Judy Blank’s Rounder Records debut Big Mood is all you could hope for – and far too fun to ignore. She may not fit the usual Meanwhile in Music mold, but she’s spent enough time in your favorite honky tonks to earn her inaugural place with us forever.
Born in the Netherlands but raised on the romance of the American myth, Blank has always chased back roads, neon nights, and the poetry of storybook nomads. Big Mood is that story unfolding between your ears.
It’s vibrant, well-crafted – deep in thought and delivered with levity, with a good-time danceable cherry on top. Blank refuses to be boxed in – one song hushes a festival crowd like a ’70s folk poet, the next spins a fuzzed-out ’60s garage-bop bathed in ’80s synths. She drifts between eras effortlessly, turning life’s chaos into whimsical melodies.
Produced with longtime collaborator Roy van Rosendaal at Studio Ruisendaal in the woods outside Utrecht. Beneath the hooks, Blank tackles mental health, climate change, and social injustice, always standing up for the world’s outliers and underdogs. Big Mood proves music can be joyful, intentional, and impossible to pin down – sometimes all in the same song, and roaring from the tummy of a T. Rex.
– @meanwhile_in_music
