In fact on ‘The Villain‘ Mal Blum does want to take the large portion of blame for…everything. Which is a fairly unusual position for most singer-songwriters to adopt, but as Blum says: “I’m so tired, uninspired, by everything I’ve done / got to keep it in check / I fall apart / I figured it out / It took too long / I’m calling it now – I was too willing to make you the villain.”
‘The Villain,’ is the title track of Mal Blum’s forthcoming full album, which will be out on July 11th on Get Better Records. The songs could be taken many ways, but Blum includes in those their trans identity, with the album’s themes firmly rooted in, and contextually informed by Blum’s trans-masculine and non-binary perspective.
Speaking of ‘The Villain‘ Blum reveals that: “I had all but finished the album, and somebody close to me gave me invaluable feedback – they said that I’d explored many aspects of villainy throughout the record, but I hadn’t taken a full song to earnestly turn the spotlight back on myself, to put my sword down, so to speak, and consider my own faults. I happened to have had a co-write that week with an artist named slowleaves/grant davidson and we wrote this. I think it’s an important turn of the album – the title of the album, ‘The Villain,’ implies that there is one villain. It can even be interpreted as a question, and so it is only fair to turn the question inwards. I think the reveal here is that there is no one villain, obviously.”
