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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Kimber Ludiker’s Della Mae learning to feel at home with success

Della Mae will perform Thursday at Chateau Rive at the Flour Mill.

Spokane native Kimber Ludiker and her bandmates in the bluegrass outfit Della Mae were congratulated on being nominated for a Grammy Award before they even knew they’d been nominated.

“We were playing a show in Tennessee, and we got an email from our manager that said, ‘Congrats on the Grammy nomination,’ ” recalled Ludiker, who plays fiddle in the band. “We thought, ‘Surely this is a joke.’ So we opened up Google and did a search for a list of the nominees, and we read our names on there. And there was a bunch of screaming, and our sound man was driving and had to steer with his knees and cover his ears.

“It was one of the craziest moments, because you don’t expect that.”

The 2014 Grammy for best bluegrass album ended up going to the Del McCoury Band, but the nomination was reward enough: Della Mae had been around for just four years and had only released two LPs, but the band was already being recognized for its work.

“It’s the highest honor you can receive in the music world,” Ludiker said. “It’s always out there as a goal. Did I think my band would receive that nomination after only a few years and after making only two records? No, but it was quite the honor. … It was great to be able to take my mom as a date to the Grammy Awards.”

Although their nomination might have been in the bluegrass category, Della Mae’s music isn’t content to stick with just that genre. The Grammy-nominated album “This World Oft Can Be” might be defined by its overall bluegrass flavor, but it occasionally dips into folk, country and traditional Americana.

“People really have a hard time placing a label on it,” Ludiker said. “No one’s quite been able to figure it out yet. … We were nominated for a bluegrass Grammy, but we don’t have a bluegrass-style banjo. But it’s neat, because we’ve been placed in bluegrass things, we’ve been placed in country things. … We’ll take any association we can get.”

Ludiker founded Della Mae in 2009, she says, as a vehicle for acoustic female musicians in the Boston area where she was living at the time. She didn’t know any of the women who would later join the band, and the fact that they all come from different musical backgrounds and were raised in different states (their new bass player is actually from Canada) add to that indefinable sound.

Della Mae just finished recording its third album, a self-titled LP that will debut sometime in May, with producer Jacquire King (his previous credits include Tom Waits, Norah Jones and Kings of Leon). Ludiker says the newest record is similar in style to the band’s first two releases, but the band seems to be growing more confident and sure of itself.

“In each record, we’ve stretched out a little bit more and come into our own sound,” Ludiker said. “It’s a logical album sequence. It’s not like we’ve added a bunch of electric instruments and full drum kits or anything, but it’s different. We really enjoyed rounding out the sound that is Della Mae.”

Ludiker, whose parents are the late Spokane fiddle virtuoso Tony Ludiker, and champion fiddler and teacher JayDean Ludiker, estimates that Della Mae has played more than 200 shows around the world in the past couple of years. But it’s the opportunities to play in her hometown that she relishes the most, and it’s quite possible that Della Mae’s biggest fan base is here in Spokane.

“Almost my entire family is in Spokane and Post Falls, and it’s really, really nice to come home and play a show,” Ludiker said. “There’s huge support in Spokane for us.

“In fact, when we released ‘This World Oft Can Be,’ after the first couple weeks of sales we got a report from the record label and Spokane was the second largest market for our record. … They were just perplexed. They’d never seen that on their printouts ever before. And they were like, ‘Wow, Kimber, Spokane is a great music town. Who would have known?’ ”