It’s been a 10-year wait, but Kelley Mickwee’s soulful new single, “Force Of Nature,” is premiering today at Glide Magazine. It’s the first release from Everything Beautiful, her first solo album in a decade and was co-written with Owen Temple and features David Jimenez on guitar. “I enlisted an amazing cast of characters, from Pumas to Gary Clark Jr. members to Heathens; it was a killer studio band,” Mickwee says. The album was recorded at Church House Studios in Austin, TX and was produced, recorded and mixed by David Boyle.
Mickwee shares: “Wrote this one for this album with my favorite co-writer, Owen Temple. I love the movement in this song. I was spending a lot of time exploring my own astrological chart and recognizing the importance of living in alignment with the phases of the moon. It’s about letting go of what we can’t control, embracing the change in all of the constant movement and acknowledging that we have within us the instinct to survive and persevere.”
LISTEN TO THE SINGLE “FORCE OF NATURE” HERE | PRE-SAVE HERE
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.”
In the end, three days was all it took to record Everything Beautiful. The songs were all written a fair bit before she hunkered down with Boyle and the rest of the players 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.
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.
“People ask me a lot, ‘Where did your singing style come from?’ And a lot of it is from growing up in Memphis,” she admits. “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.”