While he’s no stranger to the world of music, Finn Wolfhard is finally ready to release his debut solo album Happy Birthday. A heady mix of ’90s alt. and sun-soaked power-pop, this is the multihyphenate artist at his most real – uncovering previously hidden sides of his past in a celebration of fully embracing his authentic self. Which, as he explains, is the only reason to make art in the first place…
A couple of years ago now, Finn Wolfhard set himself a challenge to see how many songs he could write in 12 months. Not for anything, necessarily, just to see.
Pushed for an exact figure, he admits to having no idea, but it was loads. Some of it was just voice notes and quickly sketched ideas. Such is the nature of dealing with large quantity, he also says a lot of what he came up with “wasn’t great”.
The good stuff, however, was good enough to end up as songs for The Aubreys, the alt.pop duo he formed in 2019, when he was 16. But there was plenty in the keep pile that just didn’t fit their electronic leanings. Drawing more on ’90s U.S. indie outfits like Eels and The Lemonheads, as well as power-pop and Weezer, the music was something different. Lyrically as well, he found he was somewhere new, turning over various anxieties and insecurities and how he’s grown around them.
And so, what ended up as a fun experiment “snowballed”. Without being part of the original plan, the songs, recorded almost entirely into a four-track cassette machine in a quest do keep things raw and revealing, wound up becoming Happy Birthday, the first album with his own name on the door. Even this detail, he says, reinforces the rawer, up-close nature of what he’s doing.
“I spoke to friends about it, and they said, ‘If you want it to feel more authentic to people, hiding behind a band name maybe won't be as personal, it might make it harder to connect,” he explains. So, he said, “Screw it.”
“I’ve made a record before, but it's definitely the first ‘adult’ record I’ve done. The last album I made I was turning 17 or 18, and even though I'm only 22 it's still a young adult, I felt like it was a different, new chapter in my life. So, it made the most sense to go under my own name.”
You already know Finn Wolfhard, of course. He’s the lad from Stranger Things, Mike Wheeler, leader of the gang, a role that catapulted him to legitimate household name fame when he was just 13. In the just-as-iconic remake of Stephen King’s IT, he took on the role of wisecracking nerd Richie Tozier, to equally loud applause.
With two iconic characters done, dusted and in the past already, Happy Birthday is, Finn explains, a reflection on quite how much life he’d lived by the time most people his age were still getting their shoes on and figuring out which direction to go in.
“I look at it as a coming-of-age album,” he says. “That song, Happy Birthday, I wrote when I turned 20. It felt like a milestone. This being the first solo album, it also felt like a milestone. It was just a fun thing to think about.”
It isn’t what you might expect. Lo-fi, unassuming, fun, at times weird, and often with a sense of actually wanting to remain in the weeds of music, rather than grandstanding off its author’s name, Happy Birthday is an intriguing work. One that casts Finn in a role you might not have seen him in before: music geek.
It’s almost as if acting got in the way for Finn Wolfhard. Happy Birthday isn’t even his first rodeo. As well as playing in The Aubreys, he was previously a member of Calpurnia. His first acting job was in the video Guilt Trip by fellow Canadians PUP, in which he played in an imagined, younger version of the band.
This gig was landed, he recalls, partly on account of being able to play the guitar already – “They wanted kids who knew how to play, so that it didn't look like we fully didn't know we're doing.”
Even at such a young age, all of 11 years old, Finn’s connection with music was already long standing. As a kid, he remembers having always enjoyed records around his house in Vancouver. When he was seven, he “began to develop an obsession” after his mum played him The Beatles’ Help! album.
“I was obsessed with watching footage of The Beatles playing live, and with all their gear and stuff. It was something that I was always really fascinated by. I would have these fantasies as a little kid of being in a band and being onstage playing music with people and for people.”
Finn first tried bass, inspired by Paul McCartney, before picking up guitar. As he started to attend theatre camp and get into acting, he realised that it could connect quite nicely to his other passion. Also: The Beatles had already done it, with the accompanying (and often really weird) movies for Help!, A Hard Day’s Night and Magical Mystery Tour.
