Fanclubwallet

Is Making Rock Music Accessible

And whenever possible, she’s doing it in sweatpants.

“Time to record and produce this EP from bed the #disabled way,” the Ottawa artist known as fanclubwallet wrote in an Instagram story at the outset of what would become 2021’s Hurt Is Boring, the filler-free, bedroom pop-meets-slacker rock debut EP she made in lockdown during a lengthy Crohn’s flare-up.

A form of inflammatory bowel disease, the condition involves inflammation of the digestive tract and can affect people in myriad ways; Judge experiences extreme abdominal pain, as well as more generalized body pain and consequent insomnia and exhaustion, alongside an aversion to eating and the inability to get out of bed when going through a flare-up.

“Well, better. It was better,” she laughs over Zoom when I ask what it was like to venture out of her bedroom to Port William Sound studio to polish her debut LP, You Have Got to Be Kidding Me. “I would have a lot of moments [of being] like, ‘Whoa, this is so cool! Before I was just in bed and now I’ve got a real music studio!’ It felt more real — like, ‘Okay, I’m making an album.’”

Getting out of her bedroom doesn’t make the record any less DIY, though — You Have Got to Be Kidding Me was just made during a period of remission. “[The album was] very much written when I was starting to feel better and things were kind of opening up within the pandemic,” reflects Judge. “I was like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna start being a person again. I’m gonna leave my house and feel emotions; I’m gonna exit survival mode and go into life mode.’” This relatable premise of learning how to get back out into a world that had become increasingly harder to navigate is distilled most literally in

“Go Out,” which follows the circular whirring clicks and pings of two-minute instrumental “55,” as if to commence a new chapter.

That’s why it’s important for her to post about her disability online. “Being able to be open about Crohn’s on the internet — if anyone sees that has it and is like, ‘Oh, she’s touring and making music even though she can’t get out of bed, maybe I can do that too,’ that would be an amazing thing,” Judge says.

So far, 2022 has been a better year, but the fear of inevitable flare-ups to come looms. You can hear the fragility of the world she spins in You Have Got to Be Kidding Me, where there’s no time to be wasted sugar-coating. “I’m always worried that I could get sick again at any moment,” she admits. “And then, like, who knows?”

But that stands as a key tenet of her whole disabled-DIY ethos of meeting herself where she’s at — and it’s become embedded in her sound. “Anyone can make lo-fi music and it’s so awesome to me,” Judge effuses. “[It’s] pretty accessible; you don’t even need to get out of bed at all!”