For bassist, singer and songwriter Melissa Carper, stepping into the spotlight as a bandleader has been a process of tweaking her perception of herself. You can hear how gracefully Carper leans into the job of singing the songs — some written by herself, others in collaboration, but all bearing her voiceprint — that she’s brought to her new album Ramblin’ Soul, which she released Nov. 18. It’s Carper’s second album as a bandleader, following her 2021 breakthrough Daddy’s Country Gold, and it’s part of a remarkable career arc for a nonpareil songwriter and savvy singer. Carper has the conceptual chops to command almost any part of the Americana audience she desires, and Ramblin’ Soul finds her getting down to business and further honing her already substantial skills.
Ramblin’ Soul is a superb follow-up to Daddy’s Country Gold, with production duties carried out at Nashville studio The Bomb Shelter by studio owner and producer-engineer Andrija Tokic and bassist Dennis Crouch. Carper’s songwriting evokes a familiar landscape, right down to the nods to classic country, Western swing and rock ’n’ roll that characterize the album.
It’s a songwriter’s record made by a superb bandleader who admits she’s often been shy about dealing with the attention she deserves. Although Carper is a first-rate bassist, she chose not to play the instrument on Ramblin’ Soul. She handed over those duties to Crouch, and concentrated on her singing. As she tells me from her home in Bastrop, Texas — a small town about 30 miles east of Austin where she and her partner Rebecca Patek relocated in late 2020 after a few years in Nashville — her vocal style has changed over the years.
“If I listen back to stuff that I recorded 10 years ago, I think pretty differently [now],” Carper says in her alert drawl. “I sing a little different than I did on Daddy’s Country Gold. Hopefully I’m getting a little more free with my phrasing. It also helped immensely to have Dennis for that whole thing.”
Carper was born in Kansas and grew up in Nebraska with a musical family. Her mother led The Carper Family Band, which also featured her father, who acted as their manager, and her brothers. After a stint studying upright bass at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, she dropped out to begin her career.
Along the way, she has played in a variety of bands including Sad Daddy and Buffalo Gals, the latter a duo with Patek. She began writing songs in earnest more than a decade ago, and some of what she says is a substantial backlog of material ended up on Ramblin’ Soul. The sheer breadth of Carper’s songwriting is impressive, and she sounds as credible covering Odetta’s 1970 song “Hit or Miss” as she does delivering tunes like “Texas, Texas, Texas” and “Zen Buddha.”
“Zen Buddha” stands out as a highlight of Ramblin’ Soul. One of the many things Carper does right in her songwriting is describe obsession in a casually humane manner. (Her 2020 co-write with Nashville singer Brennen Leigh, “Billy and Beau,” describes a doomed love affair with true affection.) In similar fashion, “Zen Buddha” is both serious and a bit of a hoot — a piece of modified Sun Records-style rockabilly that doesn’t come across as a novelty song.
“Around that time I had started trying to meditate some,” says Carper about writing the song, which details the effects of a serious romantic attraction. “So that was part of my life. If I was getting in a sort of obsessive mindstate, [and I was] just trying to get out of it with meditation.”
Elsewhere on Ramblin’ Soul, Carper nods to New Orleans R&B on “Ain’t a Day Goes By” and slides into a midtempo country shuffle on “That’s My Only Regret.” She tells me she refined her vocal parts on the album, punching in and redoing lines for maximum effect. The result is a tour de force of post-Western swing singing that allows her to lay back or surge forward as the groove dictates.
The album is, if anything, even more nuanced than Daddy’s Country Gold — or indeed, her earlier work, which hardly lacked confidence. What’s striking about Carper’s current style is how deftly she turns what could be an introverted approach into a singing style that never lacks for warmth. I’ve seen Carper perform many times over the years, and I’ve never perceived her as a shy or retiring frontperson. But she tells me she’s had to work at becoming, well, the star she so richly deserves to be.
“I’ve been in a lot of bands where I’ve shared lead, and that’s really comfortable for me. I am an introverted person, and I have been painfully shy in my life, when I was younger. I enjoy the process of making an album. I’m definitely way better than I used to be.”
