Beck has announced his first album since 2019’s Hyperspace. It’s called Ride Lonesome, and it’s set for release on September 18 via Capitol. Along with the news, Beck has shared the stark, haunting lead single ‘In the Night’, which follows the title track. It comes paired with a Mikai Karl-directed video starring Denis Lavant, which you can check out below.
“My new album Ride Lonesome is coming out this fall,” Beck commented in a press release. “The musicians from my original touring and recording band that I recorded Sea Change, Morning Phase and Mutations with — Smokey Hormel, Joey Waronker, Justin Meldal-Johnsen, Roger Joseph Manning Jr., and Jason Falkner— reconvened with me at my favorite studio (Room B at United Studios in Hollywood). We had Nigel Godrich, who worked on Sea Change and Mutations with us mixing all the songs. It had been a decade since we went in the studio and recorded Morning Phase. This time It felt like the playing and the chemistry had evolved and deepened— a sound that’s come together over the decades of working together.”
“While we were revisiting a musical and physical place, it also felt like we were finding new sounds and emotional textures along the way,” he added.
Ride Lonesome Cover Artwork:
Ride Lonesome Tracklist:
1. Ride Lonesome
2. Run Away
3. In The Night
4. Failed Words
5. Bleed
6. Disappearing Act
7. For Your Love
8. Slow Canyon
9. It Ends Right Here
10. Falling Through My Hands
11. If You Don’t Know What Love Is
12. Beyond The Light
Exactly one month before the release of her new album Lost Weekend, Phoebe Bridgers delivered a surprise performance of its lead single, ‘Lost Boys’, on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Bridgers – the show’s first-ever surprise musical guest, in fact – was accompanied by a group of young musicians who really knew how to rock out. Watch it go down below.
‘Lost Boys’ was co-produced with Tony Berg, Ethan Gruska, Jack Antonoff, and Alex G. Lost Weekend, Bridgers’ third solo LP, is out August 14 via Dead Oceans.
A recent survey found that82% of marketers use AI for their tasks. But generally speaking, many campaigns still fail before customers even see the product. And the problem often comes down to the words. Not allAI writing assistants are built for marketing or advertising. Most of the time, general-purpose AI leads to content that falls short. Headlines that don’t spark curiosity. Product descriptions that fail to answer buying questions. Landing pages that don’t persuade visitors to act. To avoid this, writers need to use dedicated AI tools for copywriting.
With so manyAI tools on the market, finding the best ones is likely to make the writing predicament worse. But we already did the legwork. This article lists some of the leading AI tools for copywriting. Each option keeps every message persuasive while maintaining a consistent brand voice.
Top Five Best AI Tools for Copywriting
Jasper
Image Credit: Jasper
More thanblogging, Jasper is one of the most recognized AI tools for copywriting. It can handle end-to-end marketing workflows. It has an intuitive document editor that lets users write, edit, and format copy that converts. This tool also offers more than 50 content templates to further streamline the process. But its standout feature is Jasper IQ. A proprietary AI context layer that maintains brand authenticity. This allows marketers to integrate brand voices, style guides, product knowledge, and audience profiles.
Key Features:
Extensive training in more than 50 copywriting skills to deliver top-tier results
Transforming strategy into execution
Repurposing, length, and tone adjustment features
Pricing:
Free Trial
Pro Package – $69 per month
Business Package – Custom Pricing
Real Use Case:
Jasper can help SaaS companies in launching a new software product. They can use it to make landing pages, promotional emails, or paid advertisements. It helps in uncovering innovative ways to engage customers and propel business outcomes.
Copy.ai
Copy.ai focuses on accelerating sales and marketingcontent creation. This makes it ideal for boosting go-to-market strategies. It comes with workflows for prospecting emails, sales sequences, blog introductions, and product messaging. Copy.ai also offers a bucketload of tools for generating marketing emails, Instagram captions, product descriptions, and more. It even has an Ad Copy Generator. By setting the target URL, persona, and keyword, marketers can produce compelling ad copy that hooks audiences at speed.
Key Features:
LLM integration for future-proofing GTM strategies
More than 50 AI writing generators
Integrating brand voice consistently across every marketing channel at scale
Pricing:
Free Package
Chat Package – $29 per month
Enterprise Package – Custom Pricing
Real Use Case:
Digital marketers, including pay-per-click specialists, can use Copy.ai. It can help in generating ad copy. All while adapting messaging based on different industries and customer pain points. This makes it easier to tailor outputs to the target audience and increase conversion rates.
Copysmith
Image Credit: Copysmith
Started as one of the standalone AI tools for copywriting. But now, Copysmith specializes in broader AI content. It now houses Frase, Describely, and Rytr. Nonetheless, it can still help marketers make ad copy, product descriptions, social media posts, catalog content, and marketplace listings at scale. It’s particularly beneficial for companies managing tons of products. It maintains consistent and optimized descriptions without having to write each one from scratch.
Key Features:
Creating different advertising and copywriting assets
Extensive template library for various use cases
Supports bulk content creation
Pricing:
Free Trial
Starter Package – $19 per month
Professional Package – $59 per month
Real Use Case:
Copysmith allows online fashion retailers to launch several new clothing items. This tool enables the quick generation of product descriptions. All while maintaining a consistent brand voice across the entire catalog.
