A trailblazer in her home country, Judy Blank was the first Dutch artist to play AmericanaFest back in 2019. A tough-to-pinpoint amalgamation of styles, her sound generally favors spry indie-pop insinuation over earnest folk-laced confessionals, making her a bit of an outsider since moving to Nashville last year. But she’s beginning to come to terms with her square-peg status, winning over new fans on the road with more established acts like Susto and Wild Child. She sounds supremely comfortable in her own skin on Big Mood, her third LP and first for the Rounder label.
“Big Mood is my existential crisis, dressed up in technicolor,” says Blank. “It’s a messy, versatile collection of songs that make peace with dread, dance with nostalgia and find humor in heartbreak. I hope it resonates.”
Here’s more from Blank on each track.
—Hobart Rowland
1) “Killing Time”
“When I wrote this song, I was feeling pressure to be perfect, skinny, hot and cool to ‘sell my art.’ When I was trying to pinpoint where these feelings stemmed from, I realized my entire self-consciousness started on a warm early summer day, when our middle-school PE class was held at the local swimming pool. Terrifying. Looking back, it blew my mind to realize that my 11-year-old self had to deal with those feelings in this society. Over time, it spiraled into anxiety, a complete lack of self-worth and periods of disordered eating. It took me a long time to recover from that. I wrote ‘Killing Time’ as a disguised bop to remind people of the ridiculousness of the myth of perfectionism and the life it steals—if you let it.”
2) “Toy Heart”
“The idea for this song came from my dear friend Kirby Baby. In his song ‘Say It Ain’t So,’ he sings, ‘I gave you as much as a country boy can/I gave you my toy heart to hold in your hands.’ It shook me right there and then. I was in a situation(ship) where I was the one longing for someone’s toy heart, and I’d been making myself smaller and smaller in an attempt not to lose whatever almost-love that was. The song sounds breezy and fun, and it’s one of my favorites to play. The reality is that I was hanging on by a thread at the time.”
3) “Dinosaurs”
“I’ve always been obsessed with disaster movies. When I was a young kid, Pompeii, The Happening and Titanic haunted me for weeks after watching them. When the pandemic first hit, I felt like I was in my own disaster movie. Locked up in my one-room apartment for months, I watched the news and had these ’90s toy dinosaurs all over my room just for fun. On some nights, it was almost like they started talking to me, and I got super-philosophical. I wrote the song from the perspective of a little kid. As I was writing, it slowly turned into a sarcastic climate-change bossa, where everyone points fingers at each other and pretends everything is fine. I’ve never had more fun making a music video. It was directed by my friend Jo Anna Edmison in Palm Springs, Calif.—mushroom cloud included.”
4) “Pony”
“Definitely the loudest song on the record, ‘Pony’ is about the friendzone. I wrote it after watching a documentary about a Dutch girl who’s not turned on by her longtime boyfriend anymore and decides to make a documentary about whether or not something is wrong with her body. I found it super manipulative when she said, ‘But … would you actually leave me if I never had sex with you again?’ while filming him and awaiting his answer. Poor dude. I started to question the true intention of the documentary, and it annoyed me at the time. That’s when I wrote ‘Pony’ in one sitting.”
5) “Indian Summer Pool Co.”
“I was in Arkansas for the first time, hanging out with my friend and longtime collaborator Dylan Earl, who lived in a dreamy house in a wooded forest alley at the time. When I passed his neighbor’s house, I noticed ‘Indian Summer Pool Company’ on his truck. I wrote it down because I thought it was funny. Who’d want to install a pool after summer? It made no sense. When my Dutch boyfriend at the time started talking to his ex while I was on tour, it made me super insecure. I felt like she was the Indian Summer Pool Company. I wrote this weird little piano ballad about my own insecurity and jealousy, because she was so pretty and I felt like I could never compete. Fun fact: The piano and vocals were recorded at the same time. This was the second take.”
