Buffalo Nichols

Carl “Buffalo” Nichols has the deep, methodical voice of a storyteller. He speaks in low, even tones that seem unhurried, even as his sentences amble forward invitingly—a trait reflected in the steady guitar picking and rolling vocals of his eponymous debut album, released in October.

Born in Houston, Nichols (who now lives in Austin) moved with his family when he was one year old to Milwaukee, where he and his four siblings were raised by a single mother. He remembers his interest in group sports waning at around age ten, and video games had reached a point of tedium. On a whim, he picked up his older sister’s acoustic guitar, a cheap Rogue dreadnought bought from a catalog, and began to teach himself to play. By thirteen, he was going out to see live music in Milwaukee, experiences made possible by the city’s abundance of all-ages venues, which revealed to him a thriving community of artists.

Though he’s now a rising folk-blues performer, Nichols says, “My first introduction to music as a culture and identity was punk.” He caught the tail end of the Midwest punk and emo scene, which stretched through the eighties and nineties into the early aughts and was built by bands like Hüsker Dü and Sunny Day Real Estate. In a way, he was also experiencing his first brush with folk music. Leaving aside its stylistic markers, folk music in the broadest sense is any music that rises out of a community of people to take on a distinct style, which Nichols was witnessing in full bloom in Milwaukee’s punk scene. He recalls “the whole excitement around it—the band loading in and the stage and the lights.”