Stephen Bluhm - Out of the Nowhere. Into the Here. (2024) Hi Res

"Out of the Nowhere. Into the Here." is the sublime second album by singer, songwriter, and performer Stephen Bluhm. Recorded, mixed, and produced by Bluhm and featuring a host of gifted guest musicians, the orchestral opus is an elaborate aural feast of strings, horns, flutes, piano, reed instruments, and other timelessly evocative musical sounds — ambitious, but intimate and confiding as well.

It’s a classic story: Young, creative person connects with music and through it sees a life beyond the slow, remote town they grew up in. But few such enlightened fugitives will end up making music that approaches the exquisite and beautifully moving chamber pop of "Out of the Nowhere. Into the Here." Described by Bluhm, who was raised in rural Pennsylvania, as “ten intimate but playful songs capturing the visceral feelings of autumn and winter, love and passion, and the suspicion (I’m not alone with) that there is something going on beyond our understanding.”

While his self-titled 2017 debut was acclaimed as a synth-pop tour de force, for the autumnal "Out of the Nowhere. Into the Here.", Bluhm decided to set the electronics aside and more deeply explore the modern and classic chamber pop sounds that he’s long adored. The album’s dreamlike, instantly iconic artwork was done in collaboration with the celebrated duo Kahn & Selesnick (Amanda Palmer, the Waterboys, Shearwater).

The opening track, “Any Little Thing,” is a tantalizing first glimpse into Bluhm’s charming, emotionally intricate world. Laying out the album’s classical/cabaret calling card, it couches its tender, romantic lyrics (“I’m lost anyway / It doesn’t matter where we are”) and Sondheim-ian melodies in caressing strings and gentle piano. The playful “Wissahickon” is a heartfelt ode to the titular Philadelphia creek, whose wooded, pastoral environment was an enchanting sanctuary for the singer during his college years; it boasts some of Bluhm’s most brilliantly clever lines yet (“Sleep beside the Wissahickon / if you’re not chicken”), all of them delivered in his warm, distinctive baritone. Finishing out the album is “There Was a Light,” a powerfully vulnerable and introspective item inspired by the composer’s pondering an accidental mystical experience with kundalini (“I’ll never know / if it was all in my mind / or was it a light”).

While Bluhm has been “making songs ever since I can remember,” in his teenage years it was his older siblings’ Lou Reed and David Bowie records that ignited his adolescent musical obsession. While attending Temple University, he took the plunge into live music via campus open-mic nights and from there burst upon the bustling Philadelphia scene, prompting the Philadelphia City Paper to dub him “an old soul, writing Tin Pan Alley-ish fare and singing croon-y folk jazz in a voice that’d make Morrisey swoon.” Relocating to New York’s Hudson Valley, he further honed his expressive performing style: Belying the serious slants of some of his songs, Bluhm’s shows often find him dancing madly among delighted audience members.

“The music (and Stephen) is utterly charming,” raves famed musical theater actor and composer Tom Judson, one of Bluhm’s avowed fans, about "Out of the Nowhere. Into the Here." “The halting, clipped vocals, with a sudden appearance of sumptuous string writing, are unexpected and elegant. The music, at first blush, appears naïve. But on a close listen, it’s very assured, and complex writing. And the arrangements are really just wonderful. Sufjan Stevens meets Kurt Weill meets Stephen Foster.”

“As I put these songs and arrangements together for the album, I became more and more confident in them,” says Bluhm. “I just hope people sense the beauty in them, the genuineness that I put into them.”

With one listen to "Out of the Nowhere. Into the Here.", no doubt people will sense exactly that.