From Virality to Villain Eras: Catching up with Mal Blum

It’s been five years since indie musician Mal Blum put out a full-length album. This Friday, Mal Blum returns with The Villain, a project the singer-songwriter initially slated as a “masculinity concept album.”

We met in 2018, when Blum was slated to play Hooligan’s yearly collective, a day-long event that included dozens of artists and vendors. We quickly bonded over our mutual love of poetry and reality TV. That night, following their set, Blum read a truly hilarious poem about Zak Bagans that is burnt into my brain in the best way possible.

We caught up over Zoom and discussed the process of releasing their new record. They explained, “I really do feel like it’s some of the best work I’ve made. It’s very intentional with the visuals and the branding as well. I’m just ready to share it. On the other hand, it’s harder than ever at this juncture to reach people who want to be reached. We’re all feeling a lot of fatigue around social media and self-promotion, especially if you have a complicated relationship with yourself.” While sitting in their Los Angeles living room equipped with a pair of podcasting headphones, Blum described their mental state in the days gearing up toward the album’s release as “cautiously excited.”

The Villain was produced by Blum’s close friend and co-writer, Jessica Boudreaux. For The Villain, Blum wanted a live-band feel on the record, but days before he was supposed to meet up with Boudreaux, he underwent a life-altering break up, which not only disrupted the recording process, but pushed the songs on the record in a more personal direction. Bourdreaux told Blum to write first - they’d figure out the logistics later. Blum eventually met up with Bourdreaux at her studio in Portland, Oregon and recorded the record over the course of ten days. “It was exactly what I needed,” Blum recalled.

“I thought it was going to be one thing, and then I went through this break up and I wrote like five new songs. It became a combination of these two things. It was originally going to be a very different album,” Blum explained.

Over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, Blum took several poetry workshops with poet Shira Erlichman. When the time came for Blum to pick a title for their upcoming record, they were friends with Erlichman. So, Blum sent them the record and the lyrics and they worked together one-on-one in a “titling workshop.”

“Coincidentally, Jessica was like, ‘You should title it ‘The Villain,’ and I was like, ‘No, no, no. I want to do this writing workshop,” Blum said with a laugh. “But I am really glad that I did that with Shira. It was really illuminating to see what images and analogies I return to again and again.” Together, they decided on The Villain. Blum explained, “It sort of poses the question to the audience of, ‘who is it?’ Which I think is a more interesting way of going into the record. Also, I was feeling villainized at the time. And then, obviously now, all trans people are villainized.”

Blum came out as queer when they were 15. In 2015, they came out as trans and non-binary. They began to medically transition following the release of their album, Pity Boy, in 2019. “I was already on testosterone during the pandemic, but I was sort of on a lower dose. I crossed some invisible threshold to me where suddenly the world was perceiving me as a man and that was interesting to sort through in a lot of ways. It caused me to start looking at my own complicated relationship to masculinity and maleness,” Blum recalled. Many of the early songs on The Villain dialed into that switch of perspective: what does it mean when the world suddenly begins to see you as a man? Through songwriting, Blum began to explore all aspects of masculinity, the inherent biases and the differing perceptions. Blum’s break up threw their life into a state of emotional transition that was impossible to ignore. They called off their engagement and moved back in with their parents. They explained, “I was feeling like I wasn’t being seen, or was being spoken for without my contributions in a different way. It sort of just ended up working together thematically. It kind of expanded what I was thinking about, what’s good, what’s bad? Who gets to tell our stories?”

“The branding for the album is that I’m in my ‘I don’t give a fuck era’, but I think it will be a lifelong project: who am I versus who do I feel that I am?”

Blum has been releasing music publicly for over ten years and their approach to songwriting has shifted as they’ve grown. “I grew up in the Ani Difranco school of songwriting,” they said with a laugh. “I was like, ‘okay, this song is seven minutes? That’s what I have to say, put it out!” Blum also joked that they’ve learned the importance of editing as they’ve grown older. “As I’ve written more, I realize that editing and rewriting are very important parts of writing. Also, this is something I learned in a poetry class: preparing to write is writing.” They’ve also become fond of the writing maxim, “show don’t tell.” So, while the songs on The Villain no longer drift toward the ten minute mark, the imagery has grown sharper and tighter.

Nowadays, the music industry has transformed into a behemoth marketing machine. More than ever, artists are expected to present themselves as approachable through a myriad of social media platforms. On one hand, this level of access is beneficial, the more opportunities people have to listen to your songs, the more people will engage with your music.

Mal Blum was one of the first artists to go viral on TikTok. They found out about the app while they were touring with NightVale. A fan messaged them, explaining that Blum’s song “New Year’s Eve” was being used in an early TikTok trend, wherein participants packed up exes belongings into cardboard boxes.

