Calder Allen | Suzanna Choffel & Kelley Mickwee: Texas Radio Live

Calder Allen

“At 21 years of age, Calder Allen is one of the newest rising acts to emerge out of Austin, Texas. Both audibly and lyrically beyond his years, Allen is a prolific singer-songwriter and self-taught guitarist whose most recent singles’ The Conservationist’ and ‘Ripple Through’ were recorded at the historic Arlyn Studios. This remarkable single is produced and engineered by critically acclaimed Charlie Sexton and Grammy winner Jacob Sciba. With Calder’s sublime lyrics and gritty voice, he encapsulates his love of the outdoors and fly fishing. CalderAllen’s sophomore album is once again being recorded at Austin’s Arlyn Studios alongside Sexton and Sciba and will be released in 2024.

In June of 2022, Calder released his debut album, “The Game,” which was also produced and engineered by Sexton and Sciba. His festival run has included slots at Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza Chicago, Austin City Limits, South by Southwest, Oceans Calling, Sea Hear Now, FareWell Festival, Two Step Inn, and Format Festival. Beyond festivals, he has opened for The Avett Brothers, John Hiatt, Turnpike Troubadours, The Wood Brothers and Shane Smith and the Saints.

A fifth-generation Austinite, Calder Allen’s natural ability and love for music is embedded into his DNA; among his music inspirations are his grandfather Terry Allen, his album producer Charlie Sexton, and other prolific artists like Gary Clark Jr., Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt are also impactful influences on Allen’s music. Outside of music, Allen enjoys spending his time fly fishing, rock climbing, and advocating for outdoor conservation awareness.”

– Calder Allen.com

Suzanna Choffel

“AUSTIN, Texas – As Suzanna Choffel sits outside a coffee shop to discuss her fourth album, a grackle flits underneath the table. The presence of Austin’s most ubiquitous bird barely registers until she mentions that avian creatures have become “kind of my spirit animal” and a theme of sorts in her life—a point affirmed by the album’s title: Bird by Bird – out on September 27.

The title is from a song inspired by the legendary Anne Lamott guide to creative writing. In it, Lamott recounts a childhood memory of her brother panicking because he hadn’t even started a paper about birds that was due the next day. Their father calmed him, advising, “Just take it bird by bird.”

For Choffel, the idea of facing potentially overwhelming situations by breaking them into smaller parts resonated on many levels, from addressing anxiety to recording her album. Not only was this one created in sections, she explains, “It also felt like putting pieces of me into a collection that paints the picture of my life these past six or seven years.”

When she recorded her last album, Hello Goodbye, Choffel was pregnant with her first daughter. Now a mother of two, she’s viewing life from the perspective of someone dealing with the ups and downs of parenthood, a long-term partnership and a post-pandemic world, not to mention her music career and radio DJ job.

She knew she needed to step away from her daily routine to get in the zone for this one. She also wanted to work with producer and longtime friend David Garza, who had just become a father and was staying close to home in L.A. She booked a flight; he called drummer Amy Wood and bassist Sebastian Steinberg, his co-producers with Fiona Apple on her Grammy-winning album, Fetch the Bolt Cutters.

On Bird By Bird, Choffel finds a noirish sweet spot and hits a new creative peak, segueing from tunes reflecting her love of ’80s pop to smoky jazz grooves on which she channels her inner Peggy Lee. “I believe she is truly the voice of Austin,” Garza gushed in a recent interview. “I hope that with this album, folks worldwide will get hip to her artistry.”

Choffel already had a reputation as a singer-songwriter and performer who glides among genres, eagerly exploring too many influences to fit neatly into any category. Bob Marley, Lauryn Hill and Mary J. Blige are significant inspirations, along with hooky, Madonna-ish dance-pop, Brazilian music, Stevie Wonder and her Mexican heritage. Performing professionally since she was 14, Choffel has won several national songwriting competitions and earned a 2009 Austin Music Award for Best Indie Band, prompting her to muse, “Maybe it actually means ‘independent of genre.’”

