FEATURE: Spotlight: Remi Wolf — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Alma Rosaz

Remi Wolf

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ONE of my favourite artists…

PHOTO CREDIT: Alma Rosaz

of the moment is Remi Wolf. I hope that people pre-order her debut album, Juno. She is creating music that is so catchy and fresh! It pops and sparks. I love the sounds she puts together and, unlike some artists, her songs really stay in the head. Such a bright and hot young talent, it is fascinating seeing the first steps from a great songwriter. I am going to bring in a couple of features/interviews from this year soon. Before that, I will go back last year. Wolf was getting a lot of buzz. DORK were eager to spotlight the Californian artist:

“There comes a moment in many a musician’s life when everything clicks, where the idea of going out and taking on the world feels suddenly very possible. That there can be more than just messing around in a bedroom and smiling between mates. Remi Wolf laughs at the thought, “I actually know the exact moment, the exact day where that happened!

“I was 15 and me and my friend, we knew a bunch of songs that we’d been learning and writing together, and one day we were like, ‘why don’t we street perform near this art festival?’ We parked on a corner, just to see if anyone gave a shit about us and we ended up making like $180 in two hours. I just thought, oh I can do this… this is the moment!”

It perfectly captures Remi Wolf and her near-fearless approach to music. A performer from the very start (“My parents say that I figured out I loved performing when I was 2”), her kaleidoscope world of huge pop energy, fizzing colours and sugar-packed punches rallies against grey skies. Whipsmart quips and instant doses of pop are the order of the day – exactly how a modern pop star should be. “I want my music to sound completely different to what everyone else is doing. I’m kinda striving for big sounds, unique sounds, unique flow, unique lyrics just… to be different!”

For anyone who’s glimpsed at Remi’s world, that should be clear. Latest EP ‘I’m Allergic To Dogs’ breathes with confidence and fun, an amalgamation of hip-hop, electronica and pop only possible in a world of flicking playlists. Remi Wolf is not about waiting around for people to shuffle in at the back, it’s about getting down the front and throwing yourself into that skittle-biting party spirit. “Performing was the first thing that I really fell in love with,” explains Remi. “There are just so many homemade videos of me performing magic shows or fashion shows or dance shows from when I was 8 or 9 upwards. A lot of me performing for my parents all the time, bossing my little brother around which is actually pretty embarrassing.”

Singing was a natural step. There were parties and backyard barbecue performances; showmanship going hand in hand with determination while soaking in the sounds of pop trailblazers. Conforming to the norm? The idea of that couldn’t be further from her mind. “The one artist that just really clicked with me from a super young age was MIA,” recalls Remi. “She had a huge influence on me just in terms of sounds and what pop music can be. Her song ‘Paper Planes’, when it came out, it was surrounded by a bunch of like soft-rock pop stuff, which I also liked, but she stood out so much in the sea that it had a huge impact on me.”

From the effortless personality of Prince and the impeccable musicianship of John Mayer, to Erykah Badu who “just changed something in my brain where I was like, woah!”, there’s a traceable line between those artists Remi first grew towards and where she stands today. Freedom. “I think all of them don’t listen to anybody, and don’t listen to what the market is trying to tell them to make. They’re just completely out on their own wave, completely independent and completely autonomous”.

I have been reading a lot of interviews Remi Wolf has been involved in. She is such a remarkable artist who has put out incredible music that will stand the test of time. Juno is going to be an album that will scoop so many positive reviews!

Before coming to this year, I am keen to include The Line of Best Fit. They marked her as a rising artist last year. Remi Wolf’s path into music took a big step when she was a teenager:

“At the age of seventeen, Wolf’s singing teacher put her forward to audition for American Idol. “It was very random but I got through a bunch of rounds, went to Hollywood week, did the whole shebang, and I think what I realised was, show business is crazy,” she explains with reticence. “The curtain was pulled back a little bit for me. I realised that it was not the way that I wanted to pursue music. I just knew that it wasn’t my thing.”

