Remi Wolf: “I want to let my freak flag fly as much as I can”

The lifestyle of a touring musician, on the surface, seems glamorous. It’s one that most people outside of that bubble would think of as “jet set” – full of travel, crisscrossing the globe in private jets, or perhaps Almost Famous-style tour buses, where each new city is a haven of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll just waiting to welcome you in. Artists, we think, are paid to see the world and play music for a little bit in front of an adoring audience each day. What’s not to love about that life?!     

Actually, quite a lot. “It’s a beast and really unlike any human experience,” Remi Wolf explains from her home in LA, where she returned mere days ago from another long slog on the road in Europe. Her latest outing has seen her balancing a handful of headline shows with a huge support tour with Olivia Rodrigo in arenas across the continent, and ended with a little pit stop at Glastonbury. It’s all something she’s aware she’s privileged to experience – and can be incredible, too. “It was a different feel from a lot of other opening tours I’ve done, but I ended up really liking it,” she says of being on the road with Rodrigo. “Her fans are so sweet and cute, and Olivia is really so kind, and her band, dancers, her whole crew… I fell in love with all of them.” 

Those golden tours don’t change the fact that being constantly on the move and living a transient life is still abnormal and challenging, though. “It can be a lonely experience at times,” the 28-year-old continues more broadly. “Hotel rooms and just travelling and exhaustion and feeling really separate from your friends and family at home.” It’s not just in the last few months that Wolf has been hitting the road hard, but the last few years and during that time, she struggled with staying grounded while away from home. “I really got lost in the sauce,” she admits. 

Touring can be a lonely experience at times. I really got lost in the sauce.

Remi Wolf

It would be hard for anyone following Wolf’s path to stay out of the sauce. Since breaking through in 2019 with her self-released EP, ‘You’re A Dog!’, she’s become something of a progenitor in her specific brand of funk-pop – all washed in colourful hues and equally colourful language, refusing to be beholden by the general genre that you might want to box her in. Her debut album ‘Juno’, released in 2021 via Island Records/EMI Records, won her critical acclaim and propelled her further into a reality where touring was a big part of her life. 

As difficult as being on the road can be, that lifestyle was the main catalyst behind Wolf’s eagerly awaited follow-up to ‘Juno’, the just-released triumph ‘Big Ideas’. She wrote it in the snatches of time she had at home between each spell of travel, making the most of the precious moments she had in the studio to work on new music. For the artist, writing and recording tend to happen simultaneously, so there were few instances of her shaping lyrics or humming voice notes of melodies in her bus bunk. Instead, those sessions back at home became the grounding practice she was in desperate need of. 

‘Big Ideas’ matches the DGAF attitude we’ve come to associate with Wolf with sharper reflections on life. During The Forty-Five’s conversation with her, she calls it “a journal or documentation of different little stories and vignettes”, all linked back to things that she’d been experiencing or feeling in her rollercoaster life. Writing it the way she did – here and there, whenever she could get in the studio – felt healthier than letting all those emotions build up until the one of one long tour, while also preventing tales of her recent life from falling between the cracks of her memory. 

“I don’t want to call it processing,” she says carefully, explaining how that approach to making an album impacted her relationship with what was going on around her. “There’s still so much I need to process. But coming home and being able to go into the studio with my friends was really cathartic and nice to get these experiences on paper.” 

When she was back in LA, Wolf’s catch-up with friends largely took place in recording rooms. She made ‘Big Ideas’ with Jared Solomon – aka Solomonophonic, her long-time pal and producer of ‘Juno’ – plus other mates like Ethan Gruska and Leon Michels. When expanding her creative circle on this record, she considered some key things: “Do we have fun together? Are they able and willing to have an open mind and a freedom in the studio? Are they an incredible musician? Do they give me the space to express myself freely and aren’t trying to step on my toes?” 

Fun, she says, is the first thing she considers in her work because she’s “such a band girl collaborator at heart”. “I don’t love making music alone all that much,” she explains. “Collaboration really inspires me and I feel like I don’t really want to do this job unless it’s fun and unless I can create these spaces where I feel safe. I feel like I am having fun, and I think having collaborators who are able to join in that journey with me are my favourite people to have there.” 

While ‘Big Ideas’ still captures the lively, vivid spirit Wolf has become affiliated with in the public sphere, compared to ‘Juno’, it introduces a more direct version of the musician. In the lead-up to her second album’s release, she’s discussed wanting to be more open and honest on it. “That’s always important for me,” she says, noting this isn’t just something she’s doing in her music. “I’m trying to be more honest with the people around me and the people in my life on a regular basis, too.” 

Lyrically, that means fewer “fun metaphors” – although they do still pop up now and again – and a more literal approach. “Hopefully, people can get a bit more of a glance into my brain than they’ve been able to see before,” she says. Exactly what you might make of her and her life after getting that insight, though, she doesn’t want to know. “I’m not really sure what people’s perceptions of me are at all, to be honest. It kind of freaks me out to think about that, so I choose not to!” 

