Inspired by a sketch from classic comedy show The Kids in the Hall, pop enchanter Joanna Wang spins 23 vignettes about a colourful assortment of flophouse guests on her concept album Hotel La Rut. Recorded over the course of two years—including a stint in Iceland in 2022—the LP blends the artist’s humorous sensibilities with the earnestness of her previous album of original songs, 2018’s Modern Tragedy, and 2019 cover project Love is Calling Me to draw quirky sketches of oddball characters, with a deep empathy for their interior struggles. The star-struck daydreamer of propulsive pop anthem “She Had a Habit of Meeting All of the Artists Backstage” shares space with the lovelorn shapeshifter of prog-rock dirge “Strange Beast” and a pacifist driven to aggression by “Pigeons on Your Balcony” (based on a true story!). Many of these brief peeks into the lives of loveable losers evolved out of studio jams between Wang and her collaborators, giving their often complex arrangements a loose, organic feel—and lending extra resonance to the album’s balance of darkness and levity. Read on as Wang tells Apple Music how she created the album. What do the 23 characters in Hotel La Rut mean to you? “I think these characters resonate whether or not you’ve watched The Kids in the Hall. I love their humour and how they present it, and I love the way they describe these loser characters that are all ridiculous and charming. In a way they’re just like losers, but a loser can be made funny and adorable. Lots of the characters are that way. If they share any aspect of my personality, it’s their romantic outlook. In the fantasy of ‘I Believe That All His Words are True’, for example, it’s a little bit mocking, a little bit empathetic. So even though they may have certain qualities that are linked to traits of my own, I don’t feel that any one of them is especially like me. They’re all like little bits of me. What I don’t like writing are songs about my own painful stories. People are constantly changing, so in lots of my creative work I love writing fiction. I feel like that’s been part of my life for a long time.” Tell us about your experience of making music in Iceland. “I played guitar—although in post [production], I actually made a lot of flights to Portland [in Oregon, USA] where I played a bit of piano and synthesizer. In Iceland we spent every day in the studio. We’d eat at 11 o’clock and start work at 12. Any given day we’d be guided by feelings. I’d pick a song and play it on guitar to give everyone a sense of the structure, and then we’d go online to look for references for the guitar, drums and bass. Then we’d start to jam.” What’s your writing process like? “It varies. Sometimes I may suddenly get an idea—like for ‘Pigeon on the Balcony’, which was something that happened to a friend of mine. The thought struck me that it would be amusing to write the character as a repressed, violent sort of person. For some ideas, I won’t have any lyrics, just a guitar melody. I may start from guitar chords, or sometimes try to fit chords to a melody. Lots of the lyrics are actually assembled from different sections. For ‘There She Smiles’, I wrote three distinct sections and joined them together. That’s why you feel all those key changes as you listen.” Where did you draw your stylistic inspiration from? “When we worked on the arrangements, I had references ready for some of the songs. ‘Gasp! That Plastic Bag is Watching Me!’ for example, sounds a lot like certain Japanese musicians in the ’90s. For ‘Drunken Song’, we referenced Rush for a loose, progressive rock vibe. ‘Fancied by a Celebrity’ referenced Randy Newman for the feel of country piano and country rock. ‘People Don’t Eat Dinner by Themselves’ feels like the soundtrack to a western. ‘Flies!’ is classic British punk. For ‘Strange Beast’, I was aiming for a Led Zeppelin feel, with a bit of Pink Floyd. And ‘The Detective’ was a stab at something that felt like Queen.” Did you aim to capture a rough feel during recording and production? “I wasn’t especially deliberate. I just let it breathe. Whether or not you’d hear that particular raw sound wasn’t in my control. We’d choose a song based on our feelings that day, and then the five of us would jam in the studio until it turned into a fairly decent arrangement. So that’s why it has that raw band feel.” What new things do you want to try on future projects? “There was an online meme that took the chords of John Coltrane’s ‘Giant Steps’ and used them to play all kinds of other songs. Some sounded super absurd to me—but really good. I want to do an album of classic pop songs re-harmonised using the ‘Giant Steps’ chords and done up with the information overload of hyperpop.” Are there any plans to adapt this album into a musical? “This album does sound like a journey. And I feel like there are lots of small songs that are multipurpose. Like ‘Drunken Song’—I feel like it’s suited to lots of scenes. There’s a movie called Dead Talents Society that cut a trailer with one of the album tracks. So I feel like some of these songs could pair well with certain images. But a musical? Maybe not.” Below, Wang elaborates on the making of selected album tracks. “I Believe That All His Words are True” “The main reference for this one was a singer named Kevin Ayers, from the psychedelic music movement in the UK. He has a low, low voice and his songs have a sort of circus feel to them.” “Pigeons on Your Balcony” “I quite like this song. It’s not a specific reference to any particular film, but I did want to bring out the feeling of a Mafia member confessing in a church. To the priest, he says things like, ‘Oh, I’m innocent, I’m a man of peace’ and blames his problems on others. But his own actions are actually super violent.” “Drunken Song” “There’s not much darkness in this one, but when I finished it I felt like it would be really appropriate on a soundtrack to a brainless Will Ferrell action movie. It really suits that feeling.” “The Wish I”, “The Wish II” “These are just guitar, bass and vocal. They’re very simple, but I feel like despite their brevity, they’re a complete expression of sad sentiments. When I wrote the first one, I had in mind the feeling of that tune from Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.” “Gasp! That Plastic Bag is Watching Me!” “This one doesn’t have lyrics. But the scene it describes, you can imagine as a spy from the Soviet Union or some other power who’s retired but is still so ultra-sensitive that he feels like he’s being watched by a plastic bag.” “Jump in the Water” “This song bears the influence of Oingo Boingo, a band I really love. I had just been listening to XTC for the first time and realised that they were a major influence on Oingo Boingo. My drummer on this album, Micah Kassel, loves XTC—he listens to lots of new wave drumming—so I feel fortunate to have found him, because I knew he’d bring lots of what’s distinctive about those songs to our production.” “Shadow at My Feet” “The reference I gave for this one was The Zombies. The album Odessey and Oracle contains a song about World War I called ‘Butcher’s Tale’. I love the desolate feeling it has, so I played it for our recording engineer as a general pointer.” “Ragged Stairs to Heaven” “I really wanted this one done like the Carpenters. As the final track on the album, I wanted something that was the complete opposite to what had come before, as if this song wasn’t a hotel guest but a summing-up of all the others. So I wanted it to feel a little like an ending credits song in a movie—and a tonal shift.”