Instead of chasing post-reality show stardom, she decided to forge her own path. Perhaps partly inspired by the culture-shift in her hometown, or as a reaction to the faux-creativity of her TV experience, she felt the need for authenticity, however idiosyncratic it may be. “I’ve always had this urge to do something very different than what is going on,” she explains. “I don’t know how to explain it but I’ve always been like, I don’t want to dress like all these people, I don’t want to fucking do the same thing all these poeple are doing and if I am, I want to do it better. I’ve always had this urge to be individual and just seek my own truths.”

It’s evident in everything that Wolf does, from the mind-warping visuals to the sugar-pop melodies that coat lyrics like, “And the dentist always tellin’ me to floss my teeth, and I’m running out of Oxycontin.” Tracks like “Woo” and “Photo ID” have so many layers, sonically, lyrically and referentially, every listen should unearth a new discovery were it not all so utterly blinding.

“It’s all very natural,” she smiles. But it’s not just the music, Wolf’s world is a multimedia affair of clashing colours, post-tumblr memes, and mind-bending animation. “For my visuals, it’s all very intentional,” she counters.

Working with artist and director Agusta Yr the two pull on the surreal and wonderful thematics of movies like Spy Kids and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. “I used to watch all these stupid, crazy kids TV shows because I’m the oldest of four,” explains Wolf. “So throughout my entire life there’s just always little baby shows playing on the television. I think that I unintentionally got really inspired by kids shows and I just like the silliness of them and the colours and just the absurdity of them.”

But when it comes to the lyrical content, the influence may be something a little more adult. “I really like to paint pictures and I think my mind just naturally goes to weirder images,” she starts. “For a lot of the music as well, I was smoking a lot of weed and doing mushrooms at times so I feel like maybe that plays into it a little bit because it kind of opens your brain and you see different things and you share different things”.

Last month, Laura Snapes of The Guardian caught up with Remi Wolf. Among the subjects discussed were conforming and meeting expectations, in addition to Wolf’s relationship with alcohol and addiction:

“Her largely freestyled lyrics collage fast food (“Orgy at Five Guys with five guys”), Hollywood royalty (she threatens to “Billy Bob and Angelina” an awol ex) and cult porn films (“What’s better than two girls? Two cups!”) into remarkably human and gleamingly catchy songs about the difficulty of staying connected to your feelings in a turbo-stimulated world. Her super-saturated videos conjure the sinister charm of deepfake kids TV; she is partial to an outsized feathery hat and not shy about dancing in the street in a thong swimsuit and green Crocs (albeit filmed side-on to avoid “full crack”). Her vivacious world feels true to life and also offers a portal out of this shabby one: famous fans such as Nile Rodgers, Beck and Camila Cabello have already taken refuge, and Wolf’s debut album, Juno, is one of autumn’s most anticipated releases.

“I don’t think I’ve ever felt a pressure to conform at all,” says Wolf, Zooming at a chin-first camera angle from her LA home, where Matisse and Frida Kahlo prints hang on the wall (“They’re fake,” she clarifies helpfully). “I never thought I was weird, I was always confused by the people around me.” She credits her attitude to her parents – her Sicilian mother and Russian-Persian father “are pretty weird and very confident” – and to the “chaotic” three-bedroom house where they lived in Palo Alto with her three younger siblings and two dogs. “I think I thrive in the chaos.”

When Wolf left rehab a year ago, she felt a newfound optimism. “But also I realised rehab didn’t fix me,” she says. “I went in thinking: ‘I’m going to be done with all this shit,’ but nobody’s ever fixed. Life’s a big journey of learning and healing and I don’t think I knew that before.” The change lessened her anxiety around collaborating (Kenny Beats and John Carroll Kirby contribute to the album) and raised the stakes of her craft as she wrote her debut album on various writing retreats, including a dairy farm. “I think I’ve always been pretty bold and vulnerable in my songwriting, but now it’s a more connected vulnerability.” Sobriety showed her how sensitive she was. “No wonder I was trying to numb out for so long.” (“I got eggshells around me,” she sings in one of the album’s best hooks. “Don’t step on ’em, don’t step on me!”)