6) “Cosmic Kids (Feat. Susto)”
“Am I crossing your orbit? Are you crossing mine? Why are forbidden vibes always the best? ‘Cosmic Kids’ is a synth-soaked anthem about electric feelings better left unfelt. It features the man who changed my life, Justin Osborne, a.k.a. Susto. When I moved to the U.S. for music, I needed to prove I had work to get the visa. He wrote me a recommendation letter and offered to have me play bass in his band. I’d never played bass in my life, but six months later, we were playing stadiums opening for Noah Kahan. We’re family now. I don’t think I would’ve wanted anyone else to sing on this track.”
7) “Fading Star”
“Why are we so terrified of being forgotten? Interestingly, I wrote this heart-wrecker of a song with my friends Liz Longley and Suzie Brown in their East Nashville house before my previous album, Morning Sun, had even dropped. I was only 23 years old. I found the title in magazine lying around my favorite coffee shop, Ugly Mugs, on the morning of the writing session. Despite our different stages in life at the time, all three of us were able to connect to that sentiment. We wrote it in less than an hour and never tweaked a single thing about it. Sonically, I was inspired by Big Thief and Weyes Blood when recording this song and playing around with the spacey overdubs.”
8) “Birthday”
“I wrote this about breaking up with a friend. Sometimes you grow apart and you’re able to both let it fizzle. But some people don’t get the hint. That’s when you should send them this song. I promise they’ll get the memo. I finished it over text with one of my favorite people, Patrick Damphier, who also mixed and mastered the record. He’s a great and witty lyricist. Fun fact: Most of the songs on the album were recorded live. We recorded ‘Birthday’ twice, with two different bands because the original version felt too slow to me.”
9) “No Thank You”
“My open letter to death, signed by a spiritual atheist. A lot of existential questions came up for me while I was writing and recording this album. When I wrote this, I’d just realized I’d have to accept that I won’t able to do all the things I once dreamed of in this lifetime—and that this concept of heaven I was promised all my life was maybe not something I fully believed in. I like the idea of a multiverse, where I’m currently living out my many different dreams and lives.”
10) “You Don’t Live Here Anymore”
“This one hurts. A music critic described it as ‘another breakup song,’ but it’s not about that at all. It’s a song about loss; I wrote it about my grandparents dying. I played the Hammond solo on this song myself, and it may be my favorite melodic accomplishment on the entire album. Roy van Rosendaal, producer of this album, created the most breathtaking sonic world for it.”
11) “I’m Out”
“My everyday existential dread, summarized into a singular song. I get easily overwhelmed and have extremely high expectations for myself, and I tend to skip rest out of fear of missing out and guilt. My life always goes great until it doesn’t. I feel like no amount of therapy is ever going to prevent me from ending up in this endless cycle. ‘Catch some sleep before your dreams die out’ is still a very real reminder to me, every day of my life, and I hope it can be a kind reminder to every ambitious human out there that it’s OK to breathe and take a break sometimes before you burn out completely.”
12) “You Say”
“Another fun one to play. A ’60s-inspired bop about needy partners that I wrote with my friend Yorick van Norden, the Netherlands’ most well-known Paul McCartney enthusiast. I feel like the second someone gets too comfortable being with me, they stop liking the butterfly aspect of my personality that they were initially attracted to, which makes me feel like I’m being suffocated and ultimately makes me rebel and want to leave them. Dumb, vicious cycle. I’m doomed.”
13) “Over Now”
“The curtain call. I wanted the album to end in a place of acceptance. I love the way this song sounds like it could’ve been written in the 1950s—archaic, nostalgic, bittersweet, but strangely serene. I almost called the album Triggers after the second verse of this song, which I wrote with Patrick Damphier and recorded on a dark fall evening in the Netherlands. We turned the studio lights off to get in the mood and tracked it live, vocals included. It’s all one take. Over the counter, over the edge, over the therapist, over the meds. ‘Over Now’ is less about endings than about carrying the echoes forward.”
See Judy Blank live.
