"Watch out, there's a bird's nest in the outhouse," Melissa Carper warns as she points out the small wooden shed. "And the door won't close all the way."

The homestead that she and her partner, Rebecca Patek, share on a 15-acre farm in Bastrop flares with a feral charm. There are solar panels on the roof of the rented tiny cabin, which has been expanded with a colorfully painted converted shipping container into a two-room outpost, with a small kitchen and a connecting porch. An expansive deck runs along the back of the house, looking out over the harvested fields that slope down to the Colorado River.

It's late April and the wildflowers are beginning to fade, but the pastoral sounds still background the solitude far removed from any main road. Beans and rice with okra cook for lunch in the small 1960 Mobile Scout vintage trailer parked amid the trees, as Georgia, Carper's 9-year-old whippet, bounces through the grass.

"Sometimes we can't believe that we get to live here," Carper muses.

It's easy to understand the appeal of being largely off the grid for the songwriter. Carper embodies her own sense of modern rusticity, uneasy in crowds or in the spotlight, but with a restless and thoughtful curiosity. On stage, she takes advantage of her upright bass to position herself at the edge of the band, even when leading her band.

Likewise, her music wrangles sounds of a different era – country jazz, honky-tonk, and a bluesy soul unfurling with the thick twang of her vocals – yet can also swing provocatively playful and progressive. The result is less a throwback, though, than a fusion of styles into a new, adventurous, old-time-steeped Americana that situates alongside similar rising artists like Sierra Ferrell or Charley Crockett.

Carper and Patek moved back to the farm from Nashville in the fall of 2020. With gigs canceled and venues shut down, Music City didn't have much to offer beyond high rent. "It was Rebecca's idea actually," Carper admits. "She loved when we lived on this farm and she kind of always wanted to come back."

Carper had left Austin in 2014, after six years playing in numerous bands around town. Her primary concern, the Carper Family – a trio with fiddler Beth Chrisman and guitarist Jenn Miori – had just begun gaining traction beyond Austin when the band's namesake decided she needed a break. She and Patek moved back to Arkansas, which had been a home base for Carper for more than a decade before first landing in Austin.

"I didn't wanna live in a city anymore," she says of her ATX exit. "I was actually, at the time, a little burned out on even touring, because the Carper Family had gone out quite a bit those last two years. I kind of wanted to just go back to the country and slow down again. I wanted the pace of my life to slow down again. I just felt like I needed a reset. What I needed at that time was to have some peace and not be thinking about having two years of my life planned out ahead of me with gigs. It was great that we were having all that success, and it was probably a really terrible time for me to leave, but at the same time, I just felt like it was what I needed personally.

"This time, moving back to Austin but not living in Austin, it's a nice balance," she adds.

She also returned to Austin with a new album, Daddy's Country Gold. Over the years, Carper's upright bass, distinct vocals, and sharp songwriting had linchpinned a number of projects beyond the Carper Family, most notably Buffalo Gals with Patek, and Sad Daddy with Patek, Brian Martin, and Joe Sundell. But Daddy's Country Gold proved something different.

Many of the songs pulled from her catalog familiar to longtime fans, but Carper recruited renowned bassist Dennis Crouch to produce the album, who gathered Nashville all-stars like Chris Scruggs, Lloyd Green, Billy Contreras, and Jeff Taylor to fill out the sound. The album immediately garnered attention with its March 2021 release and marked a number of the year's "best of" lists.

Now the songwriter is prepping for the release of her follow-up, also recorded with Crouch and with Andrija Tokic at the Bomb Shelter in Nashville. Due in late fall, Ramblin' Soul picks up where Daddy's Country Gold left off but expands Carper's reach even more eclectically, with touches of soul and R&B woven into up-tempo swing and weeping barroom ballads.

With backing from powerhouse Americana imprint Thirty Tigers, Ramblin' Soul readies Carper's adventurous anachronisms precisely when her version of authentic revivalism seems primed for broader attention. The only question: if Carper herself is ready for that attention.

The original Carper Family band was led by Melissa's mother. With her older brother playing lead guitar and younger brother playing percussion, Melissa held down the bass while her mother sang and played rhythm guitar. Their father served as the band's manager.

"It was just my mom's dream, I think, to be in a country band, so she had her family be her band," Carper laughs. "I don't know when the country band idea came up, but I feel like both my parents had such a love for country music that it just kinda seemed like the natural thing. We learned a bunch of country classics, all from Hank Williams up to like some of the new stuff that was coming out on the radio in the Eighties, Randy Travis and the Judds and stuff."

Shows remained within a three-hour radius of their home in North Platte, Nebraska. The family would spend weekends driving to Elks Lodges and American Legion Halls all over western Nebraska, playing four-hour gigs for a few hundred dollars.

"My parents didn't even keep hardly any money for themselves, wouldn't even keep gas money," she recalls. "They would make sure we each got $50 each. So I had money as a little kid and I'd take my friends out to eat. When I look back now, I think, 'Wow, what a great opportunity for me to get to do that as a little kid.'"