Bird by Bird highlights include “Summer in the City,” on which her breathy alto, fanned by Elias Haslinger’s slinky sax, builds from smoldering embers to a barn-burning flame, and “New York,” her “Fever”-pitched Big Apple love note. Evoking images of a chanteuse in elbow-length gloves working the crowd in a dimly lit jazz club (or on Broadway), it could become another classic ode to the city she inhabited for three years after her season three stint on The Voice (about which then-Rolling Stone writer Jessica Hopper said, “[she’s] one of the only singers on anyone’s team … who had the sort of voice you’d want to listen to for an entire album”).

She notes that her writing was more declarative in the past, stating, “This is how it is.” Now, she’s asking, “How Do I Make You Feel” and “What Do You Want from Me.” In the former, a quietly powerful song of longing almost belied by its sweet, sensual melody, she wants to know, “How do I make you feel what I want you to feel?”

“This album is so much about just wanting to connect,” she says. “It’s for people who yearn to be seen, held, heard, touched.”

But she also examines a particularly searing example of social injustice there’s simply no way to fix: the killing of Breonna Taylor, shot in her sleep by police who stormed the wrong apartment. “‘Fast Asleep (Breonna)’ is the most specific song I’ve ever written,” Choffel says. “It originally was a folk song, but Davíd encouraged me to explore more of a gospel/Nina Simone approach.” Moody and forceful, with percolating percussion and Adrian Quesada’s haunting guitar, it notes the irony that the future EMT, had she lived, might have responded to similar situations—and saved others’ lives.That pain is tempered by hints of hope in “Little By Little” and especially “Bird by Bird”—which floats on a reggae vibe and tropicalia lilt. Choffel wrote it for her stepdaughter, who was struggling with depression and anxiety at the time. “Bird by bird and stone by stone,” she sings, “we can piece this world together / you don’t have to be alone.”

After cutting essential tracks in L.A., Choffel and Garza moved to the famed Sonic Ranch in West Texas—where she’d long dreamed of working, and he could perform his annual music festival gig nearby. Guest contributions (including violin by Warren Hood and Carrie Rodriguez) were recorded at Austin’s Cedar Creek Studio.

As she’s done in every stage of her career, Choffel continues to evolve. With Bird By Bird, she’s stretching her wings — and soaring to fascinating new heights.”

– Lynne Margolis, SuzannaChoffel.com

Kelley Mickwee

“Kelley Mickwee and her voice are one of the most recognizable talents making music in her home state of Texas at the moment — even if you may not immediately know it.

Mickwee has been a mainstay in the Texas-based music scene for years: currently, as part of Kevin Russell’s Shinyribs’ Shiny Soul Sisters, singing harmony and background vocals at his live shows and recordings; as one-fourth of the acclaimed Americana group The Trishas, with Jamie Lin Wilson, Savannah Welch and Liz Foster; and before then as one-half of a Memphis, TN-based duo Jed and Kelley. But sometimes what gets lost in the shuffle of all the well-deserved acclaim for what she adds to other artist’s projects is the music she makes in her own right.
“It’s been way too long since I have released music that is all mine,” she says. “I’m so proud of how these songs turned out, and it just felt like the right time to put new music out and see if people are still interested in what I’m doing on my own.”

It’s a comment bathed in humility, and the kind of thing an artist only says if they’re really in it because no other career path would ever really make sense for them. What else is there to do but to keep doing it? Her comments are referring to a new two-song project called Boomtown to Bust, an A-side and B-side single that she’s taking the extra mile and releasing on vinyl. “I love the good old-fashioned singles releases: a taste of what the artist is currently creating, without ingesting an entire album,” she says.

Both songs were written with Ben Jones as part of a yet-to-be-released duets album with Dan Dyer, and recorded with Jonathan Tyler at his home studio, Clyde’s VIP Room. “Jonathan Tyler and I have known each other for years and I have always been a big fan of his music, his work ethic and his vibe in general,” Mickwee says. “I was driving and heard his tune ‘Old Friend’ come on the radio and thought, that’s it, I need to make some music with this guy. So, I sent him a demo of these two tunes and asked if he’d help give them life.”

