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“[Modern pop music] I'm not that excited about it.”
“I'm very sensitive to environments and lighting and the energy flow of a space,” she enthuses, “so it was fun to go into different spaces and just immerse myself in them. I wrote a song called 'Waves' in Conway in LA, and Blink-182 recorded there in the early '00s, Katy Perry recorded there, The Weeknd recorded pretty much all of his records there, Justin Timberlake was there while he was recording. We bumped into each other in the hall a bunch of times, so when I mention Timberlake in the song (“I don't get the same itch when I listen to Timberlake without you”), it's because he was there. When you're in that space, surrounded by all those records on the walls and hearing those stories, you're enveloped in history and the past. I think that really influenced writing in that space. You feel the spirits of the walls, which I know sounds weird.”
That doesn't sound crazy, but judging by her current tour support bookings, it's not the sort of thing you'd expect to hear coming from a major-label artist hoping to break into pop's big leagues. But then again, neither is her take on the current state of pop music as a whole. “I don't get that excited,” she shrugs. “Every once in a while a hit song comes out and I'm like, 'Oh, I love pop music.' Like, I definitely love 'Espresso' by Sabrina Carpenter, and I'm a singer,” she jokes in her Valley Girl accent, referring to the smash hit's admittedly most obscure lyric. “So I'd love to 'get' her…”
But it's this very idea that excites Remi Wolf so much. She's a trained songwriter, and could dip her toe into that world if she wanted to (the next track, “Soup,” was written “with the intention of making a pop song that could be played in stadiums,” she says), but more often than not, those typical structures and rules simply don't interest her. “All the structure and everything else they teach me is just a tool that I can use or ignore completely,” she says.
“Big Idea” achieves both of these things and more, all while brimming with personality in every sound. Remi Wolf may or may not be headlining arenas in the near future. Either way, she doesn't seem to care much. Whatever happens, what matters is that she's doing it her own way. “It's fun to dream big, but not having a number one song isn't going to kill me,” she says. “If it happens, it happens, if it doesn't, it doesn't. But at the end of the day, all I want is to express myself and be free.”
“Big Ideas” will be released on July 12th by EMI Records.