Ever More Nest is a Restart for Kelcy Mae at Jazz Fest

Kelcy Wilburn of Ever More Nest, by Greg Miles

The Americana artist semi-started over when she had taken her previous stage name to a natural conclusion.

[Updated] For years, Kelcy Wilburn recorded as Kelcy Mae, “Mae” being her middle name. She combined her background in poetry with an affection for folk music and followed that path for two albums and two EPs, fine tuning her talents with each release. The ambitious ramble of the songs on 2007’s The Times Compiled became more structured on 2011’s Pennies in Hand, and by 2014’s twin EPs The Fire and Half-Light, Kelcy Mae had evolved in a more pop-friendly direction. But while it was her strongest, most controlled statement to that point, it also felt like a terminal point. 

“I didn’t feel like Kelcy Mae anymore,” she says. 

The experience had been a good one, and she chose producers Rick Nelson and Jason Rhein because they had visions of where her songs could go. Wilburn enjoyed making those records, liked the results, and happily collaborated with Nielsen and Rhein on them, but she knew something was wrong when she toured with that music and found the process to be a grind. She had evolved until the music Kelcy Mae made reflected her musical evolution more than her. Rather than backtrack and pick up old threads and old paths, she started more or less over and selected a new name, Ever More Nest.

Kelcy Mae played Jazz Fest in 2012, and Ever More Nest makes its debut Thursday at 11:30 a.m. on the Lagniappe Stage, and the show comes at an exciting time. Just days before Jazz Fest started, her Kickstarter campaign hit its goal and Wilburn will be able to release her second Ever More Nest album, Out Here Now. She had such a good experience recording the band’s first album, The Place That You Call Home, in Nashville with producer Neilson Hubbard, guitarist Will Kimbrough, and the band Hubbard assembled. 

You can hear the continuity between the new songs and those on all of Wilburn’s releases, including the two EPs, but you can also hear what she wanted. “I think the songs are happier in this country/folk/blues/gospel tradition that the North Louisiana in me grew up surrounded by,” she says. “That is definitely a huge influence, but so is poetry. So is ‘90s alt-rock.” With temperamental shifts, many of her songs would sense in a post-Lilith Fair world, and the purposefulness that you can hear Wilburn’s songs and performances are balanced by the folk and country touches that lighten potentially heavy moments and contextualize others. The album opens with “Out Loud,” where Kimbrough’s light, pulled-off guitar figure creates an airy space for Wilburn to sing “We will stumble / we will surely fall. / Running in circles / after learning to walk.” Those lines could easily play as bleak or burdened, but spare arrangement allows Wilburn the room to sing as if she were observing natural phenomena, the kind of thing you simply live with rather than mourn.

Wilburn finding Hubbard was part of the turn to Ever More Nest. She heard a song by Nashville-based singer/songwriter Caroline Spence on the radio, and “the song embodied everything about a production I might want,” she says. She found that the song had been produced by Hubbard, who is also Nashville-based. Since she wanted the album that would become The Place That You Call Home to be recorded outside Louisiana, he seemed like a good fit, and it helped that he was from Jackson, studio owner Dylan Alldredge was from Pass Christian, and Kimbrough is from Mobile. 

“We spent the first day talking about The Saints,” she says, laughing. “It all felt like home.”

Hubbard’s treatment suits Wilburn’s songs. She has an MFA and takes pride in her lyrics. They’re personal but leave room for listeners to develop their own relationships to them. They’re about something, but she’s not always sure what when she starts writing. “I do allow myself to not have a very clear thought,” she admits, but since writing is in part a spiritual act for her where words, phrases and images manifest themselves through her, she likes to let the magic happen. When they’re coming out and coming together, she might not know why, but with songs she keeps, she eventually knows what they’re about and how the pieces fit together.

“It might even be after the record has come out,” Wilburn says.

Some songs come from more obvious places. “Alone Tonight” from the upcoming Out Here Now was born from frustration. During the COVID shutdown, Wilburn remembers well-meaning people telling her, I guess you’ve got a lot of time to write now, but with life dialed down and her world smaller, she didn’t feel inspired and had a hard time writing. Finally, in a fit of frustration, she wrote, “I guess I’ll die alone tonight” and a song followed. Once she had gone through the activity of writing, she knew the first line was almost comically bleak and had no plans to do anything with it. “When Neilson Hubbard heard it, he said, Oh no, that’s on,” she recalls, and they went to work.   

Loneliness is a constant on Out Here Now since many were written in lonely circumstances, but it’s not necessarily sad. Wilburn realized even before “Alone Tonight” if she sings a sad song sad, it’s not good. “You can’t take yourself seriously when you sing a line like that,” she says. She doesn’t sell out the emotion, but she doesn’t lean into it either, and pronounced rhythmic sway along with a rippling mandolin in the arrangement give the song buoyancy. 

Trying to establish Ever More Nest in New Orleans has been a challenge with a number of obstacles starting with COVID and Hurricane Ida. She has a monthly show at the Carnaval Lounge on St. Claude, but circumstances conspired to make it less regular than that. She had to also scale down some of her local appearances because frequently she was added to multi-person bills where what the booker had in mind was Wilburn and her guitar, not Ever More Nest. And many of those group shows understandably became social events, but since her words are important to her, she prefers listening rooms and environments conducive to listening. “It’s not worth it to go play that smokey bar to 10 people who aren’t going to remember,” she says. “They might like your set, but they’re not going to take you to the next level.”

So now she’s trying to find the audience that is there specifically for her and not simply people like her. She’s part of the growing queer Americana scene in New Orleans, and in March, she was part of the bill when a Queer Country tour stopped in New Orleans. Wilburn’s ready to go on tour when the album is out, COVID-willing, armed with the unshakable belief in her songs that got her this far.

“They’re pretty easy to get,” she says. “You just have to dig a little deeper.”

Ever More Nest plays Jazz Fest on Thursday at 11:30 a.m. on the Lagniappe Stage.

Updated May 23, 1:52 p.m.

The spelling of Kelcy Mae’s former producer Rick Nelson’s name has been corrected, as has the number of times Kelcy Mae played Jazz Fest.