Carmen Nickerson Debut Album Room to Grow Celebrates Her Roots!
Carmen Nickerson has paid her dues while living a life she’s loved. From her humble origins on a rural farm in Iowa to the lights of LA, to the cabarets, venues, and music locales of the Midwest, Nickerson has walked a long path to get to where she is today. To meet her and get to know her, one can easily imagine each step has been made with grace, love and kindness.
Carmen Nickerson has been heavily involved in the Midwest music scene for almost 20 years. She has performed in a number of well-known Milwaukee-area bands and collaborated with some of the best musicians in the area.
In November, Carmen Nickerson released her first solo studio album, Room to Grow. Containing her original music, the album offers biographical snapshots into Nickerson’s life, her upbringing, and the importance of relationships.
The album also offers a taste of Nickerson’s songwriting talent, as well as a singer with a voice that can lure you in with one breath and surprise you with another. The album mixes elements of blues, R&B, country, pop and Americana—genres that reflect Nickerson’s musical influences and her versatility both as a songwriter and as a singer.
We had an opportunity to sit down with Carmen for an interview in which she shared her background and life’s experiences. We talked about the deep appreciation she has for so many supporters and musicians, and the meaning underlying the songs included on Room to Grow. She also shared some of the experience of seeking funding for the production of her album—especially for a person raised with the virtue of humbleness.
About 13 years ago, through a friend and bandmate, she came to the attention of iconic Milwaukee singer-songwriter, Willy Porter. They rapidly became, and remain, good friends and collaborators frequently performing together. Performing as a duo called Porter Nickerson, Carmen co-wrote the acclaimed 2016 album, Bonfire to Ash, with Willy Porter. Porter’s contributions to Nickerson’s music are also felt on Room to Grow with three co-writing credits as well as his guitar throughout the album.
Perhaps more importantly may be Porter’s behind-the-scenes mentoring, encouragement and support throughout the whole creative process underlying Room to Grow.
Through our conversation, it is clear Carmen Nickerson is incredibly grateful for Porter’s mentoring, advice, and support over the years.
Americana Highways: Please tell me a little about your background and how you got into music.
Carmen Nickerson: I am definitely an Iowa farmgirl from rural North Central Iowa. I was the youngest of 6 kids in my family. I went to Catholic elementary school in a town with a population of 450 and high school in a town with 900 people. I then went to Iowa State University for undergrad and got a degree in agriculture.
I had a solid musical background growing up. My dad was a barbershop singer. He was in the barbershop choir and then he was in several barbershop quartets. Music was his passion too. He played coronet in high school. He was the guy who played Taps for all the military funerals. I loved seeing him in his uniform and hearing him practicing Taps. He was just so handsome.
I was always involved in choir – high school choir, college choir. I was in the college choir for four years. So, it was choral programs. I was singing a lot of Latin, Italian, German, and French and every other language. I was an alto.
My grandmother taught piano. All of us had to take piano from Grandma who lived two miles down the road on a farm. We would ride our bikes or get dropped off – we all had to take piano lessons.
We all had to be in bands, so I played clarinet for 8 years. We had really good band programs since fourth grade, which were free. So, we would take band lessons from this one teacher.
All of this I’m telling you is in my song “Room to Grow.” That song is like a little biography, which is probably the most Americana of the songs.
I knew that singing was just something I felt in my heart. But it was definitely not a good option for a rural farm girl to want to be a singer. It was not encouraged. I didn’t know anybody singing professionally and, when I was a kid, there was no way to research how to go about becoming a singer.
Singing was certainly not encouraged as a profession. It was a really good hobby. You can sing in church. That was encouraged because it was good for you. It was a positive thing. My sister and I would play piano, and we would sing from the church’s songbook. Sometimes I played right hand and she would play left and then we would switch.
Definitely an American upbringing and if you want to talk about Americana, that’s about as Americana as you can get.
AH: Were there any particular artists who inspired you as you were growing up?
CN: I grew up with whatever my older brothers and sister brought home, which was pretty eclectic. So, from the Carpenters to Rufus—I love all that. I love that funky Rufus music. Burt Bacharach, The Jackson 5, ELO, Bachman-Turner Overdrive. Led Zeppelin, Heart, Boston. I loved all the pop music I heard.
Where I grew up, it seems like people are now big country fans. But it wasn’t like that when I was a kid. Kids then were more into Top 40 and whatever you could hear on the radio. There was no internet so there was no ability to research anything else. So, you were limited to what you heard on the radio or on TV or what someone brought home.
