I’m putting the deeper parts of me into songs, not forcing a clever wordplay onto people- that’s awful.”īlaney is fearless about using what he likes, and refuses to hide behind anything. The scene became more gimmicky and clever, and I would rather kill myself than write ‘gimmicky’ songs. In the people I liked, there was sort of an unconscious permission to do what I wanted to do, using what I’d learned as a base. “Antifolk quickly morphed into other things, and pretty quickly I knew I was done, because I didn’t want to follow that crowd, or any crowd. The scene helped me get through the part at the start where I wasn’t really very good. It’s lyrically driven music, that was about the truth, that didn’t allow the music to overwhelm everything. I never liked the name,” he laughs, “but I liked the people. “What I play is born from a genre in New York City called The Antifolk scene. His need to find his own way came about after becoming part of scene that defined itself more by what it wasn’t than by what it was, or could be. People say love is all you need… no, no, pain is the universal language, it’s what we all understand.” I leave a little bit of hope in a hopeless world. I like to explore all the different perspectives: Mine, yours, and the truth. I just played fast, and turned up the volume, but I’ve gotten to be more introspective, and that feeds the music I make now. “On the earlier records, I wasn’t able to be as musically vulnerable, to be as sonically honest as I am now. Will he need to pin down his own identity, in order to survive, and flourish, without a scene to feed off of? Blaney laughs, and shrugs off this kind of thinking. The whole music scene now is about money, and how much you can bring in, and I don’t approach things that way, so it’s been really hard to find a scene here in L.A., and I’m not sure I want to be in a scene anyway. “My music has become Bob Dylan ate the Ramones, while listening to The Replacements, and I’m not sure people get it yet. I’ll get my own island eventually, from which I’ll then want to escape,” he laughs. “My audience I can’t really define, but I’m sort of the king of the misfits. Everything, good and bad, on the record is just me.” There’s money out there to be made writing songs for strippers masquerading as popstars and talking about the good life,’ but that’s not who I am, so why would I want to. ![]() There’s a continuity to all the other things I’ve done, but It’s about evolution. I want to evolve as both a person and as an artist. It’s about the universal truth we all know and can’t deny. So if being honest is cool, then I guess I’ve cornered the market on it. Is it a catchy record? I don’t know, it’s an honest record. If someone asks me if it’s good, I tell them it’s honest. Lesser songwriters continue to try to anticipate what a fickle marketplace might want, making disposable product, while Blaney stays true to himself, and wherever his art might take him.”I don’t write what sounds cool,” he says seriously, “I write what’s honest. He still wrestles with his own boundaries, trying to figure where to put them, if at all, but is his own muse, trying to find his art organically, instead of putting on whatever guise society, his fans, or either coast might try to force on him. Regardless of the specifics, his talent as a songwriter certainly shines through. The new album, “Love Letters & Suicide Notes,” released on Future Wax Records witnesses Blaney moving away from his recent Acoustic Punk phase, and back to a fuller sound of a band, but is more likely just a richer spectrum of Blaney’s own personality. I ended up writing a bunch of songs about a girl I loved, who then left me, which pretty quickly changed the tone of, well, everything, but especially the songs.” “The band name, Dead Blonde Girlfriend, originally was a coping mechanism that turned into something more for a relationship gone wrong- the kind of stupid things guys, and maybe especially band guys, say to each other, about a relationship that imploded, probably because of me. ![]() ![]() It’s me and me only, trying to work out all these conflicting artistic personality traits.” ![]() “I never really played under my real name before the last record,” Blaney says thoughtfully, “but it’s always been under the one umbrella… me, and I don’t think there will be any other incantations, although who knows what might happen next. “I started as Joie Dead Blonde Girlfriend, years ago, then it was Dead Blonde Girlfriend when the band came together, then it was just me when I moved to California.”red “It’s schizophrenic marketing” Blaney laughs. Joie Blaney, once the leader of NYC’s Dead Blonde Girlfriend, now celebrated Los Angeles solo artist, has morphed, again, into Dead Blonde Girlfriend. It’s like a Hitchcock film come to life, or something.
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