Finn Wolfhard is on the cusp of his next big something.
He never says that directly, but he doesn’t need to. His first solo album, Happy Birthday, is out on June 6. His debut as a feature film co-writer and director, the slasher comedy Hell of a Summer had its U.S. release in April. The first batch of episodes for the final season of "Stranger Things" will arrive the day before Thanksgiving. The musician/actorwriter/director/producer is busy.
Wolfhard, now 22 and a world away from the young Mike Wheeler fans met when "Stranger Things" debuted in 2016, is both enthusiastic and reflective. He's aware of his good fortune and eager to spend some of the cultural capital he’s earned making substantive contributions to the DIY music scenes in Chicago and his hometown of Vancouver.
Between the in-home studio built with Aubreys bandmate Malcolm Craig and the multitude of instruments Wolfhard plays — his credits on Happy Birthday include guitar, omnichord, bass, Fender Rhodes, and percussion — he’s already a mile or two down that road. Happy Birthday’s nine songs, even at their jauntiest, sound like the product of an introspective season in Wolfhard’s life. Its personal, lo-fi vibe is audible in everything from chiming guitars and vocals swathed in the lush warmth of omnichord synths, to imagistic, searching lyrics. It’s a little rough around the edges, but never sharp.
Over the course of a long, digressive conversation, Wolfhard spoke with GRAMMY.com from Tokyo about making music with his friends, his gratitude for community, and the many influences that make his songs sound like the dream of the '90s is very much alive.
This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
You're currently best known for your role on "Stranger Things," which is about to launch the first third of its final season. You’re continuing to develop in your career as an actor, but music is also clearly very important to you. What does music give you, or elicit from you, that acting does not?
With music, I feel like I have a way of projecting how I feel more directly. As an actor, I'm being told where to stand and taking direction from people. I’ve been lucky enough to be on so many movies and shows where it’s very collaborative, but in the end, it's not my story that I'm telling. I'm trying to help the director or the writer give their stories to people. Whereas with music, it's coming straight from the source. I have a little more control over it, and can connect with people a little more directly.
After stints in bands like Calpurnia and The Aubreys, Happy Birthday is your first solo album, but writing, recording, and producing are all still collaborative processes. Tell me a little bit about how you find opportunities for collaboration in music.
I didn't know that I was gonna make a solo album going into this. The Aubreys still play and write music together all the time, and one day we’ll release more music. But our schedules weren't really aligning. Meanwhile, I was still writing music without really knowing if it would go to The Aubreys first, or to another project. I just started demoing stuff and writing songs pretty fast.
I met my co-producer, Kai Slater, because I’d recorded another album in Chicago and had been in and out of the amazing community of the music scene there. I'm a huge fan of his bands, Sharp Pins and Lifeguard, and I look up to him in a lot of ways — he's just one of those guys that's insanely smart and gifted, and he sort of inspired and pushed me into a direction that felt very authentic. He introduced me to new recording techniques and being okay with imperfections and flubs. We recorded a lot of this on four-track and eight-track because I wanted it to feel as handmade as possible.
Even though it's a solo album, I still wanted it to feel like a collaborative experience where any of Kai's friends or my friends who came to hang out while we were recording could just hop on an instrument and play. To me, the most fun thing about playing music is playing with other people — especially in the Chicago scene, where everyone is super connected and very supportive of each other. It was sort of a dream for me to be able to sit back and have all these amazing musicians come in and put their unique spin on these songs. So even though it's a solo record, it would not exist without these amazing people.
So you and Kai knew very quickly what you wanted the sound and the vibe to be like. What kind of shorthand did you use for that — were you describing actual sounds, or a particular song or album, maybe?
It's very instinctive. The way that we would record would start with listening to a demo that I had recorded, and then we would start playing, and it would just kind of happen organically. There was not much conversation — I’d get on the drums, Kai would take guitar, and then we’d point one mic at his guitar and one mic at my drums, and build the song from there. We’d fine-tune things, dial in sounds we liked.
It helps that we have a shared sensibility of loving catchy hooks and kind of weird, dirty, experimental sounds. We love older alternative stuff like Pavement and Stereolab, Krautrock or whatever — we would take little things from these artists who we really respect and love, and would inject those into the songs. Having a mutual love for each other’s creative instincts helped make it a very organic process.
Let’s get a bit more into some of the sounds and sonic influences on Happy Birthday. As I was listening to the new songs, I jotted down things like wooziness, fuzziness, rubbed with fine grit sandpaper, and these are all very retro sounds for today. They’re hallmarks of alternative and indie rock from the '80s and '90s; what speaks to you about those sounds here and now?
It was deliberate to add those sounds to the album, because my favorite music happens when I’m reminded that messy human beings are making it.
