Today we’re happy to present the premiere of Kelley Mickwee’s “Take Me Home,” a track from her upcoming full length, You Used to Live Here.
With a laid-back rhythm section and soaring pedal steel playing, the track highlights Mickwee’s pure, affecting vocal performance.
She shares, "This song came out of a phone call I made to my husband from Nashville on a writing trip. I was feeling discouraged and overwhelmed and he told me simply, 'take those feelings and write a song about them!'"
"I had an appointment later that afternoon with Phoebe Hunt. Turns out she was feeling some of the same things, so we wrote this one pretty quick. And just like that, my song was the medicine I needed."
Take a listen to “Take Me Home” below, where Mickwee is playing George Reiff's 1979 sunburst Gibson J-45.
Slated for release July 22, It’s easy to hear You Used to Live Here as the kind of record Kelley Mickwee was born to make.
After more than a decade of fine-tuning her performance chops, first as half of the Tennessee-based folk duo Jed and Kelley and later as part of the all-girl Texas group the Trishas, Mickwee is releasing an official solo debut that plays like an all-pieces-falling-into-place mission statement of a seasoned artist who’s finally come into her own.
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But asked about the impetus for the album, she’ll straight-up tell you that it wasn’t so much carpe-diem moxie as it was, well, a kind of panic. “It’s scary, starting from what’s basically a blank slate, but it was totally out of necessity,” says the singer-songwriter, who in late 2013 found herself facing the question of “what next” when the Trishas decided to take an open-ended break after a five-year run as one of the most promising up-and-coming acts on the Americana music scene.
For Mickwee, the prospect of “starting from scratch” as a solo act was initially more terrifying than thrilling. “But I realized I was basically going to be out of a job, so I needed to start getting self sufficient!”
The truth is, Mickwee’s always been more than capable of looking out for herself — and others; they didn’t call her “Finance Trish” in her last band for nothing. Her DIY work ethic (not to mention her marketing degree from the University of Memphis) came in handy throughout her Trishas tenure as well as during the seven years she spent touring and recording as Jed and Kelley.
And of course she’s long since proven that she can sing, having taken formal voice lessons since she was 7 years old (after her piano teacher told her mother that, as a piano student, Kelley made a great singer.) After Jed and Kelley broke up and Mickwee moved to Texas, she continued singing onstage with famed songwriter Kevin Welch for a spell, and her sultry Southern drawl seasoned the Trishas’ trademark heavenly harmonies with smoke and earthy grit. She also played guitar and mandolin with the band and found her voice as a songwriter, co-writing seven songs on the Trishas’ 2012 album High, Wide and Handsome.
Given that the Trishas initially came together to play what was supposed to be a one-off gig at a Welch tribute concert, it’s fitting that a song Mickwee later co-wrote with Welch — the gospel/soul infused “River Girl” — would play a key role in shaping her debut solo album. “I was watching that documentary about all of the music that came out of Muscle Shoals, and they kept using this term ‘river people,’ like people who grew up next to a big river,” says Mickwee, who, being a native of Memphis, naturally took the term to heart. “That gave me the idea to write something that was as close as I could get to Aretha. Of course I’ll never be anywhere near as cool she was, but I started writing it and then finished it with Kevin, because I knew he was the perfect guy to help me write a song like that.”
Mickwee’s desire to get as close to Aretha and the spirit of the song as possible was a big part of what led her back home to Memphis to record the album. Because as much as she’s grown to love her adopted Austin and its own deep pool of musical talent over the last eight years, she knew the sounds she heard in her head could only be brought to life by the Memphis cats she grooved to all through high school and college.
“There’s just something about the way those guys play, and it’s a sound that nobody [in Austin] really sounds like, you know?” she says. “It’s a totally different element, and I don’t know what it is, but it’s just like all these guys grew up playing in countless different bands together, and those Memphis boys just keep it loose! And I wanted it to sound like that. The engineer, Kevin Cubbins — he’s one of the best in Memphis, and he was in a few bands back in the day that I used to go see play all the time. All these guys are people that I’ve known since I sang my first note in public, so I knew I’d be really comfortable around them.”
Mickwee (acoustic guitar and mandolin) and her dream band of mostly Memphis musicians — including her husband, organ and guitar player Tim Regan; pedal steel player Eric Lewis; drummer Paul Taylor; and bassist Mark Edgar Stuart — recorded the album’s seven tracks, all live, over a day and a half in a home studio set up in the living room of a mansion formerly owned by the late Civil War historian Shelby Foote, the author of Shiloh. “The house is old and weird and funky, sort of run down and full of holes, but the studio has all this vintage, antique gear in it,” says Mickwee. “And I mean, it was trippy! The whole experience was really cool."
Acoustic Nation is written by Laura B. Whitmore, a music industry marketing veteran, music journalist and editor, who has contributed to Parade.com, Guitar World, and others. She has interviewed hundreds of musicians and hosts the She Rocks Podcast. As the founder of the Women’s International Music Network, she advocates for women in the music industry and produces the annual She Rocks Awards. She is the Senior Vice President of Marketing for Positive Grid, making the world safe for guitar exploration everywhere! A guitarist and singer/songwriter, Laura is currently co-writing an album of pop songs that empower and energize girls.
