The ‘Big Ideas’ of Remi Wolf

Los Angeles, CA (December 11, 2024)—It’s safe to say that the making of Big Ideas was a dream come true for emerging singer, songwriter and self-described “funky-soul-popster” Remi Wolf.

While her 2021 debut/breakout album, Juno, was made in various L.A. bedrooms during the Covid-19 shutdown, somehow Wolf and crew were able to pretty much create and record her follow-up, Big Ideas (Island, July 2024), within actual recording studios, primarily at the famed Electric Lady Studios in New York City.

It marked the first time she had recorded in “legit” studios. Electric Lady? Then Conway? That would be considered a treat—even a luxury—for any artist.

“It was always a goal of mine; I was always itching to get out of the bedroom,” Wolf says with a laugh. Jared Solomon (aka Solomonophonic), Wolf’s creative partner since before her debut single in 2019, says that by the time they wrapped up, Electric Lady general manager Lee Foster had developed a soft spot for Wolf.

Wolf first met Solomon at an afterschool music program in Palo Alto, Calif., when she was in high school. They developed an instant musical connection, she says, and soon after began playing together in bands and collaborating on songwriting. They lost regular contact when she left home to attend the USC Thornton School of Music, but then ran into each other as she neared graduation. Her first thought was, “You wanna make some music?”

Solomon produced her first single, “Guy,” in 2019, as well as “Wool” in April 2020, her first single after signing with Island Records. Along the way, they developed a unique, free- flowing, jam-based style. They work quickly and collaboratively, with production typically going hand-in-hand with the songwriting.

“We are recording, arranging, finding the instruments, doing it all as I am writing the song,” Wolf explains. “I love to work that way because I like for the song to take on its own character and sonic identity relatively quickly, or it can get confusing later. I work really fast and all my collaborators work really fast, and we’re really nerds, nerding out and making new sounds. I find it most compelling when the sonic identity and production is happening simultaneously.”

For Big Ideas, Wolf served as executive producer—curating the rooms they were in and the people she was with, as she describes it— while Solomon played many of the instruments, co-wrote some of the songs, and helped produce and engineer. They mostly worked in Electric Lady Studio D at the 32-channel API 3288 console, though there were a few days on the SSL 9000J in Studio B and at the Neve 8078 in Studio A.

“When I walked into Studio B, they had this old Rhodes that sounded really good, and they said, ‘Yeah that’s Stevie Wonder’s old Rhodes,’ and I said, ‘No way!’” Solomon recalls. “I just started writing the key parts to ‘Cinderella,’ and then Remi came in and we wrote it together. That was super-fun.”

Electric Lady engineer John Muller was assigned to work with Wolf and crew for a two-week period in 2023. He had not met them before, but fell right into the groove, tracking the songs “Soup,” “Cherries and Crème,” “Kangaroo,” “Cinderella,” “Slay Bitch” and a few others. It was supposed to be just a demo situation, but because of the way Wolf works, it turned out to be much more.

“We were much more productive than I think anyone expected at that moment,” Muller says. “We had three laid-out songs at the end of each day. People got in the room, they jammed, they were talking, we were recording, I messed around with this thing and that thing, and then, ‘Let’s go back and listen to whatever that was. Okay, I hear five seconds of this thing or a four-bar loop of this thing somewhere else.’ Two weeks of editing like crazy on the fly, and it would develop into a song.”

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He recalls a string of 14- to 16-hour days where they would jam, and he would then edit, quantize, make fixes and construct parts for them to build on top of the initial jam idea. At the same time, lots of people were coming in and out. “It was a busy time,” he says.

One of those people coming in and out was Carter Lang, who happened to be working in a downstairs studio at the time. He would pop up to visit, Wolf says, and ended up programming some bass and percussion on the song “Wave.” He also brought along a childhood friend, Knox Fortune, who ended up collaborating on “Wave” and “Cherries and Crème.” Wolf notes that “Wave” became the most challenging track on the album, calling it a “problem child,” but one of her favorites.

“It had such a specific identity born in the production,” she says. “It was a jam that we had cut up, and it’s a very syncopated and almost sloppy groove, which was really difficult to rein in. We had to literally record drums five times to get them correct, and I was not willing to give up until we got it right.” Solomon concurs, although he argues that they recorded the drums three times.

“Mixing that song—me and Shawn Everett—was another pain in the ass,” Wolf says. “We spent so long crafting the sound to make it sound correct. It’s still a difficult one to perform live.”

Everett mixed Big Ideas at the studio on his property, where he runs a Pro Tools setup through an API 16-channel mixer and a 10-channel Neve sidecar. He also has an old MCI tape machine that he likes to run stuff through. Solomon says that Everett had a big hand in shaping the sonic outcome of the album. Everett says that he enjoyed the challenge of connecting the aural concept from one song to the next.

“Different songs had different producers, so they just felt and sounded a little different, coming from different kitchens,” Everett explains. “The initial game plan was just to figure out some kind of cohesion through it, not so the album could sound the same, but so one song could hand off into the next song without anything being too shocking.”

Though he didn’t aim to shock, he did feel free to experiment. On “Motorcycle” and other tracks, he pulled out an old EMT plate he hadn’t used for a long time, only to find that it was broken. “I could walk up to it and hear the signal going into it and feel the reverb coming out. I just couldn’t get it to come out of the jack. I ended up just miking the side of the box and using the sound. It was pretty faint, but by cranking up the mic pre, I was able to hear sound out of the box. It was kind of a cool- sounding plate because it was, in some ways, more natural than pulling the line out of it; it had an interesting tone.”

On “Cinderella,” Everett went into his warehouse where he has an old P.A. system for listening to loud music: “I was using the P.A. to work some of the percussion and background vocals back into the room so I could get it to feel a little more celebratory, like it’s coming back at you at a concert instead of from a reverb.

“It’s an album called Big Ideas and the songwriting is colorful,” he adds. “It was quite a joy to take colorful songs—even though they were already recorded and produced in a pretty colorful way—to another level of color in the mix. Remi definitely embraced that. It was a great joy to work with someone who wanted to do that with me.”