I would definitely sit around by myself and listen to those records and dance. I would very privately dance. I was a very shy kid and I didn’t want anyone to see me dance. If someone came in, I would totally freeze up. I felt like I wanted to be a dancer–like I was a dancer in a previous life. I was always drawn to dance. We didn’t have dance classes in that area of the state at that time. Rural America now has a lot more opportunities for kids than when I was growing up.
AH: Does your personal background play itself out through your songs?
CN: As I mentioned, “Room to Grow” is largely biographical. Along with “In Comparison,” those two songs really give you a snapshot of growing up in rural Iowa.
I was talking to Willy Porter today. Willy is so good at giving me advice. He can verbalize things about my projects better than I can. To paraphrase what he would say, which I agree with, there was a couple of years that were really rough times for me. It’s almost as if I could say that “I was birthed out of a pretty rough time.”
AH: And that overshadowed your writing?
CN: There is one song that I would say really reflects a rough time and the aftermath of a serious breakup. “I’ll Never Forget” was definitely about coming out of a personal relationship. While the breakup was hard, you can come out of it feeling powerful and strong. It’s about taking your own power back.
“Spiritual Playboy” is a song that follows kind of the same theme. That wasn’t that serious of a relationship. More like a relationship where the other person appeared to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing early on and you realize ‘no thank you!’ [laughs]
The song, “Ascension,” is almost like connecting the story of a whole life, right? Most people have that question about ‘what are we?’ Where do we come from? Is there something else out there? Is there a God? Where are you God? It’s about questioning, about saving humanity and about all of us coming together and rising above the questioning.
“Emily” is a song about a really sweet lady who had Aspergers and who loved dancing. So, the song is inspired by not really mental illness but mental struggles, such as the struggle to express yourself. It was so hard for her to express anything. She stuttered and sometimes wrote letters to me. There was so much going on in her mind, but she had a hard time expressing it.
AH: What brought you to Milwaukee?
CN: After college, I went to Taiwan on a 4-H exchange and spent 6 months there. Then I had a job as a sales rep for Colgate Palmolive. My mom was very happy about that! She kind of pushed me to take that job which I begrudgingly interviewed for. And to my chagrin, I got the job, thinking ‘Naw-I really don’t want this job.’ That lasted 9 months—I got laid off and got a nice severance pay.
Then I moved to LA for a couple years where I was hoping to be a pop star [chuckles]. That didn’t really work out so then I moved to Milwaukee. My brother was here. He lived here since the early 80’s. And my sister was here briefly. So that was really it. I’d been to Milwaukee a lot since I am the youngest of six so I would come here with mom and dad to visit my brother and sister.
I was always fascinated by Milwaukee because…we didn’t have mansions back home! Drive up Lake Drive and see all these mansions, and I was so impressed! I remember being a young teenager and having a vision of ‘I’m going to meet a boy and someday..….’–a very Cinderella kind of fantasy [laughs].
I came here because I had a free place to live and got a temp job. I ended up working in a hotel for a year. I was working all the time to try to pay off bills.
That was actually a time when we found jobs in the newspaper. I found this band called SameAsMe—other than the bass player, it was an all-women band. We would hang out and write songs together and perform at The Globe. We also performed for a couple years in the cockroach infested, falling apart basement of the Sydney HiH building.
I joined the pop band, cover band world of festivals, weddings, and corporate parties. That was actually a very lucrative job—mostly with that one band.
I would rather do what I love than have a lot of fancy things. If I wanted to have a Lamborghini, it wouldn’t be a lucrative job for that.
AH: Did this then lead to your solo career and career collaborating with other artists?
CN: I got to know a guy named Steve Kleiber. Steve was Willy Porter’s bass player. Steve was also in a band called The Bystanders, which I joined after I quit Eddie Butts Band and did my own solo gigs at night clubs. And I met Kostia Efimov and started hanging out and playing with.
Steve is how I met Willy. Steve would always tell Willy ‘you and Carmen would sound great together.’ And so I have to thank Steve because I am sure Willy really paid attention to Steve and it was a courtesy for him. When Willy and I met, it was really good timing. He friended me on Facebook and I said “I heard you are looking for a pop singer for a project.” Willy Porter was working on his album, How to Rob a Bank, which came out in 2009. A member of Raining Jane, an LA-female band was playing on it. And Willy needed a female vocalist on the album.
