The Guardian

**The Guardian**, initially titled **The Manchester Guardian**, is a Britain-based 1821-founded magazine. Along with its sibling issues, *The Observer* and *The Guardian Weekly*, the paper is a part of *Guardian Media Group*, established by the Scott Trust. The initial trust was created in 1936 to, according to an *The Guardian* issue, "secure the financial and editorial independence of *The Guardian* in perpetuity and to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of *The Guardian* free from commercial or political interference". In 2008, the trust was manipulated into a limited configuration. On July 8th, 2021, *The Guardian* released a press entitled "Funk-pop rulebreaker Remi Wolf: ‘I thrive in the chaos’", announcing her upcoming debut, *Juno*.

## Funk-pop rulebreaker Remi Wolf: ‘I thrive in the chaos’ by Laura Snapes | August 7th, 2021

**The LA superstar-in-waiting’s kaleidoscopic music – beloved by the likes of Nile Rodgers and Beck – masks battles with alcoholism and self-doubt**

Remi Wolf’s music throbs like a bulging brain. The 25-year-old Californian’s “chaotic, colour-free, funky, stinky explosion pop” (as she once put it) revamps Y2K references – Nelly, Missy, the Chili Peppers – into a zany yet supremely soulful sound that’s entirely her own. Amid a sea of tastefully understated singer-songwriters, Wolf is a freak flag-flying maximalist.

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.”

Despite her apparent lack of inhibitions, Wolf – who broke out with 2019’s You’re a Dog! EP – is only just starting to realise how much she used to squash down her emotions. Her songwriting started out as straightforward catharsis. Her family are more “get it done” than “feelings” people, she says, so she’s naturally private. “Most of the time singing wasn’t a direct expression of what I was actually feeling, but it’s an expression. Singing is like screaming, getting shit out.”

She had also been smothering her feelings with alcohol – her blown-out new single Liquor Store notes the parallels between insecurity and addiction. The pandemic slowed a lot of budding pop careers, but Wolf says the pause saved her life. Last June she played LA’s first post-lockdown live show, a drive-in gig where she gyrated in yellow parachute trousers while fans beeped in appreciation. After the show Wolf got blackout drunk, a nadir that followed months of drinking before 9am interviews and acting destructively towards loved ones, and years of prior substance abuse.

The next day, she wept through lunch with her family and asked for help. “I decided that, if I wanted to have a career, I couldn’t keep going, because I would eventually die or not be able to function,” she says. “Drinking wasn’t even helping any more. It wasn’t fun, it wasn’t taking away any pain. It was just exacerbating it.” She had often dallied with the idea of rehab before concluding she was actually fine. “It took my career starting and actually having something to lose to make the move. I didn’t want to be miserable any more.”

Finding her feet ... Remi Wolf.
Finding her feet ... Remi Wolf. Photograph: Alma Rosaz
Her parents snapped into “get it done” mode and immediately helped arrange treatment. Wolf has been sober since going to rehab last summer. Cigarettes are her last vice: she smokes on her back step as we talk, revealing a tiny flower tattoo on each finger. She’s more serious and a trace more fragile than you’d expect.

Realising that her dream to make music professionally was in reach was a wake-up call. Wolf had been an obsessive performer as a kid until she discovered her skill as an alpine skier: she twice represented the US at the Youth Olympic Games. (Her coach used to call her “Remjob”, a fantastically inappropriate nickname for a 10-year-old that Wolf has since repurposed for her fans, the Remjobs.) Meanwhile, she sang in a harmony group and started a band with a friend. Music became a way out of sport.

“I was exhausted from skiing for 10 years and the constant travelling,” says Wolf. “It was either stop or try to make the Olympic team. I didn’t want to do it any more. For a long time I’d had this weird split life. I wanted to hang out with my friends and feel normal and grounded.”

Wolf met a bunch of boys at an after-school music centre where they jammed Stevie Wonder and classic LA punk and funk – including her main collaborator today, Jared Solomon. As she prepared to audition for music college, her vocal coach said she had an in at American Idol.

“I was like, why not? I’ll go do that!” says Wolf. She made it as far as Hollywood week (roughly the top 150 performers) and has no regrets about being booted off. “When you’re in that process, you realise how produced it is. It’s reality TV and they’re doing everything they can to make people more susceptible to breakdowns” – like being given a song at midnight to choreograph for 11am. “It worked – the next day, everybody was breaking down. It was fascinating and funny to watch, but I didn’t really want to be part of it.”

Studying music at the University of Southern California wasn’t that dissimilar, Wolf says. “Their philosophy was: we’re going to break you down to build you back up.” She says college is where her drinking problem took root as she endured confidence-shattering performance lessons on top of depression. Her 11-person house-share became her real education. They threw weekly parties and jazz shows and nerded out about music 24/7, “constantly writing and making shit up”.

DayGlo-up ... Remi Wolf.
DayGlo-up ... Remi Wolf. Photograph: Alma Rosaz
By her final year, Wolf had reunited with Solomon and found a natural collaborator. A brief run of shows in New York – once as the opening act for a KY Jelly-branded women’s wrestling match – landed her a deal with Island. That’s the point when young female artists often get their edges sanded off – a little media training, a slicker image – but Wolf made her autonomy non-negotiable, banking on a major-label budget to realise her freaky vision. “I had to be super-strong and tell my label: ‘I’m the boss here – I’m not gonna let you create or control any of my creative shit, because I’ve got it on my own.’ I’m pretty uncompromising in general – my personality is pretty contrarian.” (It’s hard to imagine a label exec conceiving Wolf’s Elton John-meets-Jay Kay image, or focus-grouping lyrics such as “I’d literally pee outside for you on Hollywood Boulevard”.)

That self-assurance energises Wolf’s work. She says she has always responded to feelgood music – Natasha Bedingfield, Lindsay Lohan, 90s one-hit wonders OMC – even when she’s felt at her worst. “I love how bright and overwhelmingly warm it is, which you don’t hear a lot of today – there’s so much dark pop and not a lot of live instruments.”

After she stopped skiing and her body changed, she briefly tried to control her weight, but forced herself to commit to self-acceptance to support a loved one with an eating disorder. It’s even more important to her now she’s well known, conscious of how many young female musicians go from “more normal to obviously having a very structured health regimen”, she says tactfully. “I’m trying not to conform to that archaic ‘female pop star body’ transformation.” Hearing from fans who say she helped them appreciate themselves is “the most I could ever ask for”, she says. “That makes me want to keep being myself. It’s a hard industry not to get swayed.”

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.”

Remi Wolf’s debut album, *Juno*, will be released on Island this autumn

1. ↑ https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/guardian-newspaper-trust-keeps-journalism-at-top-of-its-agenda-1.339116
2. ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/the-scott-trust/2015/jul/26/the-scott-trust