An Americana backbone runs through a set of catchy, cross-genre songs.
There are many ways people fall in love with Americana, but for Netherlands native Judy Blank, her appreciation of the genre came about through classic American cinema filled with road trips and desert sunsets. Such was the draw that she ended up recording her 2018 debut LP in Nashville – later even becoming the first Dutch artist to perform at Americanafest – but it wasn’t until last year that she took the big leap of moving her whole life from her home country and relocating to Music City, and from that, her third album “Big Mood” was born.
“Swimming pool / Holding it in, pretty thin / Gotta play it cool / Hey! / Do you like my body? / What a view / Maybe when I grow up / I can be somebody new,” sings Blank on the peppy album opener ‘Killing Time’, an inspired look at awkward adolescence, the pop sensibility that permeates it being the first indication that Blank isn’t going to be hemmed in by genres, but then that’s where her magic lies. The sparkling ‘Toy Heart’ has a sweetness to it as Blank says she just wants to “play house” with someone special, quaintly suggest that they could “take a trip to Disney”, “see a show from the cheap seats”, before adding that she has “Dragonball Z on DVD”.
‘Pony’ feels like 70s classic rock with a glam spin in the best way, Blank’s buoyant vocals adding a softer edge as she reflects on her past foolishness of wanting to keep an old lover around (“I used to want you to stay for a while / I liked your body, your crooked smile / Now you want me, you haunt me / It taunts me when I’m telling you no”). A delicate, stripped back piano ballad, ‘Indian Summer Pool Co.’ sees Blank wrestle with the realisation that someone was not all they seemed, while Susto frontman Justin Osborne joins her to duet on the spacey, psychedelic ‘Cosmic Kids’ that uses galaxies and stars and metaphors for a relationship.
“Dreaming of days I was in the lights / Everyone said I was on the rise / Where did they go on my rainy nights?” muses Blank at the fickleness of fame on the appropriately muted ‘Fading Star’, some beautiful strings adding a real gravitas. ‘Birthday’ finds her addressing the difficult decision to end a childhood friendship when the friends have grown apart (“No, I don’t believe we’ve anything in common / Or at least not anymore / Except for listening to the doors”), and on ‘You Don’t Live Here Anymore’ she struggles with the opposite as it’s hard to let go of someone from her past (“Sometimes I forget that a room for the past / Is not a room for regret / But what if something you have becomes something you had too fast?”).
“Can I stop you right there? […] Say it out loud,” Blank asks on the popish ‘You Say’, frustrated with the unspoken sentiments that come with new relationships: “Tell me what you’re thinking about.” The album closer, ‘Over Now’, is a beautiful, soft and dreamy song of acceptance of the fact that everything must end: “Over the rainbow, over the moon / You over me being all over you / Over and over and over too soon.”
Blank may have recently moved to Nashville, but it will be a shame if she lets any of the music purists there strip her of her ability to hop between genres because in a music business that’s often intent on putting artists in boxes, “Big Mood” proves that she’s an artist not afraid to stand out as an individual and she is all the better for it.
