Remi Wolf grew leaps and bounds between the release of her 2021 debut Juno (which she made entirely in bedrooms during COVID times) and this summer’s launch of sophomore record Big Ideas. This period represented near-constant touring, and writing in short spurts when home in California, as the artist grappled with surging through her mid-twenties while simultaneously becoming an indie pop star.
“Mentally, I was just a crazy person. The ups and downs were wild,” she said. “I was essentially very fresh to touring on that scale and it all ramped up so fast. In one year I went from playing 500-cap[acity] rooms to playing 5,000-cap rooms. It was a really mind-bending experience. And along with it came so many new feelings. Of loneliness, isolation, community, love, friendship, confusion about my own identity, confusion about relationships. It was all a big whirlwind.”
Big Ideas is a triumphant, expectedly dance-y (man, does it deliver the bops!) and yet lyrically sophisticated collection of vignettes exploring those whirlwind feelings. These are two- to four-minute stories that find Wolf all over the place, emotionally and geographically, like: making out at Chicago’s Empty Bottle on Halloween, bumping German techno in an Escalade in Miami, missing lobby call because she’s having a real good time with someone (her nameless but heavy “Toro”) at a hotel in wherever-it-was.
Wolf will still deliver a wallop that makes you blush — and she brings that brazenness to performance, too. But on Big Ideas she’s also vulnerably wondering aloud about different realities, like being a trad wife (on “Motorcycle”) and shortening the time and distance from a lover (on “Wave”). A surprisingly sweet little acoustic ditty, “Just the Start,” recalls the charm of the early aughts a la The Moldy Peaches and invites questions of meaning:
But the thing about the chase, is it plagues the human race
“Just the Start”
And the thing about a net, is it only works when it’s wet
With the fishes or with the worth of a check
And the thing about getting caught
Is you think it’s the end but you know that it’s not
It’s just the start
Wolf told me the dominant feeling right now is one of joy and relief in having the new music out in the world. Yet there’s also a sort of gasp in “taking [her] hands off the ownership” of this soul-sharing content she’s lived with for so long. “It’s also sad in a way, you know, they’re my children,” she said of the songs. “There’s a grieving process in letting them go off to college, if you will.”
But she’s appreciating fans’ reactions. “Overall, the response to this album has so far exceeded my expectations. I’ve been reading online and stuff — I try not to read too much, but — I have been reading online and I feel so understood, which I don’t know if I’ve ever really felt before in such a powerful way. I feel like people are really understanding what I was going for, what I was trying to convey…the authenticity of what I was trying to do, which feels so nice as an artist.”
I spoke to Remi Wolf at Grimey’s record shop in Nashville, where she did a pop-up performance with only acoustic guitar accompaniment courtesy of Daisy Spencer (who plays with Olivia Rodrigo, for whom Wolf opened in European arenas early this summer). Wolf’s fall headlining tour brings her back to Nashville for a show at Marathon Music Works on October 5.
Read more insights from Wolf below, and hear our whole conversation also on WNXP’s podcast channel.
The more the merrier
Recording in a studio was like a “professional play office,” Wolf said, with so many more tools and tricks than she could utilize as a bedroom pop artist in the first years of this decade. She still likes for music to be very “tactile,” though, she told the crowd at Grimey’s — like she prefers a piano to a midi keyboard. “There’s pros and cons to both things, but I think I was able to kind of execute my vision, and I got closer to how I’ve always wanted to make music, which was very jammy with a lot of people kind of coming in and out in this very free way.”
She clarified that she enlisted multiple producers and co-writers for Big Ideas. “I brought in a lot more producers on this record, who are kind of scattered throughout all the songs. It was really cool to kind of sink into writing and creating with new people and finding people that I have kinship with in that creative space. I wasn’t really able to do that during the Juno process. So it really opened up my world this time around.”
I pointed out that even though she felt protective of her songs like her “children,” she really did let a bunch of people touch the work before considering it final. Collaboration seems like a virtue she holds, now that she’s been able to dabble like this. She agreed that such openness has yielded musical and personal benefits.
“Yeah, it’s honestly been really beautiful. I feel like making this album has created a community within itself, and I have so many more people in my life now that I’ve made this album. I really did, like, bring in some of them on a whim, like met them one day and the next day they’re in the studio,” Wolf said. The example she gave me when prompted was Knox Fortune, with whom she got on “really, really fast” The very day they met, Fortune and Wolf synced up to write “Soup,” a song I consider a stand-out on Big Ideas highlighting Wolf’s incredible vocal power and also peering into a relationship in which she admires and really aims to take care of her partner:
Doing business on the top of the roof
“Soup”
They told me to leave, but I don’t wanna leave without you
You’re so patient with the animals too
If you give me your keys, I’ll go and pick up the soup
Oh, oh, I don’t wanna live without you
Embodiment and performance
Having seen Wolf captivate crowds thrice, now, once at her sold-out Brooklyn Bowl Nashville show in 2022 and at two big festivals since then, I told her it feels like she pours it all out when performing songs live.
“I definitely feel like I completely let myself go on stage. It’s my time for me to just be so in my body, which is a very freeing activity. And I guess my plan with this music is to continue to do that, but also kind of bring that freedom to the band, as well,” she said. “I mean, that’s always my goal is for that feeling of the freedom to expand as wide as I can make it without it falling apart.”
Timeless and influential records
After citing Chili Peppers front man Anthony Kiedis in that titular pandemic jam from Juno, Wolf closes Big Ideas with a club banger bonus track called “Slay Bitch” that includes the lyrics: “She’s like a dairy machine, She makes a meal out of me, Like a milkshake in her hand, She’s my Dion to Celine.” With such overt pop culture references, I said, her whimsical songs can feel like time capsules and yet the music itself feels timeless, born of varied genre and generational influences that combine in ways both comforting and chaotic.
What are some records she thinks “still hit” now like they did when she was younger in her music-making career? These five titles she rattled off make so much sense as Remi Wolf “signposts,” especially given the vocal stylings, horns and percussion on Big Ideas:
- John Mayer’s Born and Raised
- Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black
- Mac Demarco’s 2
- Paul Simon’s Graceland
- Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life
“Shedding skin” since ‘Juno’
Wolf said that when coming home for little slivers of time between tour dates in 2022 and 2023, writing new music — the songs that make up Big Ideas — was her “grounding.”
“I would go out and come back and ground myself through the music. And I was able to shed these skins that were quickly shedding. I was like a lizard. Do they shed? Who sheds? Hermit crabs? Snakes!” She laughed. I asked if it felt like multiple metamorphoses in the time it took to write and record the new album.
“Yeah! I mean from the time I was 25 till I was 28, essentially, which are just crazy years, I think, in most people’s lives. You just get yourself into some crazy stuff.”
The acceptance of the “weirdo” on the record
Wolf said she’s pleasantly surprised at the reception her song “Cherries and Cream” is getting.
“It’s this very psychedelic cinematic adventure that we spent so long on, and I feel like it was a really big risk for me to write that song and release it. I put so many hours into that song and it was something that I’d never done, it was such a production. And, it’s really nice to hear that people identify with it and are willing to take that journey with me. And I don’t know why it shocked me, but I was nervous about that one. I was really hoping that they would like it. And the fact that they do, I’m really I’m happy.“
“You’re like, ‘Oh, you love my weirdo child!'” I said, extending the metaphor. “Yeah, my weird kid!” she beamed.