“I realised, ‘Oh, you can do both! You can be funny and in a comedy, but also be writing these great songs.’”
“I would have these fantasies of being in a band and playing music with people and for people”
It was on the set of the PUP video than young Finn met Malcolm Craig, future Calpurnia member and, just as importantly, someone who was also into Nirvana and bands from the then-current explosion of acts like Arcade Fire, with whom he’d delve into the world of punk rock. Turning this into their own thing, at music camps they’d learn how to write songs, and be in a band. The first time Finn took to the stage, he was hooked.
“I remember it being the greatest feeling ever. I didn't want it to stop. It was this really great moment, like all of my fantasies as a little kid had finally come true, and I was really doing what I wanted to do.”
It doesn’t take much talking to Finn for this enthusiasm to boil over. Fast and at-length, discussing the album, the likeable, energetic, chatty star almost can’t tell you about it quickly enough. It’s hugely endearing.
“I want people to feel like they're right there with me,” he says of the no-frills production on the album, done with Kai Slater of Lifeguard and one-man project Sharp Pins. “When I listen to music, if I can imagine the musician recording it, that makes me feel more connected to it. Imperfection and stuff like that just makes me feel so much more close to the musician and the music. Because I can imagine that little scene of them messing up a bass part and being like, ‘You know what? Let's run with it.’ That makes it feel all the more human and relatable.
“These songs, to me, felt scrappy and fun. Part of the reason I recorded on cassette is that I wanted them to sound a little imperfect, and you have to be okay with the flubs sometimes. Sometimes you don't get the punch-in right, or you don't get the overdub on beep, but it becomes a part of the song. Some of my favourite songs ever have weird imperfections and flubbed lines that I think really add to the authentic-ness of the song.”
“Because the songs were scrappy and fun, I wanted the songs to sound imperfect”
All the better to allow some of the more personal elements of the lyrics to come through. Finn loves it when sunny songs come with dark, sarcastic lyrics, or vice-versa, “clashing things, where there’s sad-sounding melody, but funny lyrics,” pointing to Elliott Smith as an example. It’s the same with Happy Birthday. The title-track, with its woozy guitar effects, is a prime example of happy title meeting sadder tunes, while Every Town There’s A Darling, with its choppy guitars, takes the opposite route.
“There's stuff on the album where it's just me trying to mess around with form, and then also trying to say something that's a little more personal as well.”
Take the song Eat. In it, Finn sings about his “relationship to anxiety” he felt as a teen, and how the cycles would play out in food.
“It’s about the horror of getting really bad panic attacks when I was 15,” he says. “I wouldn't eat for days. It was classic thing of, you feel super-anxious so you don’t eat, and it feeds into itself because the body needs food to survive and calm itself down. But when you're anxious, you have no appetite, and so you're kind of working against yourself.”
Being able to put something like this out there is one of the surprises about Happy Birthday. When it’s put to Finn that it must be quite nice to be able to just be impulsive, and express himself so loosely and freely to make something that’s his, compared to the one-cog-in-a-thousand dynamic of working on something like Stranger Things, he answers “absolutely”.
“It makes things seem simpler, and I think it allows me to feel like I have a little more control and agency over my life,” he ponders. “I’m so grateful for how the show has affected people. The reason why people know me is from the show, and I love that. But [I hope I can] somehow break out of that mould as well, and show people that I'm also someone who wants to make music, and write, direct, whatever, showing people that I'm not just that kid. Which is easier said than done! But I'm kind of at peace with that.”
Happy Birthday is also part of that journey. In a few weeks, Finn will embark on a run of gigs, his first in years, since he headed out with The Aubreys when he was in his mid-teens, at the same time Stranger Things was exploding. It was cool, he says, but the curiosity factor from the audience was also harder to square than he reckons would be the case now.
