Kelley Mickwee
“Everything Beautiful” BIO
In the end, three days was all it took to record Kelley Mickwee’s Everything Beautiful. The songs were all written a fair bit before she hunkered down with producer David Boyle and the rest of the players at Austin’s Church House Studios over those three days in October 2023, and overdubs, mixing, and mastering all took a reasonable amount of time after that. But soup to nuts, the whole project — Mickwee’s second solo album, releasing September 27, 2024 — still came together in well under a year. And a mere 10 years after her first one.
Now, that last point merits some clarification. It’s not like Mickwee just up and disappeared after releasing 2014’s You Used to Live Here, her solo debut after spending five years touring and recording with the acclaimed Texas-based Americana band The Trishas (and a handful of years before that in the Memphis duo, Jed and Kelley). She spent several years hosting her own “River Girl Radio” show on Austin’s Sun Radio, and from 2017-2021 performed in front of some of the the biggest audiences of her career as a Shiny Soul Sister in Kevin Russell’s explosively entertaining and wildly popular band Shinyribs. She also sang on a whole bunch of records by friends including Ray Wylie Hubbard, Charley Crockett, Silverada, Owen Temple, and Reckless Kelly, and for the last dozen years (going on 13) has also co-hosted the Red River Songwriters Festival, her annual gathering (and accompanying mini tour) with kindred spirits Susan Gibson, Josh Grider, Drew Kennedy, and Walt Wilkins.
And yet, as busy as she stayed over the past decade, Mickwee’s solo career was noticeably back burnered for much of that time. This was very much by her own volition, for the simple reason that she just missed being part of a team — as she had happily been with Liz Foster, Savannah Welch, and Jamie Lin Wilson until The Trishas decided to go on extended hiatus circa 2013, after they all ended up living in different cities. Mickwee transitioned into going it alone for the first time in her musical life with earnest confidence, self-producing You Used to Live Here, but within a couple of years decided to take another little hiatus — this time from herself. For her, joining Shinyribs was kind of like running away with the circus. “I just wanted to be part of a band again, to take a break from having to focus on me for a while and just sink into the role of being a background singer,” she says. That “break” was hardly a vacation; she quickly came to find out that singing and dancing her ass off as a Shiny Soul Sister was hard — but it was also a blast. “It was fun to just be a goofball for awhile, but mostly I was so grateful for that experience because it definitely helped me become a better singer and performer, just pushing myself every night to match (fellow Shiny Soul Sister) Alice Spencer’s power and intensity — not to mention Kevin’s! But as much as I enjoyed the whole ride, at the end of the day I realized I finally wanted to get back to doing my own thing. And this time … I was ready.”
Everything Beautiful certainly proves that readiness in spades, but Mickwee didn’t jump into making the album immediately after hanging up her sparkly Shiny Soul Sister pants in 2021. Post pandemic, she first eased back into her solo stride via a handful of singles, beginning with a vinyl 45 in 2021 pairing “Boomtown to Bust” and “Let’s Just Pretend (We’re Holding Hands),” both produced by Mickwee’s friend Jonathan Tyler. Two more Tyler-produced singles (“Gold Standard” and “Love Tonight,” a duet with Dan Dyer) followed in 2022, and in 2023 she recorded a pair of covers (“Life’s Little Ups and Downs” and “Tennessee Valentine,” a duet with Raul Malo) with Bruce Robison for his all-analog label, The Next Waltz. All six of those singles leaned heavily on the classic country side, suggesting that nearly 20 years of living in Texas — not to mention many a writing trip to Nashville as part of the Trishas’ publishing deal — had made an indelible imprint on Mickwee’s artistic voice. But by the time she finally felt she had enough other new songs to fit together for a proper album-length statement, it was her Memphis roots that pulled the whole thing into focus.
“When I came out of the pandemic, and also took my leave of Shinyribs, I hadn’t quite figured out yet what direction I was going to go in as far as my next album — I just wanted to start releasing new music to kind of reintroduce myself to the scene,” she says. “And I definitely had a little country run there, because ’Gold Standard’ and ‘Boomtown to Bust’ were written with Willie Nelson and George and Tammy and Loretta Lynn all in mind, and then I cut that Charlie Rich song with Bruce. I mean, I do love a good country waltz, and I still have a lot of those in my set when I play live. But when it came time to do a full album, I just really wanted to make a soul record. To make my version of a soul record.
