Nicki Bluhm: Home Team
photo credit: Hayden Bilson
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Five years ago, Nicki Bluhm changed just about everything she could change. After a decade of marriage, the singer-songwriter filed for divorce, put her band, The Gramblers, on indefinite hiatus, packed up her life and headed east, leaving behind her beloved Northern California home and lighting out for a new beginning in Nashville. She settled in Music City and went back to work, channeling her raw emotions and heartache into her 2018 solo album, To Rise You Gotta Fall. Now, Bluhm returns with her next step forward—exploring the liminal space between broken and rebuilt, honoring the hope and healing she found at her new address, Avondale Drive.
Bluhm was West Coast through and through, growing up in the outer Bay Area town of Lafeyette, Calif. As a talented, aspiring twenty-something singer-songwriter in the San Francisco scene, she met Tim Bluhm, the frontman for area favorites The Mother Hips. Nicki caught Tim’s ear as much as she caught his eye. He offered to produce Nicki’s songs at his home studio. In 2007, she married him. In 2008, he engineered and produced her first album, Toby’s Song.
The Mother Hips frontman, nearly 10 years her senior, became her mentor, her cheerleader, her collaborator and her trusted critic. Together, they conceived Nicki Bluhm and The Gramblers—Nicki fronting a sextet that initially featured guitarist Jackie Greene and ALO’s Steve Adams on bass. In 2011, they issued their follow-up, Driftwood, and, as a couple, turned out an album of duets. Then, there were the “Van Sessions.”
The concept was simple—the group filming itself performing cover songs while driving in their touring vehicle. A rendition of Hall and Oates’ “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do)” turned into a viral sensation, tallying up over a million hits and ushering Nicki and The Gramblers into the national conscience.
By 2015, though, there were problems. Amid the release of the album Loved Wild Lost, Tim left the group and the couple separated. Two years later, Bluhm placed The Gramblers on the shelf and officially divorced Tim. For the first time in her career, the singer was truly on her own.
Any potential comfort from the tightknit Bay Area music scene she helped create was, now, too familiar. “There was so much overlap with Tim and me. I wanted to start over” Bluhm says. “Before I even arrived in Nashville, I changed my phone number. I only wanted to be in touch with the people I wanted to be in touch with.”
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Bluhm had known that she wanted to relocate to Nashville for a while. She had friends in the area and hoped to tap into the city’s expansive co-writing system. Moving into her new home on Avondale Drive, the former Gramblers leader quickly fell in love with both the Tennessee rain and the rolling Southern hills as they grew lush and green.
But, a sense of loneliness still colored her fresh start. She missed having regular dinners with her family. Most of the people she knew in town were often away, out on tour. “I remember sitting on the front porch, and my only friends were the cardinals and the squirrels so I would sing to them.”
Bluhm found solace, as she always has, in writing. She tackled the percolating hurt of her divorce, jumping into recording sessions in Memphis for To Rise You Gotta Fall. She embraced therapy, a process credits with helping her to choose only relationships that fill her cup. “The world is hard,” Bluhm says. “There is no shame around asking for or seeking help.”
Even after the “divorce” album, she still had lingering, unprocessed feelings. She also saw palpable signs of positive change happening. Her songwriting inspirations were emerging from a more introspective, hopeful place, infused with healthy doses of compassion and forgiveness. As well, she was acclimating nicely to Nashville and the city’s benefits.
“I love the community. I love the energy,” Bluhm says. “It’s become me finding my own fire; the light inside of me. I needed to find that from within. It’s become a more authentic voice.”
Bluhm kept a journal, archiving her thoughts on her phone’s voice memos. Still, she wrote in real-time, letting the muse of the moment lead her. “Typically, I don’t really hold back anything. The songs reflect my inner workings. It’s a catharsis for me to write.”
Her house on Avondale became a place of solitude. The undiluted pain from her breakup felt somewhat exorcised through the creative process. After a decade, she was also single again and navigating the new order of the dating world.
It was confusing and foreign; all the new apps, swiping and instant rejection. Feeling especially anxious, Bluhm decided to turn the experience into a song, “Friends (How to Do It),” that asked the age-old question: Can a man and a woman be just friends?
The tune turned out to be the first of the 10 songs that eventually ended up comprising Avondale Drive, which was written and tracked over a three-year stretch. As she wrote, Bluhm started to heal. And though she wasn’t done understanding the past, the singer was becoming more at peace with it and starting to notice the benevolent and simple effect of today becoming tomorrow.
“Things changing interpersonally— it takes time for that to unpack and work through. It was inevitable that there would be some residual process happening on this record,” Bluhm says. “Time typically makes things better. Feelings are impermanent. Situations are impermanent. The older you get, the more you come to realize: ‘This too shall pass.’”
The reference isn’t Bluhm’s only nod to her sense of spirituality. She says she often asks her “higher power” for patience and trust. And she knows that all of this is the work she has to do.
In her marriage, Bluhm motivated herself by trying to make Tim proud, to fulfill an expectation. “I was kind of living someone else’s dream,” she says. “What I’ll say, in a nutshell, is that Tim was an important mentor for me. He taught me a lot of things. He was not a good husband.” As painful as it was, she admits, the severing of the relationship has been good for her growth.
