Kelley Mickwee

When most artists decide it’s time to begin a bold new phase of their career, more often than not they’ll chalk it up to a need to step outside the lines of their regular comfort zone or to express a side of themselves previously muted by audience expectations or the democratic process of a band dynamic. But ask Austin’s Kelley Mickwee about the impetus for her first-ever venture into solo waters after years of being a duo and group member, and she’ll straight-up tell you it was a matter of survival. “I’m totally starting from scratch again,” says the 34-year-old singer-songwriter. “And it’s scary, starting from what’s basically a blank slate — but it was totally out of necessity.” But as they say, “necessity is the mother of invention.” Might have been Plato who said it first, and a few other folks here and there since him, but for our purposes here, “they” would of course be the Trishas — the band of sisters (in song if not by blood) that Mickwee hooked up with a year after moving to central Texas from her native Memphis. “Mother of Invention” was the leadoff track on the Trishas’ winsome 2012 full-length debut, High, Wide and Handsome, and at the time its “make something out of nothing” message seemed to be the story of the band itself: four gifted young singers — not all of them (Mickwee included) yet songwriters or even musicians in the beginning — who somehow parlayed what was supposed to be a one-off gig at a Kevin Welch tribute concert into a life-changing adventure across the highways and byways of Americana roots music. It was a beautiful journey, and full of promise, too, with the Trishas quickly carving out their own niche in the all-too-often male-dominated Texas music scene while simultaneously building a growing audience across the rest of the country via thousands of miles of touring in their trusty van. But alas, keeping that good thing going proved harder and harder once life (certainly not personality clashes or musical differences) scattered the four girls across Texas and as far afield as Nashville. So after five years, countless happy memories, and one last (for now) fling together on Delbert McClinton’s music cruise in January 2014, they all decided to take an open-ended break, leaving each band member free to go their own way.