You Have Got to Be Kidding Me

“I think it’s good music for being on the move,” Hannah Judge tells Apple Music of her indie-pop project fanclubwallet’s debut LP. “I feel like I do my best thinking on a walk or on the bus or driving. So, I hope that people hear this and are like, ‘I need to get in my car and go!’” However, for Judge, that desire to get moving is more than just a response to COVID-era cabin fever: For a good 10 months of the pandemic, she couldn’t leave her bed, let alone her home. Shortly after releasing her calling-card single, 2020’s “Car Crash in G Major,” she suffered a debilitating bout of Crohn’s disease. While she was laid up in her parent’s house in Ottawa, she began writing more songs and sending them off to her friend-turned-producer Michael Watson. Given her circumstances, it’s not surprising that the resulting tracks are riddled with feelings of depression, ennui, and self-doubt. What is surprising is just how joyful and alive they all came out sounding. *You Have Got to Be Kidding Me* takes the spartan bedroom-pop template of 2021’s *Hurt Is Boring* and fills in the negative space with a kaleidoscopic palette of ’90s alt-rock guitars, electronic beats, and squiggly synth hooks that pop out of the mix. And while Judge chronicles her darkest hours with a cool, plainspoken candor, her deadpan delivery also betrays a sardonic sense of humor—see: “Jar,” a breakup saga spurred by a partner’s terrible kitchen etiquette—that nicely complements the production’s playful irreverence. Here, Judge gives us the track-by-track lowdown on the album’s creation. **“Solid Ground”** “When I first signed with a label and started working with management, I was really stressed and worried that I wasn’t good enough. So, this song is me saying, ‘You know what: I do like the music I’m making. It sounds good to me!’” **“Gr8 Timing!”** “This is one of the more specific personal-experience songs. I was reflecting on mean stuff that had been said to me during breakups, and I don’t know why, but I just thought, ‘I’m gonna make a funky song about something very upsetting to me!’ I was listening to a lot of Sleigh Bells when I made this.” **“Fell Through”** “I moved back to Montreal last summer, and I was super depressed. Michael was trying to get me to make music, and I was like, ‘I can’t do it.’ So, I ended up making this loop in Logic, and we thought it sounded really cool, and we fleshed out this whole song before writing any lyrics. I literally just sat down and whatever came out of my mouth stayed in that song. It’s not really about a specific experience, but more just like an emotion—just intense depression and feeling like everything is falling apart.” **“Toast”** “I wrote this song when I was feeling like, ‘I’m just sick and I’m home all the time.’ The chorus lyric is, ‘I haven’t learned a thing all damn year/Doesn’t really matter because I disappeared.’ That was just me being like, ‘Oh, my god, I’m going to be stuck like this forever.’ I’m still sick, technically, but I’m functioning now. It feels nice that I can go out to dinner and go for a walk and actually leave my house and go on tour now. I couldn’t have done that two years ago.” **“Trying to Be Nice”** “A lot of the lyrics here are coming from super-different times. Like, there’s a lyric here about Facebook, and I wrote that one in 2018! That part was written when I had just moved home \[to Ottawa\] from university \[in Montreal\], and then part of it was written at the beginning of the pandemic, and then part of it was written when I stopped being sick, and I was like, ‘Who am I? What’s going on?’ So, the whole song is about being really unsure of yourself.” **“55”** “I used to make a lot of music like this in high school. I just loved this band Blithe Field and tried to copy them. When we were making part of the record, it was raining and we had these huge windows open, so you could hear all the rain. I had brought a Casio SK-1 up to Montreal with me, and we pulled it out of the box and put batteries in it, and it started glitching and making this really weird loop. So, we just recorded it and then added more and more layers. It felt really true to the stuff I would have made in high school. ‘55’ was just the address number where I was living. I was in this loft in Old Montreal, which was super cool.” **“Go Out”** “I do this thing where I’ll wake up one day, and I’ll be like, ‘I don’t like being in Ottawa anymore,’ and I’ll just move back to Montreal, which is what I did last summer. But when I got there, I was like, ‘Oh, why am I here?’ A lot of my friends are in Montreal, but then I’ll move there, and I’ll be like, ‘But I miss my friends in Ottawa!’ I definitely feel relieved anytime I come back to Ottawa.” **“That I Won’t Do”** “I was trying to re-engage with people \[after lockdown\], and I found myself spending time with people that maybe weren’t good for me. And when I wrote this song, I decided I didn’t want to be friends with those people anymore. I was just like, ‘Wow, I’ve been acting super weird trying to figure out who I am, and I need to take a step back and evaluate who I am as a person and who I want to surround myself with.” **“National TV”** “I wrote this one pretty late, towards the end of making the album. I heard a song that someone I went out with had made and I was like, ‘Oh, I wonder if that song is about me?’ So, I basically just made a song in response. It was just me feeling that I didn’t want to see or hear things that could be about me, so the ‘national TV’ idea is me imagining, ‘It’s everywhere! Make it stop!’” **“Coming Over”** “You might think this is a relationship song, but it’s actually kind of a love song about my old house where I lived as a kid. There’s a lyric that’s about how ‘I never knew her how you know her now,’ and it’s just me thinking, ‘Do the people that moved in there know the things that happened in that house?’ Every time I come back to Ottawa, I always wish that I was coming back to my childhood home. I drive by it pretty often. This old woman moved in, and she always puts up this huge, horrifying Santa at Christmas. My friends who still live in that neighborhood will text me: ‘She’s put up a Santa again! It’s actually so scary—you need to move back!’” **“Jar”** “This one’s about someone coming into your life and fucking everything up, and then you’re left to deal with all the moldy food. I made this last summer in intense heat. I had the fan next to me, and I think you can hear the sound in parts of it. I don’t really know why I go into that screamy part—I was feeling nuts.” **“You Have Got to Be Kidding Me”** “This song just felt really liberating. Sonically, it feels a lot more open—it feels like the end of the album for me in a lot of ways. The lyrics are about me saying, ‘I’m acting out and I’m acting in ways I don’t like, but it’s because I’m being mistreated.’ And sometimes you can lose yourself in that. I find that in bad relationships, you act in ways you’re totally not used to. The chorus lyric is, ‘I don\'t like the way you’re acting/Tell me who made you like that?’ It’s a little bit about gaslighting, which I feel like is an overused word, but that’s what it’s about.”

Described as the “ecstatic, tongue in cheek project” of Ottawa-based musician Hannah Judge, fanclubwallet synthesizes the lo-fi bedroom melancholia of classic indie acts such as Bright Eyes with the alt pop sophistication of Lights Poxleitner-Bokan, with intriguing results.

Fanclubwallet's first record, You Have Got to Be Kidding Me, litters cartoonish bedroom-pop melee with sober self-examinations.