The ghost of fanclubwallet

Canada’s music scene has always had strong indie and DIY roots via scenes in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver. Meanwhile, the nation’s capital is seldom credited with being anything more than that. Many consider nuance and niche as things waiting several miles – or, in this case, kilometres – away. But with Judge’s fanclubwallet and the scene she’s built around her Club Records label, Ottawa’s musical repertoire flourishes.

Judge recently gave the world her sophomore album, Living While Dying, but it’s the first record she’s made as a full band, recruiting her long-time producer and drummer Michael Watson, along with bassist Nat Reid, and guitarist Eric Graham, who help bring the extended fanclubwallet sonic world to life. Judge realised the potential for a change in her approach while touring another project alongside Watson and Reid. It was during a period of arduous writer’s block in an LA Airbnb. “I was trying to write something in the other room and I was like, ‘Oh my God, I don’t know what to do’ and then I was like, ‘Wait, there are two fantastic musicians in the other room. Why don’t I just go ask them?’” Judge explains. “And then we all wrote a song together and I was like, ‘What am I doing? Why am I not writing with these people way more?’”

fanclubwallet is far from Judge’s first foray into artistic expression, and her known iterations include photographer, illustrator, and visual artist. At the age of 16, she started experimenting with making music, purchasing a Casio Rapman keyboard from a thrift store. “It came with these preloaded beats you could rap over; it made crazy sounds,” she says, “but I would also make these ambient songs on GarageBand on my phone that were really terrible. I didn’t know how to edit at all, so if I messed something up, I’d have to start it over because I didn’t know how to loop. I didn’t start writing songs until I got to college and I was like, ‘Oh, maybe the guitar isn’t so bad.’”

Perhaps fanclubwallet could be described as the conduit that allowed her to tap into a feeling of validity or authority – the band became a space for Judge to write and produce songs that felt, at most, peripheral to her other projects at the time, both in sound and subject matter.

As for the eyebrow-raising band name, it comes from a literal and unassuming source: her father’s Dennis the Menace wallet – the one you get sent for being part of the fan club – that she used every day for an entire summer. It then inspired her Instagram username, and when it came to needing a band name, fanclubwallet carried across. “I was in another band and I was writing a lot of songs that didn’t always make sense for it, so I was like, ‘Maybe I should have a solo project,’” she says.

After early tracks like the lo-fi pop gem “Car Crash in G Major” went viral, fanclubwallet gradually evolved from a solo pursuit into a cohesive four-piece, each member bringing a specific flair and voice to their contributions. Judge credits bassist Nat Reid with the post-punk influence and some inimitable riffs, for instance, while guitarist Eric Graham conjures sweeping ambient guitar swells. “I could never do that, so it definitely feels nice to have a classic bassist and guitarist and not just me being a master of none,” Judge acknowledges.

Living While Dying was developed between three locations: Watson’s bedroom studio, a local Ottawa studio, and finally, a remote creative retreat in middle-of-nowhere Ontario – a small village called Mountain Grove that’s over 150 kilometres from Ottawa.

“It’s honestly one of my favourite places in the world,” Judge says of Port William Sound. “It’s [owned by] our friends Caylie [Runciman] and Jonas [Bonnetta] who live on this plot of land and they have a little house that they live in, and then in the back, there’s a big yard where they built this separate studio space.

“There’s a little cottage where the band stays,” Judge continues. “There are two beds and a pull-out couch, and the whole thing is just heated by a wood stove. You have to go into a separate building to get water, it’s surrounded by trees and fields, and it’s a 20-minute drive to the nearest gas station.”

All of this made the perfect playground for the album’s finishing touches, a feat which is certainly enough of a challenge for any artist, but with Judge suffering from Crohn’s disease to the point of being unable to leave bed – setting up equipment in her bedroom to record from an immobile state – the level of achievement is heightened. And while the surrounding world of key players in this album’s creation is something she doesn’t take for granted, she’s mindful to humbly recognise herself as the central source in Living While Dying’s development – something that wasn’t always guaranteed.

“I’ve been sick on and off for a long time, but for the first time ever, I got so sick that I had to just completely stop,” Judge shares. “We stopped touring. I wasn’t really leaving my house other than to go to work, but I mean, I was missing a lot of work.”

Much of the album surrounds the idea of forced solitude as a result of chronic illness, coupled with adjacent emotional contemplation, an established theme in Judge’s music. Her debut EP, Hurt Is Boring, guides the listener through her life during a debilitating period of Crohn’s, while her debut full length, You Have Got To Be Kidding Me, is even more quick-witted as it divulges even further. With Living While Dying, Judge tackles the same profound subject matter with wry ease while also learning to accept help from those around her. Coming to terms with that necessary step of her recovery journey led her to create the album, extrapolating songs from a painful thread.

“A lot of these songs were written while I was super isolated, and then I had major surgery last summer and after that I started to feel way better,” Judge says. “Some of the songs are about this mentality of, ‘Okay, maybe it’s not all over’, so the whole narrative is kind of feeling like you’re a floater in your own life, like you’re just watching things happen to you.”

That is what makes Living While Dying something of a sister album to You Have Got to Be Kidding Me, which was created in a deep depression, with Judge facing similar limitations from her chronic illness. There is a narrative cohesion between the two works based on the idea of being a ghost observing yourself – hence the album artwork by Montreal-based artist Meredith Smallwood – and situations you yearn to call your own or claim to have control over.

Judge’s process, storytelling, and songwriting is to-the-point; she doesn’t need 400 takes to feel satisfied with a recording, trusting the work and opinions of herself and those around her. She plays with nuance as much as with direct expression and unabashed honesty, and for an album created in the thick of such trying personal times, Judge does all this with a sense of realism and humour. Living While Dying maintains an aura of self awareness and indulgence not just in the realest of life’s pains but also in the debatable trivialities that keeps us up at night, pulling at the motley set of emotions that define our human experience.