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.