JORDY Checks in With His Inner Child With All His Honesty in New Album ‘BOY’
JORDY’S NEW ALBUM TELLS YOU — to live a little, embarrass yourself, and laugh about it, then smother it all with so much kindness and joy.
BOY, the optimistic and introspective singer-songwriter’s sophomore full-length album is a collection of snapshots from JORDY’s personal journey. From pensive heartbreak tales to self-love anthems, BOY feels like an exclamation point declaring acceptance of past and present as JORDY checks in with his younger self and confronts the beauties and messes of adulthood. It’s a bittersweet celebration wrapped in JORDY’s magnetic vocals and ascending musical composition, an upward whirlwind spiral of love and growth.
With a pop undertone in mind, JORDY experiments with a full spectrum of sounds in BOY. There are solemn, balladic moments such as “Love You and Let You Go,” neo-techno/electro confessional such as “Dry Spell,” which sit side by side with instant pop hits including “Story of a Boy.” While JORDY is undoubtedly skillful and seasoned as a songwriter and performer, being safe was not on the agenda for the making of BOY.
Read below to learn more about the release of BOY, as Luna caught up with JORDY right before his flight to kick off the latest tour with Spencer Sutherland.
LUNA: How are you doing? How are we feeling about everything that's coming up soon? Also, what's one song you're currently obsessed with?
JORDY: Oh, that's a really good question. I've been good, everything's great. I'm taking a flight after this because I'm heading to Chicago, where I start my tour with Spencer Sutherland. So [that’ll] be really fun. I've been listening to “ceilings” by Lizzy McAlpine. I’m obsessed. It's such a beautiful song, and I just love her voice. Anytime I'm on a night drive, I'll just put it on and listen to her sweet, sweet vocals. I love that song right now.
LUNA: Let's talk a little bit about your album. There's definitely this love letter theme to it. Would you say that BOY is a love letter to yourself, your past self, or someone else?
JORDY: Definitely both. It's 1,000,000% a love letter to my younger self. After I wrote all the songs and had this collection, I was like, “What’s the one commonality between all of these? What’s really binding the songs together?” At the end of the day, this past year and a half has been a lot of therapy, a lot of self-reflection, a lot of self-work. And I just turned 28 years old — it's that weird time of being an adult where you want to be younger but you keep getting older … reflecting on being younger and wanting to be older. It's that weird dichotomy.
Throughout the past year, I've been looking at where the songs came from, whether it's a song about heartbreak or social anxiety or my relationship with my sister, or being an adult and feeling like I don't know shit, or getting high, or whatever it is — what's the core behind all of these feelings? I've come to the realization that so much of that is the inner child experience. I was closeted as a kid and I always felt different. I always felt like I was on the outside looking in. And I'm looking at myself now as an adult, looking at the way I behave and looking at my feelings and how they manifest. For a lot of people, it's so easy to bury those experiences and forget how vital and important and monumental they are to who you end up becoming. Getting in touch with that part of myself, with that younger part of myself, has been so healing for me.
LUNA: You mentioned that there are a lot of very specific moments in your songwriting. Where do you draw the line of getting a little bit too specific and people can’t relate anymore?
JORDY: The line is drawn where, as long as it's reflecting on my personal experience I'm okay talking about basically anything. “Dry Spell,” for example — very on the nose, very forward, not hiding a thing. I think when it comes to when it would be too far, [it would be] sharing things about somebody else's experience. I will always write about other people — I will write about boys, I will write about friendships, whatever, … [until] it gets to the point where I'm like, maybe this person would be uncomfortable with me sharing this part of them, not my experience with them. But I think as long as it's centered around my journey and my experience — I'm an open book, I'm a heart on sleeve — [I’ll be the] say the hard thing so that other people don't have to kind of person. That's also my responsibility as an artist, to say those difficult things. As long as it's about my experience and my journey, it's all good.
LUNA: That's also something that I thought was really interesting. Even when you were answering the last question, so much of this album talked about other people, but every time you do that, this is still about JORDY. For example, through a song that's called “Becky’s Brother,” it's not like I'm invested in your sister's story — it's still very much so your story, and I thought that was such a well thought-out way to craft it.
JORDY: Thank you. I appreciate that. If you break my heart, I will write a song about you, no doubt. But no, of course, at the end of the day these are my stories. And this is the chapter one of the chapters of my journey. It means a lot to you say that. So thank you.