So I auditioned and he thought we were great together. This is how I started working with Willy. It’s been amazing because he became such a supporter when I don’t think everyone believed in me. He saw something in me that other people hadn’t.
AH: When did you start working with Willy Porter?
CN: Around 2009-2010. We wrote an album together, Bonfire to Ash. Willy co-wrote a couple songs on Room to Grow and co-produced and plays on it. I am so grateful for that. The songs by themselves are such good songs, but when you have people who can really bring them to life it’s better.
AH: That can make it magical!
CN: Oh yeah. We have Kostia (keyboards), John Wheeler (bass), John Calarco (drums), Willy (guitar and vocals), and Dave Adler plays some on it (accordion and organ). Stas Venglevski, a world renowned accordion player is on the album. Such talented people! And we have Mai Bloomfield who is in Raining Jane playing cello on one track. We sent the song to her and she played the cello track.
AH: It appears you have been writing the songs on the album over a period of years. I saw a YouTube video of “Room to Grow” dated about 3 years ago.
CN: Yeah, I thought the album would be done three years ago—it has taken so long. Almost everything was written during the lockdown of 2020. “Emily” was started a long time before. Most were written during that time period.
AH: Is this the first published compilation of your own original music as a solo artist?
CN: Room to Grow is really my first professional studio album. I did a little EP probably 15 years ago that I recorded back in my apartment. My vocals were in the closet. I put that out—sold a few. I also did a project with this R&B record company called Da’Soul Recordings, where they asked me to be a singer for one of their projects and they were focusing on me being the artist. Nothing really happened with that. It was really more their thing than my thing. I didn’t write a lot of songs on that. I think I wrote one song and it really wasn’t my decision about whether to include it. It was their decision.
AH: Apart from elements of Americana, how else would you characterize your music?
CN: Overall, the album is eclectic. It doesn’t all fit into any genre. So, I guess it would be easy to call it indie, right, because it really doesn’t fit? You can call it Americana too, I suppose, because that term itself can be viewed as an umbrella for a lot of different things.
There are elements of blues there. There are elements of a 70’s kind of a rock feeling there and there is a bit of a mystical feel. “Spiritual Playboy” and “Ascension” have a mystical feel. “Emily” is very poppy. The album has blues, it has country, it has all those different things. This sounds maybe weird, but I think it all goes together.
And I do a cover of Cat Stevens “Wild World.” I do it for a specific reason and I don’t know if it will come across that way.
AH: Do you want to share that specific reason?
CN: Many may interpret this song as a person talking about a former lover. However, my idea is that the voice is me looking back and talking to my younger self and giving advice on how to navigate the world and life.
AH: I saw that you went through the crowdfunding process to help with the expenses of this album. How did that go for you?
CN: I still have a couple weeks left on my crowdfunding campaign through Indiegogo [as of the date of the interview]. Willy Porter just posted some promotions for me and he is going to help get it going again. I think it’s pretty typical at the beginning of a crowdfunding campaign that you get a lot of support and then the support level kinda goes down. Then every five days it goes ‘beep,’ with a new contribution.
Right now, I have to get past my Midwest self and get a lot of social media posts out to finish the campaign. This whole process brings out all of this ‘who are you.’ There is a Midwest thing of not wanting to put yourself out there, not wanting to be too self-promoting. Growing up, you can be very humble. I was certainly taught to be humble. However, now if you say ‘support me, support me,’ that runs a little contrary to being humble. But you have to get past that.
Everybody wants to be successful and would like to be successful and make a lot of money. But a large part of this process is about the music. I want people to hear the music. So, the focus is not to be a pop star, which I don’t think is much of an option at this point.
The music on the album is not pop star music anyway. It is very much personal and emotional.
AH: Do you make it back home very often?
CN: My parents are both gone. One brother is still there and he still farms. When my parents were alive, I would get back more often. Now it’s about once or twice a year.
Every summer, coming up to the fifth year, my close high school friend hosts little concerts on a hill by the Cedar River. His family has a cute little pasture there. So, we have been going there every year to support him. Since the lockdown, it has just been us and friends and family where you pass the hat around.
Thanks very much for speaking with us, Carmen Nickerson.
For more information about Carmen Nickerson, including tour dates and a link to buy Room to Grow, visit her website. https://carmennickerson.com/