Best of What's Next: Blair

Homepage photo by Marielle PIcasa. Main photo by Travis Hugget.

Blair Gimma, who performs under just her first name, tends to dress in brightly-colored outfits that call to mind shiny Mylar birthday balloons. Appropriately, her folk-rock creations also span the rainbow, from the sunny guitar arpeggios and cheering children of “Hello Halo” to the sumptuously sad acoustic tune “Die Young” on the other. These songs and the rest of Blair’s debut album, Die Young (out now), came together over the past five years, half written in her native New Orleans and half at her uncle’s house in Orange County, Calif. She’s since moved to Park Slope, Brooklyn, where she’s still getting used to the hustle and bustle and where she recently sat down at Ozzie’s Coffee Shop for a chat with Paste. With her asymmetrical curls tucked behind one ear and her eyes darting thoughtfully back and forth, she detailed her rejection from Ani DiFranco’s record label, her firsthand experience with Hurricane Katrina and her abiding love of kittens.

Paste: What role do kittens and rainbows play in your life, seeing as they’re on your blog, in your lyrics and on your album cover?
Blair Gimma: I always joked that I wanted to have a stage name, or give an artist the stage name of Rainbow Skittle Kittens. Just a straight-up funk performer named that. It fits. It’s kind of girly fun to scream, “Kittens, rainbows!” and subject everyone to my strange mind.

Paste: In "Candy in the Kitchen,” the lyric goes “I was dancing to Whitney Houston.” Which song?
Gimma: That’s a good question—“I Wanna Dance With Somebody.” “How Will I Know” is another good one.

Paste: The song has heavier beats than anything else on Die Young. Is it a one-off, or do you have more like that to come?
Gimma: Every song on here can sound a little different. It’s not my place to say whether it fits together. I feel like I could go a lot of places. I could write 11 songs that sound like “Candy in the Kitchen” or 11 songs that sound like “Wake Up Shake Up,” which is more acoustic. It wouldn’t be bizarre. I have a lot of choices. This one, I wrote at a high tempo. There was no other way to record it. It was what it was. I used Garage Band to demo it. I think it has some original tracks from that on there. It’s fun to play live. I’m gearing towards that. I know that pretty soon once the melody comes out.

Paste: What do you think about New Orleans music?
Gimma: I like a lot of percussion that comes out of New Orleans. Like second line and beat, but not necessarily jazz drums—more like just a looser way of playing the drums. As far as funk and jazz, I don’t sense it in my music and I don’t think about it while I’m playing. Probably more the geography. It’s almost like under a spell. I like Fats Domino, recent stuff not that much.

Paste: Did you meet Ani DiFranco when you borrowed gear from Righteous Babe for recording?
Gimma: She lives in New Orleans, and her boyfriend, Mike Napolitano, is a producer. He did a lot of local stuff and a lot of her stuff. She was out touring or something. Mike had worked with my producer Keith Ferguson. I don’t think I would have been able to make it without him. Mike lent me all of these things that would have been thousands of dollars to rent from someone else for a low amount of money. I don’t have a personal relationship with Ani DiFranco, but I did send a CD there in high school. I was like “OK, I need to send my stuff out to labels.” They sent it back because they couldn’t listen to it, but they told me to keep trying. I thought it was good that they sent it back because they spent stamp money to send it back. They could have just burned it or thrown it away. It was laughable: it had a printed cover that I made on my own computer.

Paste: What was it like opening for national acts while you were in New Orleans?
Gimma: I was younger, 21 or 22. Within a couple months I had opened for Cat Power and Bright Eyes. I don’t think I really understood it at the time. I thought it was cool. Having those names attached when I played helped. For those it was pretty full. Everything starts later—you see these long bills, these bands are opening and that’s a great thing, but if you play at 8:00 only seven people are there. For these in particular, the shows start later in New Orleans. They never start on time. I was able to get a decent draw. I didn’t meet either of them, though. They were probably taking a nap on the bus or something.

Paste: Were you in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina?
Gimma: Yeah. I lost all of my stuff, physically. My apartment in Broadmoor got hit. My mother’s house had wind damage. My place got six feet of water. I lived in a basement apartment, so it was, like, no hope. I got my guitar out of there, I got pictures—I guess I lost a music collection, music magazines I had saved since I was a kid. People lost more than that. Now everyone who lives there, we have a sense of frustration but also humor about it. What else are you gonna do? It was a wild, bizarre event. What I took from it, besides the hardships and tragedies of humanity, is that anything can happen. I’m not really phased by it, I just know that anything can happen. Not in a jaded way. Life is bizarre. I had evacuated the day before. It was a delayed catastrophe where the storm passed, but then levees started breaking and water seeped in, and, “Oh, you can’t come home for a month.”

Paste: How long were you displaced?
Gimma: I was displaced for longer. I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do. I was in Florida, Kentucky and Alabama. I have some family in Kentucky. A couple musicians in New Orleans and I stayed out on a farm in Alabama. I came back seven months later. I had only a bag of clothes with me. We were in Alabama, and we were gonna play a lot of music and get a lot done, but the shift was so extreme that it was darker. There was a lot of drinking and wondering what to do. When you’re not around your neighborhood or your stuff, you’re like, “Who am I?” When you don’t have things to bounce off of like you did before.

Paste: Does the tragedy inform your material?
Gimma: Not literally. Most of my stuff isn’t very literal. I’m sure aspects of loss or something’s there. I don’t know how to pin it down myself.

Paste: We recently lost another musician before his time in Jay Reatard. It it that type of tragedy you’re talking about on Die Young?
Gimma: It’s sad to see a young person go, especially an artist. The name of the record can be interpreted in so many ways. There’s a sadness in that. At the same time though, there’s something beautiful about putting all of your eggs in one basket and not worrying about sustainability. Just throwing yourself into something is a mind state that’s very different from what we’ve been taught—just plan out your life and think about things over and over. I think that can really dilute something very pure and instinctive. It’s something tied up in that—tragedy and beauty at the same time. Self-destruction doesn’t have to be a part of it, but just a commitment, being willing to die for what you’re doing. You don’t have to die because you play rock ‘n’ roll. It’s not part of the package. It’s not why I’m doing it.