LUNA: I got the sense from you that you are probably one of those songwriters who can crank out songs very quickly. But that also means when you're staring at a catalog of songs and you're trying to put together an album, you need to sort through all these things and find a common denominator in it. At what point did you decide that this album is called BOY and that it's about how the people in your surrounding affected and built you?
JORDY: Some people might go into an album cycle being like, this is what I want my album to be called, this is my goal for this record. I kind of let life steer me throughout this past project. My goal was to write songs that were continuing to be honest and authentic to myself. It was important for me to live a little life so that I had some feelings and experiences to be reminded of, to write about, but after the collection had been created and after all the songs were done, I was like, “What's really bringing these songs together?”
Obviously, "Story of a Boy" is the big moment on the album, and I was thinking about potentially naming the album that. But I ended up with BOY because I liked the one-word, powerful statement. It's also such a word for interpretation. It's for my younger self, and all the songs were created because of that. I just turned 28, but I'm just a boy trying to figure it out still. So it was after the songs were written when I was like, “I think this is definitely the name of the album.”
LUNA: Where do you envision people listening to this album? What are the settings?
JORDY: Oh, that's a good question. It's a great record to listen to in the car. Wherever your safe space is, wherever your sanctuary is, I want you to listen to this project in a space that makes you feel comfortable and makes you feel like you can be vulnerable and let out your emotions. So whether that's at home or with a friend or in the car, on a run, or anywhere — as long as you feel safe and comfortable.
LUNA: Besides feeling safe, comfortable, and vulnerable, what are some feelings you want people to experience when listening to this album?
JORDY: Oh, definitely nostalgia. Especially with “Story of a Boy,” this project and making it was a very nostalgic experience for me. And honestly, being seen and heard. I'm referencing the years of my life that I felt really invisible as a character because I wasn't able to be open with who I was. I think that I make music now, obviously, for my younger self, but [also] for my community who went through the same thing. I like to think that my music should be enjoyed by anyone, and I do make my music for everyone, but a part of the beauty behind some of those specific moments is that I'm excited for my fellow queer community to listen to this project and really feel seen and heard. Because I think that we spend a lot of time not feeling that way. That's something I would really love people to feel after this project, like, “Wow, I finally hear myself.”
LUNA: What is your favorite song ever written? It doesn't even have to be one that you've written for yourself.
JORDY: Oh my goodness. This is a hard one. I really love the song "Unburnable" on my album — I actually wrote it in Nashville with Madi Diaz and Mikey Reaves, and they are incredible. And I think the reason I loved writing that song so much was that it happened very quickly. It was one of those songs that just fell out of us. It was a very healing experience. I had basically just met Madi and Mikey, and by the end of the session I felt like we were all family. It was such a beautiful day of writing. It's also the first song of mine that I've ever put out that is one vocal tape — that's it. I recorded one vocal take straight through, and that's what we ended up using.
I also love the song because it's cool that we invented a word, because “unburnable” is not technically a word. We were really able to do some storytelling in that song and use a pretty specific and niche experience and weave it into this general feeling [that] there are things from your past that will make a really large impact on you, and sometimes they're unburnable and sometimes you hold on to them because they meant a lot to you at the time.
That sentiment is really important to remember. The older I get, the more experiences I have, and the more relationships I have and the more heartbreaks, it's so easy to move on from those relationships and burn the evidence and move on and whatever. But I'm kind of over here being like, I'm always gonna hold on to certain pieces of those experiences because it made me who I am today.
LUNA: If you can go back in time 20 years and get to say only three words to your younger self, what would those three words be?
JORDY: Don't give up. Keep going. If you see yourself in the future, you'd be so proud and so enamored of how far you'll end up going, so just don't give up.
LUNA: At what age did you realize, “Yeah, I think music is the thing for me and I'm gonna stick with it”?
JORDY: Oh, my whole life, truly. There are home videos of me as a child, being barely able to walk singing the theme song to Dudley the Dragon. I remember my parents took me to see a family friend who was in a musical and I remember leaving as a really young kid being like, “I really want to do that.” I was singing ever since I was little, growing up with the Disney princess movies, The Lion King and all of those movies. I was able to tell by looking at my experience as a kid, it was always a part of me.
LUNA: I know it's only the top of April and you have a lot coming up this year. Speaking of the album, the tour, and I don't know what else, what are you excited about for the rest of the year?
JORDY: Oh my goodness, well, I'm so excited to get on the road again because it's been a bit since I've played a show, and I'm just aching to get on stage and to see everyone and just continuing to spread the music. There's gonna be a lot of shows in the next couple of months — that's gonna take over my life, but it's going to be the best way to bond with everyone and celebrate the release of the record.
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