Finn Wolfhard On New Music, Acting And Taking Control

finn wolfhard for ‘fire from the hip’.

finn wolfhard

It takes me a second to recognize Finn Wolfhard. When we chat on Zoom, the 23-year-old is dressed down and sporting headphones with a bit of a goatee — rather a far cry from the 80’s adjacent getup that, courtesy Netflix juggernaut Stranger Things, most of the world has seen him in for the last decade.

The thing is though, that Wolfhard is okay with different. Everything about his post-ST choices, in fact, has suggested that he would prefer different, right down to his team’s request that I keep Stranger Things questions to no more than two.

Today, Finn Wolfhard is here to promote his music, and I have no complaints. Fire From The Hip is the second album from the 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, one that’s a “little more mature” and “casting a bit of a wider net”, he tells me.

The latter means a larger range of instruments (there’s a mandolin in there somewhere) as well as musical influences — Wolfhard points out the “real country element” along with the drum machines and electronic elements as a real attempt to “marry them all together” in an experimental but coherent process.

Compared to his debut album Happy Birthday, Fire From The Hip has had a much quicker turnaround. This album was finished as late as February of this year for a July release, but that was because the first one spent so long in gestation that “I had basically another record ready to go by the time Happy Birthday came out,” says Wolfhard.

The general nostalgic rock vibes of the album are in stark contrast with the liberal sprinkle of very online pop culture references. “I think growing up in the generation that I’m in, the internet is just ingrained into everyone’s personality, and I think no matter what, we all kind of grew up with social media,” Wolfhard says, although he goes on to say he’s definitely not a chronically online person.

Not anymore anyway.

“I feel like now I’ve been trying to really get away from social media a lot more. Like, I had a lot of fun with social media and it can be great, and it’s a huge part of the way that things work now, but I try to be off it as much as possible.”

There is a nod to Nicole Kidman’s viral AMC ad, for example. The opening song, ‘I Will Let You Finish’, literally ends with a verbatim transcript of Kanye West’s infamous interruption of Taylor Swift’s 2008 VMAs speech.

“Pop culture is a huge part of my life, and it adds a little bit of a sense of humour to things,” says Wolfhard, which tracks with the frequently irreverent, almost fever-dream-like lyricism of most of the tracks.

Wolfhard himself was only five years old when the Swift/West saga kicked off in real time, so memory of it is more connected to a South Park episode about it. “Being able to write about things that everyone kind of lived through together and saw, I think is a sweet spot sometimes when recording.”

I wonder out loud what frame of mind one has to be in to lace that moment, one that’s now baked into pop culture annals under keywords ‘awkward’ and perhaps ‘prescient’, into a whole song verse. Wolfhard smiles.

“I kind of wrote that so that I would be able to play it live,” he explains. “I basically wanted to write it so that the song would end when — you know, this thing that I would look out in the crowd and people would go, wait, is that the VMAs rant?”

Wolfhard will have plenty of opportunities to see this happen on his Common Side Effects tour, kicking off July 17 and spanning three months and twenty stops in the US and Canada. He’s spoken before about his contention with the idea of phones at concerts; does he plan to take the CORTIS and Phoebe Bridgers route and ban them altogether?

“I don’t want to have to police people either…be the mom, kind of,” he frowns. “If people want to take a few photos, take whatever, that’s great. But if you’re focused on having your phone out the whole show, in my head, it’s kind of defeating the purpose of going and being with people and being at a show.”

Fire From The Hip was recorded in the middle of the Minnesota woods (so they had no distractions in their “own little vacuum”), at the now renovated cult classic Pachyderm Studios, with collaborators both old and new.

“It’s funny, because this one to me is such a summer-sounding record. It’s coming out in the summer. But I recorded it in the freezing cold,” chuckles Wolfhard. “One day I’ll record something in the summer and then it’ll be a winter record.”

So Wolfhard is firmly back in his musician era for a bit, and enjoying it too. He is, however, still an actor, and a former child actor at that. He’s shooting an upcoming movie that he’s been trying to make with a friend for years. His acting resume already includes other blockbuster franchises like It and Ghostbusters.

I muse over the paradoxically unforgiving nature of the industry he’s in, one where musicians are perhaps taken more seriously with age and experience, while actors are pressured to continue presenting themselves in a more fixed age or type. It must be difficult, even impossible, to be one and the other.

Wolfhard sits up straighter, the most dialled in he’s been so far.

“I think that’s a great question,” he begins. “I wouldn’t be talking to you if I wasn’t already an actor, and people know me as an actor. I also have to be always mindful of that, too, because that’s what started it all for me.”

“But also, being a little bit older, a young adult, you also want to prove yourself and show people that you have your own experiences, that you’ve grown, and that you’re learning a lot about yourself and want to express that and show people that you want to be taken seriously.”

Acting is a visual medium, he reflects, one where you’re expressing yourself but also constantly being told what to do, where to stand, what to say. “It’s all about look.”

“You have to look a certain way, or be a certain way, be relevant for this reason in order to get this part.” Music, on the other hand, even though it has its own set of problems and “weird industry stuff”, lets you have a lot more control over it, he tells me.

“Especially for me, who’s someone people know as an actor, I get to kind of rewrite history a little bit and show people that, oh, this is also what I’m into.”

“Without disparaging that part of my life, or that career, just showing myself too, that I have a different perspective.”

Clearly it’s struck a chord. “It’s a really good question,” he repeats after a pause.

“Because everything is so public, and everyone is seeing everything all the time, I think people are starting to think about the whole parasocial thing”, he continues carefully. “That was not in the zeitgeist maybe 15 years ago.”

“But the fact that people now are thinking about things kind of in that way, I think, is humanizing a lot of people in very public-facing jobs.”

Finn Wolfhard’s ‘Fire From The Hip’ is out now on all platforms. His ‘Common Side Effects’ tour kicks off July 17.