Win Tickets ($56): Willi Carlisle – Winged Victory Tour w/ Olive Klug @ Aladdin Theater | Folk, Country

We are giving away a pair of tickets Willi Carlisle w/ Olive Klug @ Aladdin Theater on October 28. To win, comment below on this post why you’d like to attend. Winner will be drawn and emailed October 20.

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From our sponsors:
Willi Carlisle – Winged Victory Tour w/ Olive Klug
October 28, 2025
7pm, 8pm | $28.07 | All Ages
Purchase Tickets: etix.com

Aladdin Theater
3017 SE Milwaukie Ave, Portland, OR 97202

Folksinger Willi Carlisle holds tight the conviction that love is bigger than hate, and no-one is expendable. Carlisle’s music has always been a dance between absurdity, spectacle, and philosophy. On his fourth studio album, Winged Victory, Carlisle returns with his signature blend of traditionally-rooted folk music and kaleidoscope of oddball characters to confer with his core tenets in more overt and provocative ways.

“These songs feel poised on the edge of the apocalypse, or at least at the beginning of a great transformation in America,” Carlisle says. “During this borrowed time, the weirdos, cowboys, and dreamers in these songs dare to love, and often pay for it with blood.”

Carlisle delivers Victory as the next chapter in his long-running direct address to the hope that by understanding our collective suffering, we might be free of it. He’s intent on creating art and a well-rounded life in a broken world. The idea began with 2022’s Peculiar, Missouri when Carlisle proclaimed “your heart’s a big tent, everybody gets in.” After gathering together all the world’s weirdos and misfits under the big tent, with 2024’s Critterland, Carlisle let them loose into the world. Now, on Winged Victory, they speak for themselves, unencumbered by social expectations.

While only a relatively short time since the van-dwelling singer-songwriter Olive Klug has fully pursued the nontraditional life of a touring musician, their sophomore album Lost Dog finds them contemplating a propensity for adventure no matter what avenue of love and loss it leads down. Although still very young, on Lost Dog Klug artfully addresses “aging as a neurodivergent free spirit” on the road with an unarguably talented ability to fearlessly voice deeply honest emotions through captivating storytelling.

Gentle at the start, album opener “Taking Punches From the Breeze” gets its title from Klug’s self-described nature of “letting the wind take them wherever they’re meant to be.” As more instrumentation fills in alongside fingerpicked guitar and Klug’s soft croon, a shuffling drum beat arrives under lyrical imagery of life’s new direction and the ups and downs of being beholden to the breeze.

Deemed by Klug as “the happiest song you’ll ever hear about unrequited love,” “What to Make of Me” is a “zydeco-inspired romp” so full of life and self-assuredness that there’s hardly room to dwell on anything remotely devastating. Pure unshakeable confidence clocking in at just under three minutes, this tune is much like the short-term romance that inspired it with the added benefit of being able to listen on repeat.