Outsiders might view Wolf as someone bright, ballsy and bold, but that’s only one dimension of her personhood. As the contents of ‘Big Ideas’ show, there are plenty more layers of life going on with her – not least, she says, ones where she’s “always deep in some anxious shit”. “I’m a rather anxious person,” she explains. “I have a lot of anxiety about if I’m doing the right thing with my life or if I’m doing OK.” 

Making music, for her, is a safe space to explore those feelings and concerns – a constant exercise in exorcising whatever’s on her mind at that particular time. “It’s therapeutic to be able to release all that built-up tension in my head into something that makes me want to dance and sing,” she agrees but says the art of self-reflection can sometimes become a burden.

“As an artist, you have to think about yourself all the time and talk about yourself all the time. There are lots of difficult aspects to that dynamic. Sometimes, I wish I could just shut it off, but I’m marketing myself – I’m writing about myself and my life and getting up in front of people, singing about that, doing interviews. It can get overwhelming sometimes, but I’m happy I get to do it and have this environment in which I get to think critically about all these things. But it can be hard, for sure.”

As an artist, you have to think about yourself all the time and talk about yourself all the time. There are lots of difficult aspects to that dynamic

Remi Wolf

Sometimes, she’s able to use her songs not just as spaces to work through things but as messages to herself when she needs them most. ‘Cinderella’, the groove-laden opening track of her new record, is one such instance. In it, she becomes her own fairy godmother, helping her through the ups and downs of her transient life. “I was on and off tour and feeling pretty destabilised,” she recalls of writing it. “I was feeling overwhelmed and like I wasn’t really getting the validation I needed in order to keep going from people I cared about, and I felt strange about that.” That experience made her realise she “can’t rely on other people to make me feel OK” – and began writing to explore how she could do that for herself instead. 

The searing grunge of ‘Alone In Miami’ is less a message to herself and more that traditional storytelling, capturing a time when Wolf was, as the title says, alone in Miami for five days. Its lyrics depict some of the so-called glamorous life of someone in the public eye – sushi paid for by Playboy, general hedonism in an unfamiliar place and unfamiliar people – but is filled with a fraught sadness too. 

“At the beginning of the trip, I felt really hopeful and like, ‘This is gonna be a really fun solo trip’,” Wolf shares. “But then I realised that Miami is just a wild place. There are lots of parties, and it’s quite strange in itself. I actually really like it, but it’s a weird place to be by yourself. By the end of that trip, I just felt really crazy and lonely, and I was doing drugs and partying a lot, so it’s a weird, utopian-dystopian exploration of my time there.” 

Whether on the road or back home for a period, Wolf has found the best way to deal with the cons of travel and her job is to “find pockets of relaxation and recovery”. On tour, that means going on daily walks that “allow me to re-enter into a good headspace” and listening to her body. Since returning from Europe, she’s been “chilling in the pool”, even though she’s really sunburned: “I look like a lobster, but I’m happy about it!” Food, too, plays an important part in this balance and she waxes lyrical about LA’s “really nice tomatoes” and other nutritious goodies she’s been enjoying until she catches herself, laughs and apologises for “rambling”. “I’m giving myself the permission to enjoy the simple things when I have the time,” she concludes. 

If the key to a healthy, happy life is balance and boundaries, then the same loosely applies to Wolf’s music, too. Sometimes, it might seem like nothing is off limits in her songs – “Eating my ass like the human centipede,” she memorably sang in ‘Quiet On Set’ – something she’s also questioned, not least after making ‘Toro’. The shimmering, sexy strut is a no-holds-barred depiction of a hotel romp with someone endowed with a big penis, Wolf sharing: “We’re waking up the people down the hall / You’re a bull, and I can’t help but say, ‘Toro, toro’”, later adding: “Putting the tray outside the door, I want more / Yeah, I’m drooling like a rabid dog.” 

“I don’t think there is a limit,” Wolf begins before slowly backtracking that thought. There might not be a bar on what she’ll share from her personal life, but there is in what she’ll put out there about other people. “There’s a hard balance there, especially if you’re writing about people in your life. I don’t really like blowing up anybody’s spot or talking about anybody directly – I feel like that’s kind of rude. I would never directly mention someone’s name or something like that; that’s too far for me.” She doesn’t have to worry about those she has written about deciphering songs to be about them, though: “I tell most of them [before] so they know! We’re good.” 

There’s a hard balance there, especially if you’re writing about people in your life. I would never directly mention someone’s name or something like that; that’s too far for me.

Remi Wolf

Not putting a threshold on what she can write about is part of the artist’s continued commitment to herself to express herself as authentically as she can. That aim is something that’s always fuelled what she wants to do in music and isn’t changing any time soon, even if it can be hard to stay true to it. “Sometimes accessing that and letting yourself do that can be difficult, especially now there are more pressures in my career and more people listening and watching,” she reasons. “But [I want to] always be as pure and myself as possible, no matter my environment, and just let my freak flag fly as much as I can and not be bothered. I want to get closer and closer to myself and my truth, which is always changing. It’s an endless chase.”