Mal Blum talks new EP, trans masc music and who’s gonna win ‘Drag Race’

In the early stages of my own coming out as trans and non-binary last year, I spent a lot of time with Mal Blum’s album Pity Boy. A jangly indie rock record, the album explores themes of visibility, anxiety and identity through a series of frank and catchy riffs. 

A veteran of the indie rock scene, the Los Angeles-based Blum has been making music professionally for a decade. Over that time they’ve garnered a devoted fan base, touring as an opener for the Welcome To Nightvale podcast live show and indie rocker Lucy Dacus.

But touring was put on hold in 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic, giving them plenty of time to sit and think and stew. The result is Ain’t It Nice, a dust-covered collection of tracks that wouldn’t sound out of place in a wayward diner off the side of the highway. Drawing inspiration from John Prine, Bruce Springsteen and others, Blum has crafted a record steeped in pandemic loneliness and the messiness of queer and trans masculinity.

For any queers (like myself) who’ve proudly claimed Springsteen as a trans masc icon, it feels like a perfect fit and a welcome evolution for the shapeshifting Blum.

I sat down with Blum to talk about Ain’t It Nice, available everywhere April 15, trans masculinity and who’s going to win this season of Drag Race. 

I really appreciated the country vibe of Ain’t It Nice. I grew up in rural Alberta, which is like the Wild West of Canada (or at least likes to think it is). Listening to this album was very evocative of a lot of really familiar things from back home. What inspired you to make this kind of “rolling through a canyon, cowboy, old motel” type album?

I had been listening to a lot of Americana and I got teamed up with my friend Kyle [Andrews] through our music publishing company to do a co-write, and we wrote this song called “The Road.” So I was thinking about some of these themes, like being on the road and rambling, and when we were done with it, we were like, “I really like this vibe, do you want to do some more like this?” So that is the literal way that it came about. But more broadly, I was so used to being on the road constantly. That was just my life for years and years and years. And when the pandemic hit, I was in a place of having to go inward, literally and figuratively, and think about “Do I enjoy that? Was that serving me? Was that even the life that I wanted?”

I found that the things that I was yearning for—like the open road and geographical vastness and weird motels—those are the things I was yearning for. I was also yearning for intimacy and connection. And at one point [during the pandemic], I had to drive across the country with my partner. So all these factors were sort of percolating, and I just wrote the songs. 

Genre-wise, it’s quite a departure from the more indie rock and punk work you’re known for. What inspired that shift?

The last record [Pity Boy] was an indie rock record and the record before that was pop-punk. I like punk; punk is not a dirty word to me. But I really hadn’t written anything on acoustic guitar in a long time. I was just sort of experimenting during the pandemic and I was alone and, you know, I’m always writing weird songs that are sort of genre departures. Like, I write lots of different types of songs, and sometimes they go into the song graveyard. 

I have tons of those. But these felt more personal and they had a cohesive vibe. I remember I was like, “Should I put them out? Should I not put them out?” I mean, it is kind of a departure. 

I emailed them to [American singer-songwriter] Mitski. She said something really nice back, she said, “It’s not that different, I’ve definitely put my fans through weirder.” She was like, “You could actually make it a full-length and I think that would be fine.” And I was like, “Yeah, I could.” 

The year was so heavy and there was so much death, both publicly and personally for me. I sort of had this moment where I wondered: Why hold onto these things that I’ve made in order to fulfill “my brand”? We’re all dying; it doesn’t matter. If you made something that you want to share with somebody just do it. And for that matter, I also decided not to wait to find what label to put it out on or anything, I decided to self-release it. Life’s too short, and none of this shit actually matters. 

I don’t know how many people can say the phrase, “I bothered Mitski about it.” That’s quite a name drop.

Yeah, I have a strange acquaintanceship with Mitski. We have actually only met one time technically, but we’re like phone friends. I think of her as my AIM friend, you know, because every six months or so we’ll just send some voice memos to each other and I’ll be like, “What’s going on your life?” 

I just really like her and I think she’s great. But I sometimes forget how famous she is. 

This album is very evocative of Bruce Springsteen and John Prine in its exploration of masculinity, particularly in your music video for “Candy Bars and Men.” As queer and trans people, I know we think a lot about masculinity, but I’m curious about how you grappled with it through song. 

