Rising singer-songwriter Melissa Carper rambles into Bend

“When I put out ‘Daddy’s Country Gold’ (in 2021) … I actually paid for PR and radio promotion, so people found out about that album,” Carper said in a phone interview from a tour van somewhere in New Mexico. “Before, I was making a lot of albums where we didn’t do any kind of PR campaign, so nobody really found out about our music. So that made a huge difference.”

That is, no doubt, true, but don’t let the cold, hard reality of the music business fool you: Carper is also getting more attention because her music is invariably excellent and highly enjoyable. “Daddy’s Country Gold” and its follow-up, 2022’s “Ramblin’ Soul,” are two of the best country albums of the past couple of years.

The latter is “an exquisite work of audio goodness that mesmerizes with its wayback sound and style, stealing you to a simpler era in music when everything made more sense,” according to Saving Country Music, an influential website focused on twangy music.

Indeed, Carper specializes in old-time sounds: traditional country, Western swing, vintage jazz, throwback folk-blues. It’s a sound she picked up as a kid growing up in a musical family, where Jimmie Rodgers, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn and Ray Charles played on the turntable and road trips meant going on tour with the family band. Carper played upright bass and attended the University of Nebraska on a music scholarship, where she discovered classic jazz and blues. Since then, she has lived an itinerant musician’s life, bouncing from Arkansas to New Orleans to Austin, Texas and New York City, busking along the way and honing her craft. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, she moved to a farm near Bastrop, Texas, which she still calls home.

These days, Carper is part of a wave of artists who are finding success by playing music that sounds like it’s from another era, such as Charley Crockett and Sierra Ferrell. That wave has provided another boost to her career, Carper said.

“It feels like there are a lot of people that are doing old-style music right now, and people are responding to it,” she said. “I think having a bunch of us is good, because if someone’s listening to, say, Sierra Ferrell on Spotify and they like what she’s doing, then this other artist pops up who’s similar, then they’ve discovered someone else they’re likely to enjoy. I think it’s great that we’re all sort of helping each other out in that way.”

As for why more people are getting drawn into vintage sounds, Carper doesn’t have a theory, really.

But based on her past experience, it doesn’t necessarily surprise her.

“I mean, I’ve been playing this kind of music for almost my whole life,” she said. “So I’ve been doing it forever, and anywhere I’ve ever played, people will say, ‘Well, I didn’t think I liked country or bluegrass, but I like what you’re doing.’”