Features

Woman At Work: Nicki Bluhm

Nicki Bluhm and The Gramblers Live at Relix. Click here to watch their performance. For a look at some of their Van Sessions, watch two collections we’ve compiled, here and here.

Photo by Noa Azoulay-Sclater

Standing tall with long brown hair, high-waisted jeans, a multi-layered top of dark blue and mustard yellow, with a pair of Ray-Bans perched on her nose, Nicki Bluhm is a throwback to the ‘70s in more ways than one. (That’s her in the recent Gap ads alongside The Avett Brothers, Kaki King and others.) Sure, she looks like she could have been palling around with Michelle Phillips and Linda Ronstadt in the heyday of the Laurel Canyon scene, but it’s the attitude toward her career and music that help give her and The Gramblers a contemporary, retro vibe.

“Numbers on the computer are cool and I appreciate them but it’s physical people you want to make connections with,” she says from the Relix office rooftop shortly after a session for the magazine’s website. She’s talking, in part, about the sudden and unexpected success of a video the band posted of them covering Hall & Oates’ “I Can’t Go for That” in their tour van as part of an ongoing YouTube series of cover songs. Hall chimed in about it online, which saw subsequent retweeting by folks ranging from Ryan Adams to Cameron Crowe.

“It’s been great to see [the viral popularity of the video] transfer to people checking out our original music,” Bluhm says. “[When] you travel 3,000 miles across the country, it’s nice when people show up.” Case in point: The previous night, Bluhm and The Gramblers played their first New York City show to a sold-out Mercury Lounge.

With three albums under her belt—all in collaboration with her husband Tim of The Mother Hips—Bluhm delivers a soulful, rock sound that vacillates between a full-title boogie and a languid, J.J. Cale-like mellowness. She sings from the throat with a slight twang, which likely trickled down from the cosmic country-folk of her native California. The next record is completed and the band in the process of shopping it to prospective labels while slyly sprinkling in some of the new material during their current live shows.

“Greg Loiacono of The Mother Hips made up the term and it was to describe a rambling, gambling person who is loose and hanging out playing music,” says Bluhm of the band name. “There’s not a solid definition—it can be whatever you want.”