Their song “Fine” also had its own viral moment, often soundtracking baby animals. To this day, Blum is still active on TikTok. “What’s weird about it is that both of those songs were posted by fans as original sounds. At that point in time, TikTok did not have the technology to identify the songs. It was like, five hundred thousand videos using ‘New Years Eve’. And they did label it ‘New Years by Mal Blum’ so people could go and find it, but I didn’t have TikTok, so I didn’t really appreciate the situation like I would now,” Blum recalled. Since the song itself wasn’t linked to Blum’s account, they were inadvertently shielded from any hate comments.

But over the past week, one of Blum’s videos ended up on the wrong side of TikTok, accidentally popping up on the feeds of a couple million transphobes. Blum’s releasing The Villain alongside Get Better Records, a queer and trans-owned record label. For part of the album’s promotional cycle, Blum qualified for a marketing program that would boost their videos as sponsored content on TikTok.

“The label boosted one of my videos and I didn’t think ‘oh yeah, I’m trans and shirtless,’ like I forgot about transphobia almost, but what was interesting, though, is so many of the comments are rhetoric that is being shoved down the dominant culture's throat right now. They’re like, ‘you’re a self-hating, delusional cult member who’s actively trying to harm our children.’ And then, on one of the other videos where I’m talking about the album and how it’s named "Villain” and how trans people are cast as villains, the same people who are saying those things are like, ‘when have you ever been cast as villains?’”

Blum is also a SAG-certified actor. They booked a couple of voice-acting gigs and some short films during the pandemic. But lately, they’ve seen a rise in transphobic rhetoric in Hollywood that mirrors online vitriol. “I see so many trans people in Hollywood who are decorated professionals, who have been nominated for Emmys, and these people are not being hired. What is happening across all trans identities, the Trump administration has put this target on our backs. They’re scapegoating Trans people. They’re saying we’re villains. It’s a bait and switch that’s as old as time. In making it clear that their agenda is very anti-Trans, it has bled out into Hollywood in a really disturbing way where most people in Hollywood, if they have a trans storyline, they’re cutting it,” Blum explained.

With their online ads for The Villain, Blum suspects they stumbled upon a perfect storm of transphobic pressure points. They continued, “I think the combination of me being trans, shirtless and dancing, seemingly advertised to them, hit a lot of people wrong. But on the other hand, the more hate comments I got, the more people it reached. I’ve been engaging with them, which I know you’re not supposed to do, but I’m doing it,” Blum said with a shrug.

“I’ve known I’ve had ADHD since I was in the third grade, so I should know this about myself, but my brain craves the dopamine and moral rigidity that comes from fighting with people on the internet, so I have to be really careful,” they explained. When Blum was younger, they found it easy to become sucked into internet drama. This time around, they tried a different approach, ensuring hate commenters that any insult they could think of Blum had already thought about themself. “I started a series being like, ‘Okay, you hate me. But guess what? I’m the final boss of hating me.’” They started responding to videos by critiquing hate comments. “Even a few of the haters thought it was funny, but for some of them, it makes them madder that I’m doing this,” they said with a laugh. They cited humor as an essential coping mechanism for dealing with online hate. Their favorite hate comment is, “Some of us are straight,” in response to people not knowing who Mal Blum is.

“In my mind, they can say whatever they want about my body, but when they start saying stuff about my lyrics, that’s when I start to twitch and I get really mad,” Blum said with a laugh. Blum also has several apps downloaded that block certain social media platforms during certain times of day to help them disengage from the discourse. On one hand, social media levels the playing field of the music industry, bypassing the need for labels and promotional intermediaries that were essential for artists in the past. But the constant cycle of self-promotion can get old fast.

“It’s cool that TikTok can be so accessible to fans and possible new fans. On the other hand, since anyone can do this, there’s so much content and self-promotion that causes artists and fans to be really fatigued,” Blum noted.

“When I have to make stuff like that, I feel horrible,” Blum admits, “You know, there’s people on TikTok who tell you, you can’t just be an artist or a writer, you have to be an influencer who does all these things. And I think a lot of us are not cut out for that.”

Luckily, Blum has a hearty support system of fellow queer and trans musicians and artists who help combat the fatigue. “My one friend, John Allison Weiss, we went on tour together in 2015. Now, we’re both older and trans and it’s just cool how we’ve grown in tandem,” Blum says. Weiss’ new project, Charlie Mountain, will open for Blum on the upcoming tour for The Villain. When Blum met fellow musician Bartees Strange, they were contemplating quitting music altogether. “I was in a really tight spot with this record. But after I met Bartees, his enthusiasm and excitement for music and appreciation for his own art and other’s art was contagious,” Blum recalls.

Growth as an artist is continuous, just like the stories we tell ourselves. With The Villain, we’ll be hearing from a new side of Blum, but something tells me it won’t be the last time.

The Villain is out on July 11 with Get Better Records.