Tim Bluhm

In a time when the ability of the music industry to fabricate "introspective singer songwriters" is rivaled only by the enthusiasm of critics to bleat about the "new Gram Parsons" any time a pedal-steel guitar weeps, Tim Bluhm stands with contemporaries such as Will Oldham and Elliott Smith as evidence that real songcraft still matters.

While the nineties witnessed an endless parade of critical darlings whose one, or only, album was trumpeted as the biggest thing since Bob Dylan, Tim Bluhm and the Mother Hips quietly released seven lyrically rich albums and wrote hundreds more songs whose live recordings are traded by a near-fanatical cult of devotees. In the last thirteen years, Bluhm's songs have filled hundreds of concert halls around the West and gained thousands of die-hard fans who criss-crossed the nation for shows, all the while being mostly ignored by mainstream critics and commercial radio. (After the release of the Mother Hips' most recent album, the band graced the cover of the San Francisco Chronicle with the canny headline: "Why Isn't This Band More Famous?") And in a decade where "indie rock" became a popular sales slogan instead of an ethic of artistic independence, the Mother Hips earned a living touring and selling their own records without handouts from a major label, without a single television appearance, and without ever making a music video.

Despite his prolific discography, Tim Bluhm leads a life informed less by the pages of Rolling Stone than by a Jack London novel. He may well be the only musician in the world with seven albums who lives in a van. Bluhm has balanced his music career with the life of a vagabond, drifting between the California coast and its mountain ranges in a Chevy van crowded with mountaineering gear and surfboards, and, as he puts it in his characteristic understatement, "looking around."

As a result, few artists are as inseparable from a place as Tim Bluhm is from California. To natives of the state, his language is at once familiar, droll, and poetic. As in the songs of Brian Wilson and Merle Haggard, the poems of Robinson Jeffers, or the novels of John Steinbeck, Bluhm's rhythms and images, his dreams and disappointments, reflect a distinct sensibility distilled from the complex and beautiful Golden State. In "Tear It Down" he sings, "I will miss your weekday mornings, floating over your oyster beds/ Riding through your mermaid hair, after I tear it all down."

The songs on Bluhm's new EP The Soft Adventure are crafted with a bird's-eye view, flying over landscapes and swooping down to inspect the details that make personal lives personal: the humorous, the curious, the vulnerable, the sarcastic and the earnest. Listeners will hear the influence of Bluhm's favorite musical predecessors: Neil Young, Gene Clark, Leonard Cohen and Skip Spence.

Colts, which was recorded on a four-track in 1996, chronicles a dark period that Bluhm glibly calls his "indoor lifestyle," and the subsequent escape back into light. The songs are filled with longing, tenderness, resignation and regret. He sings to a companion: "We got down here together/But you'll have to climb out by yourself."
In a single line from "I Can't Stay," Bluhm evokes the remnants of California's natural beauty, notes its jarring intersection with modernity, and sketches a scene of bleak alienation within this land of promise: "Foxes in the sand dunes, reactors tucked away in the hills/The lampshade and the drapery and that bottle of those little purple pills."

For 12 years, Los Angeles native Tim Bluhm has been the lead singer, co-guitarist and chief songwriter of the Mother Hips. They released three albums with Rick Rubin's American Recordings before self-releasing Later Days in 1998, and in 2001 they released Green Hills of Earth on Future Farmer Recordings, which was named by Rolling Stone critic Bill Crandall and the San Francisco Chronicle as one of the year's ten best records. Bluhm's work also includes the album Land and Sea Chanteys and the self-released collaboration with Greg Loiacono Ball-Point Birds. With the Mother Hips, Bluhm has performed with Wilco, Johnny Cash, the Old 97's, Cake, Cracker and the Black Crowes. As a solo performer he has played with Jimmie Dale Gilmore and The Flatlanders, Kieran Kane, and John Doe.