“We wanted a ‘Red Headed Stranger’ kind of feel but with a ‘mining’ or ‘gold’ metaphor,” she says about Side A, “Boomtown to Bust.”

“Once we got it into the studio with the band, it was just undeniable that it wanted to be a waltz. I love Dan [Dyer]’s harmony vocals on this one. Cody Braun’s fiddle sits perfectly with the mood of the song and Marty Muse glues it all together with his dreamy pedal steel. It’s a reflection on what comes when that love loses its glitter and shine.”
Side B, “Let’s Just Pretend (We’re Holding Hands),” is a story of unrequited love, with a little tinge of hope weaved in. “Speaking of love, I love what Jonathan Tyler played on the electric guitar on this one,” Kelley says. “That, and the accordion, really give it that extra little push into that juicy Texas ‘The Mavericks’ kinda sound, which was completely unintentional but welcomed.”

Boomtown to Bust is Kelley’s first original release since 2014’s You Used to Live Here, her debut solo record. Within the past year, she’s re-focused her efforts on her solo work, beginning with a set of four singles in 2021 recorded with singer-songwriter Jonathan Tyler and culminating with her latest “Gold Standard,” out now. Although she was already a seasoned artist at that point with a decade’s worth of experience under her belt, up until then all of her performing and recording experience had been as part of a unit: first as half of the Memphis-based duo Jed and Kelley, and then as one-fourth of Texas’ acclaimed all-woman Americana group, the Trishas.

When the Trishas, all living in different parts of the state or as far away as Tennessee, collectively decided to slow their roll a few years back, Mickwee realized that in order to keep living the dream of playing music for a living, she was going to have to strike out on her own.

Three years later she took a different leap, one that was not so much a matter of “starting over from scratch” so much as just learning how to take her hands off the wheel and have fun as a proud member of one of the hottest acts in Texas: Shinyribs.

Launched in 2007 by Gourds co-founder Kevin Russell as a “solo” vehicle, Shinyribs has since evolved into arguably the most explosively entertaining band to spring from Austin in decades. Mickwee joined the family in September 2017, claiming her spot onstage next to Alice Spencer as one of the band’s two harmony and backup-singing “Shiny Soul Sisters.” She had to hit the ground running and learn the ropes fast (knowing that Shinyribs would be taping its debut appearance on TV’s Austin City Limits the following month), but from the start she felt not just right at home, but exactly where she needed to be.

The Trishas never did exactly breakup, though, meaning that Mickwee and her other song sisters Jamie Lin Wilson, Liz Foster and Savannah Welch still happily reassemble every once in a blue moon when their schedules line up or a favorite gig comes around — like the annual MusicFest in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, where they all played their very first show together as part of a 2009 salute to Savannah’s father, renowned songwriter Kevin Welch. Mickwee is also still an active partner (alongside co-founders Susan Gibson, Walt Wilkins, Drew Kennedy, and Josh Grider) in the Red River Songwriters Festival, which will celebrate its 10th anniversary in 2022. “That’s our little baby, and it’s doing pretty well — the last few years have sold out!” Mickwee says proudly of the event, which is held every year in Red River, New Mexico and preceded by a short “Traveling Red River Songwriters” tour.

And then there’s Mickwee’s weekly on-air gig she hosted for five-and-a-half years until she had to step away in 2021, the “River Girl Radio” on Austin’s “Sun Radio” (www.sunradio.com). “The format was pretty much whatever I was feeling,” she says. “I was given a lot of freedom to play whatever moved me within that hour each week. It was so rewarding to get to stretch that creative muscle and learn about a ton of music I wasn’t familiar with in the process.” (Mickwee can still be heard all day, every day as “The Voice” of Sun Radio.)
With all of the above currently on her plate, one wouldn’t think Mickwee would have any time at all left over to devote to her own performing songwriter career. Even though scaling back was part of her plan all along, it’s still very much a part of her bigger picture.”

– KelleyMickwee.com