In the eye of the storm: Remi Wolf writes her life with ‘Big Ideas’
Remi Wolf is an electric performer. Whether she’s bounding across the cavernous stage of London’s O2 Arena (as she did in May, opening for Olivia Rodrigo), getting the dance-floor going a week later in her own headline show at Electric Brixton, or completing a triumphant Glastonbury debut, the funk-pop party-starter always delivers.
Her distinct, powerhouse vocals, infectious energy and buckets of charm are able to win over even the most reluctant punter; who else would be able to lead the O2 through a jazzercise-esque warm-up, telling the crowd: “We can’t have any stale air in here tonight, it needs to be full of hot, human breath”? The Palo Alto-born artist has built up a reputation as a megawatt live artist and earned the eager fanbase that comes with it.
It helps, too, that Wolf’s songs shine in the live setting. Take ‘Soup’, a currently unreleased tune off her new album ‘Big Ideas’ (out this Friday), a fizzing, funk-flecked synth pop cut that details a fracturing relationship. Or to be more specific, as she explained when introducing it at Glastonbury: “I wrote it about being in a relationship with somebody and not being able to give them what they fully need, but wanting to so, so bad, and trying your best – but then you trying your best turns into you, on a rooftop, snorting cocaine until 7am.”
It’s a track destined for huge stages – which was Wolf’s intent. “I was like ‘I want to make a song that sounds like it should be played in an arena’,” a grinning Wolf tells NME. Mission accomplished.
“I was riddled with growing pains and thinking a lot, and being put in a lot of situations I’d never been put in before”
Emerging in 2019 with EP ‘You’re a Dog!’ (and two more pooch-themed follow-ups and debuting two years later with acclaimed album ‘Juno’), Wolf is now gearing up to release her second album ‘Big Ideas’. A slick funk- and soul-inflected record, it runs Wolf’s confessional songwriting through a genre-hopping kaleidoscope. Whether it’s uptempo, club-friendly numbers (‘Slay Bitch’), to Flaming Lips-inspired “psychedelic crunchiness” (‘Frog Rock’) and Evelyn “Champagne” King-influenced “soul-funk-pop” (‘Cinderella’), Wolf always bolsters her sonic adventures with her distinct vocals and lyricism.
The album was written in five distinct chunks, in the breaks Wolf had during two “monumental”, non-stop years of touring ‘Juno’. “I’d be on tour, come home, have two days off and then go into writing, and then leave again for tour,” Wolf recalls, chatting to NME over bites of bacon and egg in a trendy East London restaurant.
“In the year of 2022, I had six weeks at home,” she reveals. “I just experienced so much, and was riddled with growing pains and thinking a lot, and being put in a lot of situations I’d never been put in before.”
While creating ‘Big Ideas’, Wolf took full creative responsibility of curating “the rooms, the people, the vibe… really leading it from start to finish”. With her brutal schedule, the record became something of a buoy for her, giving her space to make sense and synthesise the experiences she was having on the road. “In that way it was really cathartic, because I was able to document my life,” she reflects. “There was so much happening [that] a lot of [the songs] wrote themselves, as I was just talking about what the hell was going on.”
One of those vivid pictures Wolf painted includes the lyric in the folksy ‘Just The Start’ that reflects on touring burnout: “I don’t want to party/but I don’t really wanna work/either way I’ll be lonely, either way I’m cursed”. “That was a song I wrote alone in my bed at 4am in a hotel in New York,” she says. “When you’re travelling and don’t have a home base… there’s an incredible lack of stability, and it’s really easy to start leaning on vices. Especially when you’re really tired, and you don’t want to be working, but you don’t want to be destroying your body.
“It’s this crazy feeling of ‘I have no idea what to do’. It’s a really lonely feeling. And I think at that time I was going in and out of feeling that way, and deeply longing for a home, or any sort of comfort.”
In the past, Wolf has spoken openly about sobriety. She marked one year of her 2021 single ‘Liquor Store’ with a message on Instagram explaining that “in a grand Hail Mary to save myself and my budding career, I quickly sent myself off to rehab, got sober, and four months later came back to LA to immediately start writing my debut record”. ‘Liquor Store’ was the first song she wrote on her return.
In the years that have followed, Wolf’s own journey with alcohol has shifted and evolved. “The whole first album ‘Juno’ was written when I was sober and had just gone to treatment. It’s a journey, I was really young then. I’m happy that that’s what I was doing at the time, and since then, in the past three years I’ve gone in and out of being sober, and it’s just an ever-evolving thing,” she reflects today.
“It’s something I’ve observed acutely within myself, and right now I’m at the point where I don’t feel like it’s necessary for me to be sober, and I’m doing a good job at drinking in that way that I want to. It doesn’t stress me out, and it’s not putting me in a major depression, and it’s not affecting my life in a bad way.”
“I started trying to find a balance of partying, then not. I was given the time and space to actually explore”
“I think for a while I was really rigid in the way that I thought about it,” she adds, discussing a black-and-white mindset she had towards drinking. “It was either ‘I’m sober, or I’m off the deep end’. I’ve tried to relax my mindset about it, and let myself fail, and then succeed, and see what works.”
Heading into another busy period of touring alongside the release of ‘Big Ideas’, Wolf has now cultivated ways to look after herself while on the road, aided by a period of four months at home – the longest continuous stretch she’s had in four years. “I started trying to find a balance of partying, then not. I was given the time and space to actually explore, instead of being like: ‘fuck I’m desperate for sobriety, or I’m desperate for a drink’. I wasn’t acting out of desperation. So now it’s nice to have those tools,” she says.
“I’m on the road right now, and if I’m feeling uneasy or something, I can just be like: ‘I know if I go on a two-hour walk, and walk under the sun, I know that in two hours I’ll feel a lot better than I do now’. If my body is feeling really tense, I know I can go to a yoga class and I will feel better after that. I think I have been accumulating these tools that are helping me now.”
After a handful of summer festival dates, later this year Wolf will embark on a huge tour of the US and UK, where she’ll be able to drawn on experiences from recent high-profile shows she’s been a part of. These include the aforementioned ‘Guts’ tour with Rodrigo, shows with Lorde, and gigs with Paramore in Australia last year. “I love them, they’re the nicest people ever,” Wolf says of the rock band. “They’re such a dream to tour with. Their audience was really awesome.”
With Paramore, Wolf also contributed a version of ‘You First’, featuring her own verses, to the band’s remix album ‘Re: This Is Why’. Hayley is such an amazing singer and melody writer, that that was just fun to be able to sing her melodies. And to hear her sing every night was just fucking psychotically, insanely good. She’s amazing.”
It won’t be long till we hear similarly glowing comments about Remi Wolf’s own live show, her compelling voice and on-stage bravado fuelling the buzz. When it comes to the release of ‘Big Ideas’ next week, Wolf says she’s “mostly just excited to bring [the songs] to life live, with a full band on my own headline tour”, something that’s already on the cards – including a date at London’s iconic Brixton Academy. But with songs like ‘Soup’ written to fill arenas, we wouldn’t rule out Wolf’s big ideas taking her there next.
Remi Wolf’s ‘Big Ideas’ is out July 12 via EMI
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Hannah Mylrea
NME
