cummings, Whitman, or Sandburg, but he couldn’t see himself in the world of “page poets.” Since Carlisle had already been drawn to worker poets and songwriters like Woody Guthrie and Utah Phillips, it made sense to turn to a grittier form of American poetry: the humble folk song. Setting his poems to music, he started singing on porches around campus, moved to street corner busking, slept under overpasses, traveled and traveled and learned songs and music from whomever he could. He fell in with experimental theater types in the Ozarks, lived on collective farms, took up the button accordion, learned some polkas. Many artists have an insatiable curiosity, but few travel all the many branches of their interests like Carlisle does. And you can hear that in his music. The songs on Carlisle’s upcoming album, Peculiar, Missouri, come from his travels around the US, his belief that love is the only way forward for our country, and his critique of late-stage capitalism. The songs are intensely personal, but feel universal. That’s the magic of Carlisle’s songwriting. He’s felt every step of his travels, lived every moment, and uses these memories to fuel his songwriting. The cut-rate prestidigitators on “Tulsa’s Last Magician” come out of a surreal night of partying in Florida with a troupe of magicians. The rapid-fire patter of “The Down and Back” comes from Carlisle’s experience calling square dances. “Life on the Fence” is a heart-breakingly honest song about the trials of bisexuality in a culture that shies away from nearly any expression of love between two men. “Your Heart’s A Big Tent” sounds almost like Carlisle’s thesis statement for the album, “Just sing until you love yourself, and love until you die.” Other songs are harder takes on the sickness of late stage capitalism in America. “Vanlife'' contrasts the privileged Instagram influencers tricking out their vans for life on the road with the many hard-working men and women forced to live in their cars without homes of their own. The album’s title track, “Peculiar, Missouri” wrestles with finding humanity in the fluorescent-bathed aisles of Walmart. We tend to look at protest songs from a place of anger, of frustration. But Carlisle’s point is that these songs are written from love. We protest because we love something and want to see it made better. We highlight inequities in our culture in order to change them, to improve lives. Carlisle bristles if you ask him how he copes with a divided America. “Who told you it’s divided,” he demands. “They’ve managed to convince people that certain elements of national politics or religious politics are hills that they have to die on. Most Americans have been systematically deprived of any ability to advocate for themselves. The square dance, the concert, the independently owned record store, the coffee shop, the small press, the punk house… These are the places where the right to assemble and think freely is still living against all odds.” In a country where the idea of freedom is so beloved, perhaps it takes a free spirit like Willi Carlisle to help us remember Utah Phillips’ famous phrase, that “freedom lives between your ears