“We were playing a show in San Diego, and there was a drunk guy up in the balcony, and I think we were in between songs, and someone threw something,” he recalls. “It was an older drunk dude, and he was yelling, ‘Straaanger Thiiiings!’ Which, by the way, I fully expected. But I remember going home and being like, ‘Fuck, man. This is why people are coming.’
“Obviously, everyone is welcome, and I appreciate anyone that knows me from the show and wants to see me because of that. But I was 15 or 16, and having an adult yell at me like that just made me feel super-weird. I thought, ‘Oh, maybe I should take a step back for a bit and just make music in private for a while, and not feel like I have any expectations to be a certain way or be a certain person for someone.”
Part of the growth from then to now, as a more confident, older solo artist making a coming-of-age record, has been untangling this. Not least when Finn admits that he can be a stern critic of himself.
“I expect a lot out of myself,” he smiles. “I can get in my head about a show that doesn't necessarily go great, or I feel doesn't go great, and I won’t enjoy it as much. Or not let myself enjoy it as much. I'm now feeling like I'm ready to actually want to enjoy things. Also, I was a teenager when I was touring. I felt like there were a lot of things that I was grappling with, and that I was uncomfortable with.
“Nowadays, I'm much more patient in that regard. If I did play a show and what happened in San Diego happened again, I wouldn't be surprised in any way. But over the past few years, as I’ve got ‘older’ – and I say that in big air quotes because I know I’m still not that old! – I feel like people will start to understand what I’m about, what I want to tell people, or what I want to get across to people.”
It’s this that makes Finn The Musician so likeable. Asked about his ambitions, he keeps it modest, saying just to be able to write and play, and enjoy himself doing it, is just fine.
One of the things that’s most to Happy Birthday’s credit is what it isn’t. Specifically, it’s not the sort of music you’d make were you simply making it to sell a lot of it. It’s the sound of dive bars and rehearsal spaces, demos and voice notes, where, as he says, the imperfections are what gives it its character and soul. It’s honest, both in its lyrical revelations, and in how it's made. You can hear the joy of recording into tape machines with your mate, the fun of having to problem-solve your way through it. His audience, in his mind, is just him and his mates who’d be going out to watch PUP. With the means and connections he has, the choice to do what he has is commendable, and says a lot about Finn. Given the choice to easily be a pop star, he's chosen to be a real musician.
“I feel like there's been actors in the past that are musicians and they are really talented, but they play more into it as an actor,” he says. “They'll sign to a major label, or they'll make a pop record. I don't judge anyone for doing that, but that's not something that I'm interested in. I probably could have done that if I wanted to, I could make a super-overproduced pop record. If I wanted to go down that road, I could have explored it, but I'm more interested in just doing stuff that I want to do that I find interesting.”
“If I like it, or my friends like it, that’s really the thing that that matters”
This isn’t defensive. It’s enthusiastic. And whether he’s talking about his own work, The Beatles, Sparklehorse, Weezer, or simply picking up a guitar for the sake of it, it’s hard not to get pulled in by his energy. He hopes people dig it – and, we have to say, if you’re into grungy, shoegazy alt.rock stuff, it’s quite likely you will – but more importantly, he digs it. And good on him.
“The most rewarding and fun thing is making stuff that you would want to listen to, or making stuff that your friends want to listen to,” he beams. “I'm not super-concerned with writing or making music so that it can reach the most people possible. Even with [Stranger Things] being over, I’m not super-concerned with staying relevant or in the public eye, or whatever career move that people would think that I would do.”
“Some of my favourite artists, actors or musicians or whoever, have really carved out a specific career for themselves, where they just want to stay true to themselves and do what interests them,” Finn says. “If I like it, or my friends like it, that's really the thing that that matters.”
Will Happy Birthday change the world? Either way, that’s not what its author wants. But becoming an enduring, cool, cult concern? Entirely possible. Stranger things have happened…
Get your limited-edition Finn Wolfhard Kerrang! zine.
Happy Birthday is released on June 6 via AWAL.
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