Sir Woman’s Kelsey Wilson is on a journey (to The Bottleneck)

Sir Woman. // photo credit Brynn Osborn

Musician Kelsey Wilson  first came to most folks’ notice as the frontwoman for the Austin folk rock band, Wild Child, and her current project, Sir Woman, is likely to blow the minds of anyone who’s come to view her as a folkie. Sir Woman is funky, soulful, and more than a little ambitious. To wit: in February, the project dropped If It All Works Out, which is only the first half of an album. The latter part, If It Doesn’t, hits on Friday, May 16, just days after Wilson and the group headline the Bottleneck in Lawrence.

We hopped on Zoom with Sir Woman’s Kelsey Wilson ahead of their Lawrence show.

The Pitch: This tour is not a small jaunt. You’re going out for two months, all over the country, playing venues as well as festivals like Treefort. You’ve been doing this for a while, but what are some things you have in mind that gets you ready for tour?

Kelsey Wilson: This one’s hard because we’re leaving right after South By and South By is the most insane festival. Just makes everything hard to do in Austin. When you live here and South By is going on, it’s pretty tough to do all the pre-tour things–sauna, swim, stretch, and walk. It’s really all about just like physically taking care of yourself, because once you get on the road, once you’re in a bus every day for seven hours, it’s really hard to take care of yourself.

I have to imagine that your physical health is really important, given that, at the end of the day, you’re getting up on stage and singing these songs that have some real emotional heft. You’re going to have to take care of your physical health in order to be in the right mental headspace to do these shows.

Definitely, definitely. You gotta navigate. I mean, yeah, it is emotional. I wish I had the ability to phone it in, just be a character and not feel anything whenever we play the music, but all the music–especially for these new albums–is so personal that I feel it every time. I’m like, “Okay, this is going to be an interesting set for me,” ’cause it’s so close to home.

The last couple albums, it’s been a few years since I wrote them. After a few years passes, it doesn’t even feel like they’re me anymore. It belongs to the audience, but this still feels like it’s mine, so it’s more pressure.

Listening to “Don’t Do Forever,” I can’t even conceive of what it’s like to get up on stage and sing that, ’cause that is a heartbreaker of a song.

I’m glad you liked that. I mean, that one’s one of my favorites. It actually like, it really is. It doesn’t sound like a love song, but it’s a love song. It’s a love song for before you’re ready to admit that that’s how you’re feeling. You think about it from that angle and it becomes a lot less emotional and more sweet.

What I find absolutely crazy about this whole thing is that If It All Works Out is just the first half of a two part album. How are you navigating having an album that’s out and then you’ve got another one that’s on the way when you’re putting together your set list?

For the West coast, we’ll be focusing on the songs that are out on this first album, If It All Works Out. And for the East Coast, we’ll be focusing on songs from If It Doesn’t, because that album is going to drop right before that tour. It’ll be two completely different tours on each coast. The show you see in LA is not going to be the same show you see in New York.

Given that you’ve spent so much time in in Wild Child, and that was a band that came together and grew, what were the challenges you had in assembling the band to make and perform the music that is Sir Woman?

Honestly, the biggest challenge is all the players are so good that everybody needs them. I have three different players for every position, so the East Coast run will also be an entirely different band than the West Coast run. Me and the singers and the bass players stay the same but everyone else rotates out .

The hardest part with Sir Woman is everybody is such a beast at what they do that they’re all in three projects themselves. It’s more of a collective than it is a band at this point. 15 band members.

It’s pretty great to be able to go three deep in any given position for a band. I feel like most folks don’t have that flexibility,

Oh yeah, I’m really lucky. Everyone is so insanely talented that it doesn’t matter who’s available. It’s going to be a good show. So I’m very lucky.

One of the things that really has me intrigued about If It Doesn’t is that you got Jason Burt to produce. His work with the Texas Gentlemen has been some of my favorite stuff over the last few years. What’s it like working with different producers for the two halves of this?

With Matt Pence, who produced the first record, he has a giant tracking room and a big, beautiful studio in Denton that I love going to called Echo Lab. For that album, I wanted a lot of strings and horn arrangements, and I wanted to track everything live–all real instruments, everybody in the room at the same time–and just capture a live performance as best as possible.

With the second album, I started a lot more of the songs with just me and Jason or me and John Deas plays keys. We would write and build beats and use more pop production. We’d build and write songs, just all keyboard samples and stuff like that, and bring in players. Just a little more poppy.

What does the rest of 2025 look like for you?

I have no idea. I’ve left it pretty open for whatever it is the universe requires. I’ll be touring. Not as insane as I would have back in the day. Touring is a lot more harder in your thirties than it is in your twenties, so I’m a little more selective about it. I’d rather do a couple solid tours a year than just always be on the road.

We’ve got some exciting things happening. We did Kelly Clarkson and we’re going to do the CBS Saturday Morning show and hopefully Late Night and stuff like that. I’d love to play more festivals. I’d love for this music to just reach more people and do whatever it needs to do.

Sir Woman plays the Bottleneck on Wednesday, May 14, with Oh He Dead. Details on that show here.