Finding a place, person or sound that feels like home can be a mysterious process. Sometimes a brand new experience can somehow recreate the feelings of the past and bring a certain kind of peace and comfort that is usually reserved for familiarity.
Melissa Carper captures this sentiment perfectly with her songs which while clearly rooted in the past provide a warmth from times gone by while also somehow managing to sound fresh and new transcending notions of time.
Melissa Carper will perform at The Heights Theater opening for Hayes Carll on Thursday, March 16 and will return to Houston with good friends and collaborators Kelly Willis and Brennen Leigh on Saturday, May 27 at The Dosey Doe Big Barn.
Since growing up in rural Nebraska, Carper has spent much of her life rambling from town to town. In her youth she sang and traveled with her family band planting the roots for her search for new sounds and places.
“I’ve moved around a lot in my lifetime,” says Carper. “I’ve lived in a lot of different places and of course touring as a musician that’s part of it too but I haven’t quite settled down yet.”
Carper has busked around the country, working in Alaska and performing with her projects Sad Daddy and The Carper Family.
“I would say the way I sing was definitely influenced by busking, learning how to project. I remember one of the first times I was busking in Eureka Springs trying to make the people on the other side of the street hear me. You learn how to sing in a certain way for sure,” she describes.
Carper’s songwriting and vocals could easily be mistaken for vintage recordings as she possesses a warmth and grit not often found in the modern world of music. Carper finds a way to smoothly harmonize with her collaborators, surely the effect of singing along to her family’s old records as a child.
“I was lucky my family played a lot of old country music so I grew up listening to that and then on my own when I started trying to discover stuff, I realized I liked old blues, jazz and all that as well as the country, bluegrass and old time music. I tried to find the oldest music I could find that was recorded and I love all that stuff.”
Recently Carper has found some roots in Texas, setting up in Bastrop and Austin as a home base and stepping into a new role, solo artist. “It’s really been a great place for me to develop and write songs,” she says of living in Texas with her partner and bandmate Rebecca Patek.
In 2021 Carper released Daddy’s Country Gold, a beautiful album that shows off her one of a kind jazzy and effortless vocals, bass playing style and songwriting abilities that she has honed over the years earning her the perfect nickname of “HillBillie Holiday” by her friend and collaborator Chris Scruggs.
“That album to me was a compilation of what I felt were my better tunes that I’d written over the last 10 years and tunes that went together on an album,” she says of Daddy’s Country Gold.
Just last year she did it again with Ramblin’ Soul where she intentionally pushed her signature old school sound to a more rock and roll and blues edge than her previous album drawing inspiration from Leadbelly and Odetta.
“Ain’t A Day Goes By” hits the listener like a punch in the heart with her sweet, melancholy crooning where Carper’s longing pushes joyful memories to deep sadness. A song inspired by her departed black Labrador Betty, it could easily be the soundtrack for the universal feeling of heartbreak complete with glorious harmonies captured in the recording.
“That’s one of my favorite things to do is sing harmony and luckily I’ve always been in bands where there’s a lot of great vocalists and everybody is able to sing harmonies.”
Melissa Carper will perform in support of Hayes Carll on Thursday, March 16 at The Heights Theater, 339 W 19. Doors open at 7 p.m, $28.
And on Saturday, May 27 at The Dosey Doe Big Barn, 25911 Interstate 45, Doors open at 6:30 p.m, $20-30.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