Wolf named her debut album Juno after the French bulldog she adopted in quarantine (he is named for the Roland synth). Like Lorde, Clairo and Fiona Apple, she calls her dog a key part of the creative process. “He was my partner and my witness,” she says. He also softened living alone, which Wolf hates. “It gets really dark really fast. Having Juno let me focus on something else: a walk, making sure he has water. It got me out of my own way.”

The gleeful fantasias of Wolf’s music videos and her allergy to preciousness are aspirational for her, she says: the goal is to escape the spiral and be that breezy all the time. It takes a lot of work,” says Wolf. “I would love to live a very carefree life. I know it’s not gonna happen all the time. But that is the end goal”.

I will wrap things up in a minute. Before I get there, Harper’s Bazaar profiled and celebrated Remi Wolf. They announced that she is going to rewrite the rules of Pop music. Quite a big claim! There is definitely something different about Wolf’s music and approach that means she will leave her mark:

“Speaking of new stuff, what can you tell us about putting your debut album together?

With every project I’ve done so far, it’s always been pretty piecemeal. I’ve never really been like, “All right, I’m going to camp out for six months in a studio and bang this out.” I’m way more sporadic. I’m floating, and then sometimes I’m like, “Okay, I want to make music today,” and then it’ll happen. So it kind of came together like that.

The first song that we started writing on the record, we started back in February, right before the pandemic hit. We had the bare bones of the structure. And then, from February onwards, it was a pandemic, so it was all when I went to rehab. I think we started really writing in November; that’s kind of when we got the bulk of the album out. From there, it started to take form a little bit. From January to April this year is when we started adding more tunes and doing all these one-offs. Songs just kept happening, and we just kept beating other songs that maybe we were going to throw on the record until we had an album.

PHOTO CREDIT: Sophie Hur

A lot of the process was like, we had all these songs that were maybe 70 percent done. And something that I like doing is getting out of the space that I’m comfortable in. I like renting Airbnbs and camping up in the house. We finished a lot of the records that way.

How would you say this album follows up your I’m Allergic to Dogs EP? Is there some sort of evolution there that you see?

I think something that’s really important to me in my artistry is just constant experimentation. I think in all the past EPs, everything, every song has been its own experiment, and on this record, we just kept that same mentality all the way through. I want to push myself, I want to push my writing, and I want to push the soundscape and the sounds we’re able to use, the words I’m able to use, the vocal tone that I’m able to use. I think that I’m just constantly challenging myself and experimenting with that.

Experimentation is another through line for me, and I don’t ever think that it’s not going to be. It’s just a part of what I really value in art. I want to keep it alive; I want to be innovating. I want to constantly try to innovate the sound of pop music. My biggest dream for this album is that people consider this the new pop.

It’s like you’re rewriting the rules.

Yeah, exactly. Erase the rules of pop. It would be my dream if radio was like, “Wait, this is sick,” because it’s so different than everything that’s on the radio now. At the end of the day, I want everybody to like my music.

What would you say has been the biggest high from your career so far?

I think [releasing] “Liz,” because it’s a song that has such a different sound, production-wise, than all my other songs and I’m really singing my ass off. And for some reason, I was really, really scared to release it. I was, “Oh, my God, people are going to hate this. People are going to be so confused.” But I think the fact that it just got so much overwhelming, positive feedback gave me a lot of confidence going forward. I’m like, “Okay, well, I should just probably be fucking belting my ass off all the time.” The reaction to that song was really special”.

If you have not heard of Remi Wolf yet, then go and follow her and check her music out. Ahead of her debut album, Juno, coming out next month, she is going to come to the attention of new fans and supporters. A wonderful artist who will be around for years to come, go and wrap your ears around…