As Bluhm finds a comfortable balance between her work and personal life, some of her questions have morphed into acceptance. Within the placid and reflective lope of “Juniper Woodsmoke,” Bluhm sings a striking line, made even more penetrating by the slightest of breaks in her voice as it rises in strength: “Though we may never, ever settle the score/ It don’t matter because it won’t be what it was before.”
“People have their own memories of things. People have their own truths. I might really believe my truth and they might really believe theirs. We’re never actually going to agree on what the truth is,” Bluhm says. “It lends to this idea of forgiveness. Forgiveness only takes you—on your side of the street—to come to an understanding, to come to a more processed place where you can forgive. It doesn’t have to include the other person. It can happen in your own inner landscape.” ***
At the album’s core are Bluhm’s explorations of her inner landscape. Musically, they’re unpinned with a confident stride that suggests brighter days ahead. There’s a sly, ‘80s new-wave defiance infiltrating the lead track, “Learn to Love Myself,” and a throwback, ‘60s soul vibe entrancing on “Love to Spare.”
Yet, Bluhm didn’t limit her creative purview to her personal relationships. The album’s second half delves into narratives of abuse and reckoning—within society, in the music industry and in the wake of the #MeToo movement. In fact, the current cultural and political zeitgeist directly inspired the incisive original “Mother’s Daughter.”
Watching Christine Blasey Ford’s revelatory testimony against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, Bluhm was especially moved by Blasey Ford’s courage. She posted her support on social media.
“I remember thinking, ‘Wow, she put herself in the line of fire. This is a big callout,’” Bluhm says.
Yet, when a male friend’s response was to question her support, she realized that the same fight for the truth was destined to repeat itself over and over again.
Bluhm rewatched an Anita Hill documentary. The similarities she found between Hill and Blasey Ford’s stories appalled her. “If we can’t believe what they’re saying, we have a problem,” Bluhm says. “I don’t believe in cancel culture, but I do believe in people acknowledging when they’ve made a mistake, owning up to it and doing better.”
She is also quick to point out that the music biz can do better, too. A decade ago, she operated from the mindset that people were intrinsically good. She felt protected. Her perceptions dramatically shifted while working on To Rise You Gotta Fall.
Looking for a producer for that record, she met her share of what she calls “toxic people in power,” that went so far as to stall the album’s release. She learned to question motives; to stop expecting people to think as she does. “I’ve had abusive relationships in my life, though none physically, I’m happy to say,” Bluhm says. “But the mental manipulation, the psychological manipulation, is certainly abusive. I have no more room in my life for abusive relationships. The only relationship I’ll maintain that feels abusive is with the music industry.”
For Avondale Drive, Bluhm surrounded herself only with positive forces. She counts the album’s producer, Jesse Noah Wilson, and Kai Welch—who assisted with vocal production and co-wrote several songs—as trusted advisors. Ironically, for a touring artist, she also credits the pandemic with helping her along.
In March of 2020, when COVID-19 placed the concert industry on ice, Bluhm outfitted Avondale with enough gear to cut demos of her latest songs while waiting out the lockdown. “We started tracking and we were like, ‘This actually sounds cool.’ We recorded the bulk of the record there.”
All of the Bluhm’s friends, who were supposed to be on tour, were more than willing to offer some remote assistance.
Bluhm and Wilson immediately started sorting through their collective Rolodex. They recruited bassist Jennifer Condos and a bevy of drummers based around the county: Los Angeles musician Jay Bellerose, Austin reisdent Richard Millsap and Nashville transplant and Dr. Dog member Eric Slick. They also welcomed contributions from Karl Denson, James Pennebake and Erin Rae, among others.
“Every time we got a track [sent back], it was like Christmas morning; dropping it in, and just being, like, ‘Damn, that’s awesome,’” Bluhm says.
She tapped her neighbor and dear friend, A.J. Croce, to not only supply vocals and guitar but also to co-write “Love to Spare.” For his unique rhythm-guitar approach, she called on The Wood Brothers’ Oliver Wood to grace “Friends (How To Do It).” Bluhm tracked her vocals over three days at Compass Records’ studio, with Wood joining her for a cheeky, in-person duet.
Wood’s friendship with Bluhm dates back nearly 10 years, when they first bonded on the festival circuit. “The song we did was light and fun. There’s humor built into that song,” Wood says. “I got the vibe that she’s on the other side of some turbulence. It definitely shows up in her everyday stature as well as her songs.”
The final track Bluhm wrote for the album was “Wheels Rolling.” It’s a beautifully fitting closer, a glimpse, as she says, into this last transect of her life—a front porch, country jam sure to please the cardinals. Again, lyrically, she asks a question, but this time, by the end, she also has an answer: “Quit looking out and get to looking in.”
“My primary goal is to figure myself out as a human so that I can like myself because I’ve got to live with myself for the rest of my life. If you don’t like yourself, you’re in trouble,” Bluhm says. “My inner critic is very strong. And it’s always a vulnerable time when I put out a record. It’s my truth. My truth has been told. And I believe the output is honest and authentic to me.”
In August of 2021, Bluhm moved to Madison, a nearby suburb. Yet, she’ll always have the album to immortalize her time on Avondale Drive. And she has nothing but gratitude for her first home in Nashville. “I could cry thinking about it. It was just the most incredible place to land, surrounded by so many kind people. I really got my strength back there.”