“When I first sat down with David Boyle to have our ‘what do we want to do with these songs’ talk, the first record I had in mind was Dusty in Memphis,” she continues, then laughs. “And yes, I’m sure a lot of people before me have named that record as touchstone! But I told him I just really like the sound of that record, the way her vocals sound, the band, everything about it. And David went, ‘Ah — I know what you mean, and I got you! We can do our version of that.’ So that was definitely part of the intent from the start. But it was also more than just that one album. People ask me a lot, ‘Where did your singing style come from?’ And a lot of it is from growing up in Memphis. Because not only was that music on the radio there a lot, but I was going out to hear live music in Memphis at a pretty early age, like even in high school, using my fake ID to sneak into clubs, and a lot of those local musicians had a big influence me. So I really tried my best to ‘represent’ by making a record that sounds like a girl from Memphis, because that’s who I am — even though I made that record in Austin, Texas.”
The fact is, Mickwee has been representing that “girl from Memphis” her entire career. You could hear it way back in Jed and Kelley, before she was even writing songs, and all through both albums she recorded with the Trishas, even when she wasn’t taking the lead vocal. And of course it was very much a part of You Used to Live Here, too — especially on the soulful opener, “River Girl,” her co-write with Kevin Welch which arguably remains her signature song to this day. “I’m proud of that song, and that whole record, which actually was recorded in Memphis,” she says. “But it was made on a really tight, shoestring budget, and the songs were kind of all over the place, style wise. With Everything Beautiful, it was really important to me that all the songs worked together and flowed into each other like one piece. I wanted it to be a true album album, from beginning to end.”
And that it most definitely is. From the opening notes of “Joyful” straight through to the closing title track, Everything Beautiful is as seamless as it is sumptuous, rewarding listeners who tuck in for the full course with not only the finest batch of originals that Mickwee has ever wrapped her whole heart and never-better voice around, but also a collection that all but begs to be heard on a home stereo system — ideally on “wax.” Mickwee credits the album’s rich, organic sound to Boyle’s decidedly old-school engineering and mixing sensibilities. “I first worked with him when he produced Fog & Bling for Shinyribs, which was one of the two albums I sang on while I was in the band. We did that record at Church House Studios, too, and I just loved the space and the way he worked. Call me biased, but I think it’s the best sounding Shinyribs record!”
She was especially impressed by the way Boyle recorded her and her fellow Shiny Soul Sister Alice Spencer’s vocals on Fog & Bling — the same Spencer that Mickwee recruited to arrange the backup vocals on Everything Beautiful. “Alice wrote all of those parts, and she sings them, too, with Tony Kamel, Bruce Hughes, and Courtney Patton,” she enthuses. “And those harmonies are one my favorite things about the whole record! I can’t help but smile every time I hear them and just think they’re so cool, the way they kind of take the place of a whole horn section.”
Yes, you read (and will surely hear) that right: There are no horns on Everything Beautiful. Nor, Mickwee adds with a hint of proud mischief, is there a single acoustic guitar in the mix. Not on “Force of Nature,” the lead single co-written with her good friend Owen Temple, let alone on “Verge of Tears” or “Let’s Run Away,” both co-written with her even older friend Jed Zimmerman (the same “Jed” of Jed and Kelley fame), or even on the oldest song on the record, “Long Goodbye,” a Trishas-era co-write with Jamie Lin Wilson and Gary Nicholson. Mickwee concedes that will make things a bit interesting should she ever find herself performing any of these songs in an acoustic setting, which she inevitably will, given that “singer-songwriter” is still very much a part of her whole deal as a once again full-time solo artist (especially come Red River Songwriter Festival time every winter). But because that singer will always still be that “girl from Memphis,” and because all but one of those songs are that songwriter’s own (the lone exception being “About Time,” penned by her steel guitarist, Colin Brooks), rest assured that no matter the room or setting or however many other people are playing with her onstage, every ounce of honest soul cooked into Everything Beautiful will still come across loud and clear. All Mickwee ever has to do is the one thing she’s always loved to do the most, be it as a Trisha, Shiny Soul Sister, or River Girl going it alone: Sing.