The last five years have been a real constant grapple with masculinity. It’s still growing and shifting, my relationship with masculinity. Not just in terms of my gender presentation, but just as a whole—my associations with it and positive representations of it and negative representations of it and my own beliefs about what masculinity or femininity means. It’s sort of a lifelong process, right?

In terms of this EP, I think at the time it was more unconscious. But there was definitely some stuff shifting for me while I was working on it that changed a lot of my life.

I’ve been out as trans for years, and had been on testosterone before working on this. But it was during the pandemic, during the lockdown while I was working on this, that I went up on my testosterone or something shifted with my levels. I’m not sure what happened, but suddenly I crossed over that invisible barrier, where strangers started reading me as male.

While I was working on these songs, my voice dropped more. So like, I can hear certain songs that we recorded earlier and are higher than other ones. And [my voice has] even dropped more since then. But that was kind of the first big one. And then all of a sudden I was walking through the world and people were not reading me as a woman and also not reading me as, like, not being unsure or uneasy about my gender, which was the other thing that would obviously happen. They were reading me as a man. 

And I was like, “Am I okay with this?” Yes. But that was definitely an adjustment. After being every letter of LGBT and every flavour of gay and trans my whole life, it’s weird to keep discovering more things at this point.

There aren’t a ton of hyper-visible trans masculine musicians in the industry, especially folks who are taking testosterone. There’s this whole narrative around testosterone and what it does to your voice. As someone who loves to belt at karaoke, I know it was something on my mind when I was deciding to start HRT. So I can only imagine how it impacts folks who sing professionally. Could you talk a bit about how those two things—making music professionally and going on T—affected each other?

Even people who aren’t singers for work or people who are just casual singers, like you’re saying with karaoke, they’re worried about losing their singing voice. It’s interesting just because I feel like transition is so much steeped in this cultural understanding of all the things that you stand to lose if you medically transition, but we don’t really think about as a larger cultural idea the things that you gain.

Talk to any trans person who has medically transitioned and they can tell you the things that they have gained—and it’s different for every person. For example, I didn’t think that I could dance and then I got top surgery and it turns out I do like to dance, I just didn’t like the way my body moved before. It could be something small like that [or] it could be something huge, like the way I’m able to actually enjoy sex now. 

The way that society thinks about transition is often through as cis lens or through a lens of like, panic. It’s all about identifying the things that you could lose, and that’s on every level. You absorb it. People who think about transitioning for years and get told “you could lose your social group, you could lose your singing voice, you could lose your hair.” You sign liability sheet after liability sheet after liability sheet [when medically transitioning], so I understand why there’s a focus on that. But a lot of times, I think it’s a fear of the unknown as well. 

I can’t tell anybody what the right thing to do is for them. I did lose my old singing voice, but I got a new one. It’s hard because you don’t want to lose the thing that makes you happy. But for me—I don’t know, it wasn’t really making me happy.

I didn’t really have any models for it. I remember reading about Justin Bieber going through puberty and I was like, “He seems fine.” And then my friend John-Allison [Weiss] did it before I did, and so I talked to them about it a bit. I just kind of feel like life’s too short. 

What does trans joy look like to you? 

Humour — and sometimes it’s gallows humour, really. And sharing that with other trans people, or queer people in general. 

My friend Drew has been coming over every Friday with her girlfriend, and we’ll watch Drag Race and then we have a slumber party. It’s been bringing me a lot of joy. I realize it’s like one of the few social interactions where I don’t feel like I have to put on anything, and I don’t worry about how I’m being perceived that much. 

I think the most queer joy, the biggest and smallest moments of queer joy, come from that shorthand—when you’re with somebody who understands you and you don’t have to explain things and you can kind of really get into the nuances of everything because you don’t have to sort of start from the bottom. And I’m not saying that that will happen with every queer person. I’m just saying sometimes when it does happen, it’s beautiful. 

Who’s your pick to win Drag Race this season? 

I don’t know who will win, but I would love if Willow Pill won because she’s so fucking cool and weird. But Bosco is also cool and weird. Also Angeria Paris VanMicheals. Those are my three faves.

Interview has been edited for length and clarity.