A musical career eventually caught up with singer Paula Nelson, but she certainly didn’t make it easy.

Nelson has done television stunt work on “Friday Night Lights” and will appear alongside Hollywood vets Michael Madsen and Tim Curry in the political thriller “Conflict of Interest,” due out this summer. She left her band and the live music Mecca of Austin, Texas, for Colorado and a career as a massage therapist but returned.

“My thumbs hurt. That would be the big one,” said by phone from Steamboat Springs last week, when her tour took her back to Colorado. “And the fact that I wanted to tell people to move over and let me on the table.”

Nelson reunited with the country-rock band she’d been playing with before she left Texas.

“Pretty much I went back straight into that after I moved back in Colorado,” Nelson said. “Again, I was fortunate and honored enough for them to quit their other jobs and their other bands.”

It didn’t take long for the music business to catch up with Nelson: She’s been playing piano since she was 7, and she has at least one important connection in the business: her father, Willie. Paula appeared at her father’s Independence Day bash two years ago, and her dad returned the favor by contributing to her third album, “Lucky 13,” last year.

“Lucky 13” reunited Nelson with a quintet of her best friends: singer, multi-instrumentalist and producer Matt Hubbard, guitarists Landis Armstrong and George Devore, drummer Kevin Remme and bass player Chris Johnson.

Nelson’s voice isn’t the only powerful thing in her repertoire: She holds a black belt in taekwondo and brags that she could take on her big-brother bandmates.

“I’m their bodyguard,” she joked. “I’m Mama Hen on the road, and I can kick a– if I have to.”

Listeners can expect a belting from Nelson and her band, but a kinder type.

“We just come in there with fire and play our hearts out,” said Nelson, who plays the Crystal Bay Casino on Wednesday, Jan. 21. “Hopefully we’ll get some folks in there to come and see us.

“Outside the fact that I’ve written the majority of the songs … all my songs are there, and they’re completely honest, and I’ve got a band backing me, and each of them individually are wonderful musicians,” she said. “It’s pretty much just a party all the way around, so there’s something for everybody.”