There’s imperfections and weird flubs and quirks… I love when hi-fi meets lo-fi in a weird way, and when there's clean bass or vocals, but then you have a really weird, fuzzed-out guitar or super-saturated sounds. It makes it feel a little more personal and something that I can grasp a little more, because I can feel the actual person through the music. For these songs, I thought that was the right thing to do.
I love checking artists’ own Spotify profiles, because you see what’s resonating with them at a given moment in their playlists. You have so many playlists on your user profile as well as on your artist profile, and they’re all quite eclectic. Do you approach that consciously or are your picks all a stream-of-consciousness jumble?
I look at them as little time capsules, what I was super into at the time. And sometimes I look back at older playlists and cringe really hard, like Oh my God, I can't believe I was listening to that much of that song. And then, of course, I listen to it again and think, maybe I was on to something. It’s odd to see how you fall in and out of love with all these different influences.
One of the playlists I’ve made for Happy Birthday is just every album that really inspired it, just because I think it's fun to hear other musicians’ influences. It makes me discover bands that I wouldn’t have listened to otherwise. It’s not as if the music that inspired this album are best-kept secrets, they’re all very well-respected, but if listening to it can make the album make more sense to a listener in terms of themes or the sounds we used, that’s the goal.
As far as influences go, the stuff I look for are just hooks, the things that stick in my brain — Feist songs, Guided By Voices songs, Alvvays songs, Teenage Fanclub songs. I listen to a bunch of different stuff, but all of them kind of share this similar kind of melodicism.
I can hear all of those artists’ influences in Happy Birthday, too. I think they all have a commitment to making their work sound handmade One of the other influences I thought I heard quite a bit of in the new songs was The Apples in Stereo, particularly on your vocals, and it made me want to go back and relisten to The Discovery of a World Inside The Moone.
Yeah! All of those Elephant Six Collective bands are so cool. Just a bunch of guys and girls that were all just making really cool, weird, poppy rock music on their tape machines. Listening to those albums, you can really feel the community within it. Kai is trying to cultivate that kind of scene within his own world, too — he puts out a local music zine called Howell Gala, which is named after the Krautrock song.
I can tell how important community, or being part of a collective, is to you. Do you think you’ll be in Chicago for quite a while? Or would you want to spend most of your time in Vancouver, to be part of the creative scene there?
It’s just that I have a bunch of musician friends in Chicago, and it made so much sense for this album to collaborate with them and record there. It would be amazing to be able to do in Vancouver what Kai is doing in Chicago.
I just had a conversation recently with Malcolm Craig, my bandmate in The Aubreys, about going to a lot more DIY shows and being more supportive within the local scene in Vancouver. It’s really important to us to foster a scene identity in some way — not to take ownership over it, but to be supporters. Malcolm and I have built a studio in my house, so it’d be great to record different solo acts and bands, having people coming in and out. I just love making stuff with people.
It’s kind of amazing to, at this point in your career, have the freedom to pursue a variety of art forms – both making art and helping other artists achieve their own goals. There’s tons of examples out there for you to follow in their footsteps.
It's true! Like, just the Beatles alone, they loved supporting and making stuff with their friends. I love that story about George Harrison funding the Monty Python movies, just because he wanted to see those movies and to be a part of it in some way. It’s a really cool thing to learn from.
In some senses, both with your playlists, as well as in your writing and recording, you’re revisiting things while finding artists and sounds that are new to you. Where do you find music that’s new to you?
A lot of it comes from my friends and even from my parents, honestly. My dad randomly started playing the Hoodoo Gurus in the car two or three years ago and right away, I was asking "Who is this? Why haven't I heard this before" He said he used to listen to them all the time and just thought I’d like the song. He was right, I loved it!
I like checking artists’ profiles to see similar artists, too, and reading interviews with people that I respect and love, too. If they name-drop an album and I’ve never heard it before, I can listen right then. It’s almost too easy now!
When I watched your What’s In My Bag? from 2018, I got curious about what artist and album you’d recommend to a friend today if you were wandering around a record store together.
I’ve been listening to The Replacements and Paul Westerberg a lot recently. I’m a gigantic Replacements fan, and part of the reason my parents got together is that they’re both Replacements fans. Tim is a great record, and specifically “Bastards of Young” is a youth anthem. That's a really fun one to introduce to people, because even though they’re a really well-respected band, a lot of people haven't heard a ton of their music, and going through their full albums is really important.
Are there any current songwriters who you would want to apprentice yourself to?
There’s tons of people I’d love to tether myself to for a bit! Molly Rankin from Alvvays is amazing, and Lee Mavers from The La’s – he hasn't been in the public eye. He’s a genius who made this one album and peaced out for a while. I’d be so interested to pick his brain. Alvvays has that something about newer, female-led alternative bands that just have their finger on the pulse and write pop hooks that other bands don’t have.