New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Today, Chicago's shadowy songwriter and detached, distorted dream-pop lyricist, Claude, shares her second single, "Everything's Great," from her debut EP, Enactor, due out February 12, 2020 via Side Hustle Records / The Orchard. The single arrives as Impeachment hearings dominate the media landscape, tying back to the very origin of the track. On writing the song,
Claude says, "I wrote this song after Trump got elected. It felt like the world was ending and I wanted to somehow poke fun at his "Make
America Great Again" slogan."
A cathartic song that taps into a collective "empty eyes" energy that many felt after Election Day in 2016,
Claude feels into the internal call for self-preservation to ignore the heaviness of reality ("You'll go crazy if you don't turn off your device") and a call for escapism because of the weight of the world. It's easier to fake it than to be rooted in what is so ("The menu for breakfast is mouthfuls of pretend" / "You get through life faster if you're a good liar").
First single, "Screen," which was shared along with a music video, sets the stage for this new song, and talks about the all-too-relatable scroll droll and social media toll. A song about being detached in a digital era and social media's existential impact, "
Screen" connects to this conscious self-awareness of living through a screen and how numbing it truly can be.
American Songwriter, who premiered the song and video, says the song "shows
Chicago musician Claudia Ferme delivering an eerie, evocative meditation on our collective social media anxiety," adding, "You'd think social media would make us less lonely—particularly during a time when it's literally illegal to hang out with other people IRL. Think again."
On Enactor as a whole,
Claude says: "This EP is about the world outside of me and the world inside of me, about change and disassociation, about the different faces we put on, and about trying to be honest. In it are my ideas about the effects of technology, the state of the world, and the state of ourselves when we're dealing with uncertainty and changes in our lives.
I originally recorded all of the songs for this EP myself the winter of 2017 into the spring of 2018 but then with the help of my dad, who works at a high school with a recording studio, and the school's engineer added bass and drums and basically made an EP of songs the opposite way you're "supposed" to make them. As I spent more time in
Chicago and met more people who also played music I formed a band. The original members are no longer a part of this project but through one of them I met engineer, and bassist, Michael Mac and he helped me re-record the EP now that we had been playing them live for a while and I had a better idea of what I wanted the songs to sound like."
Stay tuned for more on Claude's new EP, Enactor, with more singles on the horizon, and don't forget to follow her on socials. "
Screen" and "Everything's Great" are both out now on Side Hustle Records and the EP arrives February 12, 2020.
TRACKLISTING - Enactor EP
Screen
Everything's Great
In Limbo
Reality
Fantasy
Enactor
Songwriter Claudia Ferme writes existential-dream pop as Claude. She began crafting the songs that make up this project in Bloomington, IN during her last year of college to deal with the dread and fear she felt with finally being done with school and deciding what she wanted to do with her life. The project became fully realized when she moved back to Chicago, during the spring of 2018. After slowly meeting other people in
Chicago who also played music she decided to form a band for the project and started playing shows in the city. She draws inspiration from powerful songwriters like Joni Mitchell, Amy Winehouse,
Angel Olsen, and Weyes Blood, as she puts lyrics at the forefront of her music. Claude's music has caught traction on playlists both on Spotify and YouTube — including Spotify's official "Fresh Finds" playlist, TheLazyLazyMe, BIRP, My Old Kentucky Blog, and Hypemachine.
Founded in 2019, Side Hustle Records is a digital label comprised of the music industry veterans at Big Hassle Media. Not tied to any one genre or style, but rather to musical artistry in all its forms, everyone at Side Hustle has set their sights on advancing artists' careers in any way they can. Side Hustle Records is distributed exclusively by The Orchard. Look out for more exciting releases from Side Hustle in the coming months.
