Nicki Bluhm – Rancho Deluxe (13th Floor Album Review)
Nicki Bluhm sings like someone who has travelled far, but never lost touch with where she began. On Rancho Deluxe she draws on her heartbreak, reinvention and restless travel to ask what it means to find home, community and meaning at times of personal change. This is an album of resilience and reflection, alive with stories that circle nature, struggle and connection.
Bluhm’s career began in California with Nicki Bluhm & The Gramblers, a band whose West Coast Americana and viral Van Sessions covers brought national attention. After the end of her marriage and band, she turned to solo work, recording To Rise You Gotta Fall in Memphis in 2018, a raw exploration of loss and rediscovery. Relocation to Tennessee reshaped her songwriting, and on Rancho Deluxe she is supported by a tight Nashville and Austin ensemble — Richard Millsap on drums, Jesse Noah Wilson on bass, Cameron Neal on guitar, Kai Welch on keys, Sam Kossler on pedal steel, Kristin Weber on strings — to create a record that feels lived in and carefully honed, and is named after the home studio where much of it was tracked.
The opening track Bay Laurel Leaves sets the tone: a gentle but dramatic meditation on displacement, its soft chiming strings and shuffling drums echoing the lyric “If home is where the heart is, my heart is stretched as far as it will go.” The band wrap themselves around Bluhm’s voice, heightening the sense of longing as the dynamics rise and fall. Falling Out of Dreams follows with greater momentum, an upbeat guitar line offset by lyrics of self-doubt before settling on a clear-eyed resolution: “Falling back in love with someone I used to be.” It is a song about reclamation, moving from disorientation to renewal, and the lightness of the music matches that transformation.
Tumbleweed keeps the pace high, with bursts of guitar and surging drums propelling Bluhm’s declaration of resilience: “Won’t waste my time on any regrets, it’s the mistakes that make you wise.” The band build intensity almost to the edge of collapse before lifting into near celebratory release, their dynamics tracing the joy of committing to the future.
Where the first three tracks deal with questions of identity and movement, Keep on Growing is the hinge that turns reflection into resolve. Opening in a slow, questioning mood, it pivots on the line “So don’t forget who you are” and becomes affirming, its gospel inflections supported by Mellotron, Wurlitzer and layered guitars.
At the album’s centre, the bright Cumberland Banks combines banjo, dobro and communal chorus to tell of storms, floods and surrender to the elements. Its rhythms skip like river currents, instruments rising and falling to match the uncertainties of the journey. By contrast, Change the Channel drifts in a dreamlike haze of pedal steel and reverberant guitar, the slowest song on the record. Bluhm sings of clouds, rain and shapeshifting selves, her voice echoing into a dramatic swell as if to remind us that change is unavoidable and disorienting.
Simple Side of Me returns the album to solid ground with fast, bright guitar and lyrics that celebrate the comforts of routine: hot coffee, songs yet to be written, the gallery of chosen family. It is one of the album’s most open-hearted tracks, the music brisk and confident, its optimism underpinned by a deeper sense of belonging rooted in the every day. Trying to Survive turns outward to the lives of others. With organ, guitar and a slow drum shuffle, Bluhm sketches stark portraits of a Walmart worker and a man starting his day with cocaine, before drawing the universal refrain: “We’re all tryin’ just to make it out alive,” one of many sharp, grounded lyrics on the record.
The closing pair of duets shift the mood again. Taking Chances, with Jamie Drake, captures the weariness of life on the road, “Why is the grass always greener in the past,” while still finding meaning in the act of singing itself: “Isn’t a song still worth singing, even if nobody’s listening.” Long Time to Make Old Friends, featuring Dillon Warnek, ends the album on warmth, its flute and keyboards carrying the sentiment that endurance and generosity define true companionship: “You give the shirt off your back, and I’ll wear it in.” These two songs look back more than forward, and though they complicate the arc of renewal that has driven much of the record, they offer a softer resolution, reminding us that growth often depends on what we choose to carry forward.
Across Rancho Deluxe, Bluhm and her band balance stylistic shifts with consistency of attitude and point of view. The musicians deepen the lyrics through subtle dynamics, moving between quiet reflection, celebratory release and hazy disorientation with precision and feeling. The themes of home, identity, survival and connection are threaded across the songs in ways that feel both personal and universal. Despite or perhaps because of its variety, the album holds together as a memorable journey, one executed with conviction and care.
John Bradbury
Rancho Deluxe is out now
Click here to watch The 13th Floor MusicTalk Interview with Nicki Bluhm
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