It’s hard to imagine a more humble start for a musician than playing a set at Frank’s Bar. A nondescript two-room storefront on U.S. Highway 190, it is what most people would call a workingman’s bar — a long, worn bartop on the darker side, dim fluorescent lights, a pool table and a few four-tops on the other.
But that is where Kylie Frey played her first public show. “Yeah, my first gig was Frank’s in Opelousas,” she said. “The second was Willie’s. So it’s like I grew up playing in those little bars. I was 17 playing out at Mexican restaurants in Opelousas, Lafayette, New Iberia, wherever there was a place that would let me play.”
Now, not quite a decade later, the singer-songwriter is preparing to set up at Sound Emporium in Nashville to record her second batch of songs, with an EP expected by the end of the year.
“We’ll start recording in about a month,” Frey said from Key West, where she was playing two sets at the 2021 Mile 0 Fest. “I’m making it up as I go along. I’ve written so many songs, it is hard to settle on what will get recorded. I know we want to put out a six-song EP by the end of the year, and ‘The Story’ is definitely one of the songs that will be on it.”
The new work will be a follow-up to 2020’s “Rodeo Queen,” Frey’s auspicious recording debut. It spawned one single, “Spur of the Moment,” which has charted comfortably on Texas radio while driving hundreds of thousands of plays online.
Although she hails from the zydeco-rich St. Landry Parish, her musical roots were set while on the road as a rodeo competitor. Like her father, boudin baron Billy Frey, Kylie spent a lot of time on the road in Texas, traveling from competition to competition on the rodeo circuit.
“Rodeo really is how music came about for me,” she said. “I was always on the road, so I soaked up a lot of Texas influence.”
Hopefully she can continue to ride that influence. As venues reopen post-pandemic, Frey hopes that the spark “Rodeo Queen” caused can be fanned into a flame.
“I was just getting up and going when the world shut down,” she said. “But I have been more able to play than some of my friends have.”
One thing she is looking forward to is this year’s Christmas show in Lafayette.