Although North Platte didn't offer a lot of opportunities culturally, the school system did have an impressively strong string program. Her orchestra teacher, also an upright bass player, recognized her talent and encouraged her to audition for state orchestra competitions. She earned a music scholarship to the University of Nebraska.

"When I got out of North Platte and went to school in Lincoln, which is on the other side of the state, I felt like I had just finally kind of woken up," she remembers. "I was pretty sheltered, so I felt like for the first time in my life, I started becoming aware of what was out in the world.

"I only ended up going about two and a half years," she continues. "I literally couldn't take the regimen anymore. I had had enough of it and I was also a perfectionist, so I always had to get straight As, and when you're making yourself work so hard, too, I just couldn't do it anymore. Then I just felt like my wild side came out, and I just wanted to be a free person. That's when I started my traveling."

Over the next decade, Carper's restless spirit would lead to her spending time in Alaska, Arizona, New Orleans, and New York City, among other places, but she found a home in Northwest Arkansas. Eureka Springs was just a small tourist town, but Carper discovered a close-knit community that also helped her come out.

"Eureka Springs was a perfect little town for me to be comfortable with myself because there are a lot of gay people who live there," she offers. "It's this little hippie town. So I was just, it was just, normal.

"I think I was also incredibly shy. I still am, but then it was to the point where it was really hard to function. So I think being so shy and trying to come out of the closet, being in a town where I felt like this is acceptable, and in a small town, it's easier to maybe make friends, so I had some friends, and then I had this little community – I think back then, that was sort of what I needed."

Carper began playing bass for bands around town, and writing some of her own songs while continuing to travel around the country. After a four-year stint with the hard-partying, self-described "pornobilly" band Mountain Sprout, she was ready for a change. At 34, she got sober and moved to Austin on the advice of songwriter Gina Gallina.

"I moved down to Austin and I don't know, just the floodgates of my creativity opened up," she marvels. "It was just time. It was time for me to start writing songs and the songs just poured in. Thirty songs came in that one year. Being around all the music in Austin and then being around lots of songwriters, it just kept the creative flow going. It just rubs off on you."

"It's all moving pictures," offers Dennis Crouch, speaking from his home in Nashville during a brief pause in touring with Alison Krauss and Robert Plant. "I learned that from T Bone [Burnett], and that's what sucked me into Melissa's music. Every one of her songs is like its own little mini movie."

Crouch first met Carper when he was rehearsing for a gig where Patek was playing fiddle, and the two bassists hit it off. He eventually made it out to hear her perform and was immediately captured by the power of her voice and storytelling. And although he was initially reluctant to produce the album, he understood immediately what Carper was trying to achieve and recruited the cast to make it happen.

More than anything, though, Daddy's Country Gold represented Carper truly stepping out on her own for the first time, recording the songs she'd been accumulating over the years in a way that she'd always wanted to make them sound.

Ramblin' Soul takes another step forward. Songs like "Zen Buddha" and "Boxers on Backwards" lick live favorites with a wry humor and energy, while "1980 Dodge Van" thumps with a low, gritty rumble. Most spectacular though is the emotional twinge that wrings from the soulful shuffle of songs like "Ain't a Day Goes By" and the stunning take on Odetta's "Hit or Miss" that swaggers behind a Bobbie Gentry rhythm. And the closer of Brennen Leigh's "Hanging on to You" sways a gorgeous pop melody that twists in Carper's nasal croon.

"I think she is a genius songwriter," attests Leigh, who toured this summer as a trio with Carper and Kelly Willis. "I love her ability to state things in a way that's very simple, and very naturally spoken, and yet very romantic at the same time. And she's hilarious.

"I think she's one of those that'll always evolve and she's just somebody that's always gonna change as an artist, but stay true to herself," she adds.

That evolution strikes as one of the most exciting elements of Carper's solo albums. Her work with her other outfits all deliver their own unique charm and impressive flavor, from Sad Daddy's lo-fi cabin recordings on this year's Way Up in the Hills to the intimate pairing with Patek on Buffalo Gals' 2020 LP, Where the Heart Wants to Go. But Daddy's Country Gold and Ramblin' Soul surge with an altogether new confidence.

"I feel like ever so slowly in my life, I've learned how to sing better and become more confident in myself," says Carper. "I haven't ever been a super confident person, and I haven't wanted to be a frontperson. For many years I've been the bass player or the harmony singer, or I just sing a few leads on songs. It's really always been out of my comfort zone, so I've just had to push myself to do something I'm uncomfortable with.

"But when you get more confidence and you do it more, it kinda opens up your singing," she continues. "So I feel like I'm finally growing into being able to even perform my songs. Now I feel like I can sing these songs the way I want to sing them."

Melissa Carper releases the first single for Ramblin’ Soul, “Ain’t a Day Goes By,” next week. She performs at the White Horse on Friday, Sept. 2, at 8pm.

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Melissa Carper, The Carper Family, Beth Chrisman, Jenn Miori, Brennen Leigh, Rebecca Patek, Dennis Crouch

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