Photo by Samer Ghani
Buffalo Nichols
Buffalo Nichols
When Milwaukee native Carl Nichols—the songwriter, guitarist, and vocalist who tours under the moniker Buffalo Nichols—moved back after a brief stint in Austin, Texas, it was easy to pick up where he left off and record his latest album The Fatalist, which is out September 15.
“It’s home. Everything's very familiar,” Nichols says. “Everything is what it was growing up, so it's all just coming back to what I'm used to.”
What has changed is that his profile as Buffalo Nichols has grown tenfold in the past couple of years following the release of his self-titled debut on Fat Possum Records.
The album earned him rave reviews from NPR and Rolling Stone, various major festival performances and his network television debut on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” One of his favorite moments was participating in the Playing for Change video series that highlighted artists big and small.
“It’s all been very cool,” he says. “I haven’t had much time to just sit back and look at what’s happened. It just keeps moving forward or moving somewhere. It’s a good feeling, overall.”
While he’s thankful for being back in Milwaukee, he’s also grateful for the abundance of opportunities he found in Austin and Texas that helped him to his current success.
“In Milwaukee you really have to work 10 times as hard to get half the work done,” he says. “I don’t know if I could do what I’m doing if I hadn’t left, but I’m trying to see if I can use that momentum to come back in Milwaukee and keep it going.”
Milwaukee Roots
While in Texas, he didn’t forget his Milwaukee roots. He says it felt weird when people started referring to him as an Austin or Texas artist and had to correct them as he had spent his whole creative career in Milwaukee. He even recorded most of his debut here.
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“Part of me just always had that chip on my shoulder,” says Nichols. “I always try to correct people and say, ‘No, I’m not really from Austin, I’m from Milwaukee,’ but it was just really hard to combat that once it got going. But I just believed, and I still believe that Milwaukee has something special, and I wanted to come back and try to contribute to that, to the city that I grew up in.”
From the beginning, Buffalo Nichols has been a very DIY-centric project. Nichols says Milwaukee inspired that mindset. “It wasn’t really something that I planned, it was really out of necessity,” he says. “I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to just sit in the studio for a week and get the album done and then hand it out to somebody to mix it and pay an engineer to sit there while I figure stuff out. I knew the only way I was going to be able to make an album close to what I had in my head, I was going to have to do it myself.”
For The Fatalist, he spurned the urge to go bigger and better and recorded, self-produced and mixed it all from his home. While the album features special guests with Milwaukee connections—Jess McIntosh plays violin on a couple of songs and singer Samantha Rise contributes vocals on “This Moment”—he felt it was important to center the album around himself and his own thoughts.
Improvise, Experiment
'The Fatalist' by Buffalo Nichols
'The Fatalist' by Buffalo Nichols
“All these experiences that I’ve accumulated, I tried to put into this album, and reject the current trajectory of a lot of artists in the world of roots music, which is very much relying on credibility from famous studios and famous musicians and all these things, and just put the emphasis more on the music than where it was made or who played what on it,” he says. “That’s the do-it-yourself mentality. You don’t always have access to these things, so you figure out how to do it on your own.”
One of the biggest differences from his debut is that Nichols improvised and experimented more. He experimented with 808 programming, added samples and utilized synthesizers on some songs. He said it’s a culmination of the 10-plus years he spent making music for himself and recording at home and figuring things out on his own.
“The foundation of some of my experimenting was if you could take these songs and just produce them in a somewhat modern way, would people be able to relate to it? Which parts of these songs are so important?” he says. “Because electronic music is more related to this than what people consider the blues today. The kind of blues-rock thing that is most associated with the blues today is so much more removed from that than what I’m doing. But it’s going to take more effort for me to convince people that this is the blues, and it exists somewhere in between.”
For example, his cover of Blind Willie Johnson’s “You’re Gonna Need Somebody on Your Bond” formed as a result of him collecting and making music out of samples. He took a vocal sample from Charley Patton’s version of the song and built his version around it with a unique mix of hip hop, electronic music, and acoustic blues.
Lyrically, the album is just as ambitious. Nichols tackles themes of identity and purpose inspired by the last few years of his life and questions such as “what’s important?” and “how much say do you have in the way that your life goes?” that he’s been asking often since 2019.
Chose to survive
“Especially coming out of the pandemic, a lot of people started to reprioritize things,” says Nichols. “Immediately it became clear that you don’t really often get to choose what is important, you just have to do what is necessary to survive. And in trying to survive, you just have to do certain things. And that, to me, opens the questions of fate.
“Under certain circumstances, you have to do certain things to survive. Can you change the course of your life? Can you make different decisions? Can you do different things or has everything already been ... not in a cosmic sense, necessarily, an omni benevolent creator has decided your fate, but maybe the forces in the world, government, religion, capitalism, have all laid out a plan for you that is too powerful for you to escape?”
For example, “Turn Another Stone” was inspired by his feelings from traveling and “knowing so many people who travel.” It’s a theme that appears frequently in his music because as a musician “you spend a lot of time traveling and a lot of time alone and a lot of time looking for something.”
This fall, Buffalo Nichols will be back on the road. He’s most excited to play with a band, something he hasn’t done since taking on the moniker. He’s also really excited to get out and see people’s reactions to his music.
