Courtney Patton & Kelley Mickwee at Bird's Nest Listening Room - Dunn NC

When purchasing tickets to the Bird’s Nest Listening Room, you are agreeing to our policy of “Shhh…listen”. While artists are performing, please be respectful to him/her and other attendees by refraining from loud conversations. Disrespect will be addressed with one gentle warning. If disrespect continues, you will be asked to leave.

Tickets are nonrefundable unless show is cancelled.

Show at 7:00pm. Doors at 6:00pm

Courtney Patton is a storyteller.

She’s also a mother, a producer, a singer, a songwriter, a tour-van driver and a musician- as well as a world-traveler when she’s out on tour throughout the continental U.S., Canada and Europe. But to anyone lucky enough to be sitting in the audience while listening to her expansive Texas twang belt out her version of deep and soulful country music, she’s a storyteller. In a musical era in which clichés and bravado are mistaken for bold noteworthiness, there is something far more brave in peeling back highly personal and emotional open-book songs and delivering them with sensitivity and sentiment. Patton does just that. She is the consummate storyteller in her music. Heartache isn’t just described, it is tangibly felt.

Following her previous solo albums, Triggering a Flood (2013) and So This Is Life (2015), and her acoustic collaborative project with her husband and fellow Texas troubadour Jason Eady, Something Together, (2017), Patton has drawn on true life day-to-day autobiographical life experiences and released her third album, What It’s Like To Fly Alone, earlier this year.

Patton explains the genesis behind the project, “The album is titled after one of its songs, “What It’s Like to Fly Alone”. The title sounds melancholy, but the resolve isn’t. This record is full of songs about people who have had to “fly alone” in some way, whether through grief, loss, life choices, addiction or love. We have to work through our struggles, choose our own destiny, just like the characters in each song. We have to make ourselves happy. No one else can do that for us. I’ve been down in all of those ways, but I chose happiness. In the end, “flying alone” is soaring because you pick your path and you find your way.”

She’s shared the stage with leading lights of the country-folk scene including Walt Wilkins, Bruce Robison, Jamie Lin Wilson, Cody Jinks, Sunny Sweeney, Brennen Leigh and Drew Kennedy. Musicians on her latest project include musical talents such as Chip Bricker, piano player with Gene Watson's highly acclaimed Farewell Party Band, Austin City Limits Hall Of Fame member Lloyd Maines on pedal steel, Heather Stalling (wife of Texas troubadour Max Stalling) on fiddle, and Jamie Lin Wilson (The Trishas) and Dan Tyminski (Alison Krauss & Union Station) on background vocals.

What might be most remarkable, however, is that Patton is doing this all independently. After having Kennedy produce her last album, Patton took the production reins this time around, further cementing this as her most personal work to date. There is no marketing team or music label support. It’s Patton and her spirited passion for the music that has her hands-on over every part of her career.

That makes the fact that What It’s Like To Fly Alone debuted as high at #4 on the i-

Tunes country chart and made a mark across four different Billboard album charts (including a Top 20 mark on their Americana Albums Sales chart) all the more remarkable.

But then again, Patton is a storyteller. It only makes sense.

In the end, three days was all it took to record Kelley Mickwee’s Everything Beautiful. The songs were all written a fair bit before she hunkered down with producer David Boyle and the rest of the players at Austin’s Church House Studios over those three days in October 2023, and overdubs, mixing, and mastering all took a reasonable amount of time after that. But soup to nuts, the whole project — Mickwee’s second solo album, releasing September 27, 2024 — still came together in well under a year. And a mere 10 years after her first one. 

Now, that last point merits some clarification. It’s not like Mickwee just up and disappeared after releasing 2014’s You Used to Live Here, her solo debut after spending five years touring and recording with the acclaimed Texas-based Americana band The Trishas (and a handful of years before that in the Memphis duo, Jed and Kelley). She spent several years hosting her own “River Girl Radio” show on Austin’s Sun Radio, and from 2017-2021 performed in front of some of the the biggest audiences of her career as a Shiny Soul Sister in Kevin Russell’s explosively entertaining and wildly popular band Shinyribs. She also sang on a whole bunch of records by friends including Ray Wylie Hubbard, Charley Crockett, Silverada, Owen Temple, and Reckless Kelly, and for the last dozen years (going on 13) has also co-hosted the Red River Songwriters Festival, her annual gathering (and accompanying mini tour) with kindred spirits Susan Gibson, Josh Grider, Drew Kennedy, and Walt Wilkins.

And yet, as busy as she stayed over the past decade, Mickwee’s solo career was noticeably back burnered for much of that time. This was very much by her own volition, for the simple reason that she just missed being part of a team — as she had happily been with Liz Foster, Savannah Welch, and Jamie Lin Wilson until The Trishas decided to go on extended hiatus circa 2013, after they all ended up living in different cities. Mickwee transitioned into going it alone for the first time in her musical life with earnest confidence, self-producing You Used to Live Here, but within a couple of years decided to take another little hiatus — this time from herself. For her, joining Shinyribs was kind of like running away with the circus. “I just wanted to be part of a band again, to take a break from having to focus on me for a while and just sink into the role of being a background singer,” she says. That “break” was hardly a vacation; she quickly came to find out that singing and dancing her ass off as a Shiny Soul Sister was hard — but it was also a blast. “It was fun to just be a goofball for awhile, but mostly I was so grateful for that experience because it definitely helped me become a better singer and performer, just pushing myself every night to match (fellow Shiny Soul Sister) Alice Spencer’s power and intensity — not to mention Kevin’s! But as much as I enjoyed the whole ride, at the end of the day I realized I finally wanted to get back to doing my own thing. And this time ... I was ready.”