Writer.com
Writer.com positions itself as an enterprise AI platform. So users can expect it to approach copywriting from a brand governance perspective. It offers AI agents that do the heavy lifting. Users just need to describe what they need, along with the context and standards. As such, this helps marketing teams ensure every piece follows approved messaging, terminology, and style guidelines. It can deliver on-brand work instantly. That means larger organizations can use copy that fits into existing content management processes.
Key Features:
Personalizing brands across channels, personas, and products
Collaboration tools for enterprise teams
Automated workflows without eliminating human control
Pricing:
Free Trial
Starter Package – $29 per month
Enterprise Package – Custom Pricing
Real Use Case:
Financial institutions can use Writer.com to automate handoffs, reviews, and redundant work. So marketing teams can make website copy, email campaigns, and promotional materials more efficiently. This accelerates cycles and launches campaigns faster.
Anyword
Image Credit: Anyword
Emphasizing brand and performance, Anyword is another option built specifically for GTM teams. Its standout capability is performance prediction. This platform taps into marketing data. Like audience, business goal, and channel. Doing so allows it to advise marketers which copy is more likely to resonate with a target audience. With its suite of AI tools, including content intelligence, a blog wizard, and a data-driven editor, users can eliminate time-consuming, resource-intensive A/B testing.
Key Features:
Creating high-converting marketing copy
Real-time business results monitoring
Maintains brand identity across every channel and team
Pricing:
Free Trial
Starter Package – $49 per month
Data-Driven Package – $99 per month
Business Package – Custom Pricing
Enterprise Package – Custom Pricing
Real Use Case:
Marketing directors can benefit from Anyword’s copywriting features. It helps refine email marketing copy using AI-powered performance predictions. In practice, this is likely to boost click-through rates by creating more engaging, data-backed messaging.
Choosing the Standout AI Tools for Copywriting in 2026
Successful copywriting has always been about persuasion. But the work isn’t just focused on pricing, design, or quality. The words that represent it need to make the difference between attracting attention and getting ignored. That’s what makes these AI tools for copywriting essential. They can be used to create copy for advertisements, e-commerce listings, emails, landing pages, and social media.
But as with choosing any set of AI tools, the best one often depends on your workflow. Jasper shines in full-scale marketing campaigns. Copy.ai backs up sales and outbound messaging. Copysmith streamlines e-commerce content. Writer.com helps enterprise teams maintain brand consistency. Anyword focuses on optimizing copy for conversions.
That said, copywriters should not fear these AI counterparts. In fact, they should maximize them to elevate their efficiency and output quality.
Tracy Weisman is an interdisciplinary artist and visual storyteller whose work explores identity, vulnerability, American symbolism, and the emotional tension between attachment and disillusionment. Rooted in her background as a professional speechwriter, Weisman’s practice is shaped by a deep engagement with narrative, persuasion, public language, and the ways national myths are constructed and communicated. Working across textiles, sculpture, installation, and mixed media, she often transforms familiar cultural objects through processes of stitching, alteration, accumulation, and physical disruption.
Her practice draws equally from contemporary art methodologies, craft traditions, and vernacular Americana, resulting in a body of work that resists categorisation. Her work emphasises emotional resonance and material transformation, balancing conceptual rigour with physical immediacy, and reflecting on contemporary America through both personal and collective experience. Rather than offering fixed political conclusions, the work explores emotionally charged themes by inviting viewers into a space of reflection, discomfort, contradiction, and empathy.
She lives and maintains studio practices in both Palm Springs, CA, and Narragansett, RI.
You spent years as a speechwriter before moving into visual art. Does your background in persuasive language show up in how you construct an artistic piece?
It does. Humans are hardwired to learn from what we hear. After all, we’ve only had written language for around 5,000 years; prior to that, we communicated and transmitted our culture orally. As such, I used to remind my clients that every successful speech is grounded in a good story. To make ideas stick with an audience, I used metaphors and vivid language to engage the visual brain as well as the ear. Today, I rely on that same construct as a visual artist, using familiar but altered objects to create visual metaphors that stop viewers in their tracks. I’m especially drawn to vintage materials because they have stories embedded in them already, which adds depth and complexity to a piece.
I find the presidential ‘portrait’ made of four-letter words particularly fascinating. What was the process of choosing those words like, and how did you navigate the line between commentary and caricature?
As a life-long word nerd, I had a lot of fun creating this piece out of vintage French tin sign letters. I dumped them out on my work table and played Scrabble, creating as many four-letter-words as possible to describe the current Oval Office occupant. To strike a balance between commentary and caricature, I let language do the work. For example, I combined humorous, onomatopoeic words like glob and crud with more serious descriptors like vain, liar and sham, and then alphabetised everything in columns to give each word equal emphasis. The triple gold frame surrounding the words leaves no doubt about the subject of the piece. It’s one of my favourites in the show.
Photo credit: Madison van Wylen
Turning quahog shells into fundraising objects that benefit Newport’s Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Center connects this conceptual work to something very local. How did that idea come together?
Creating this show helped me work through heavy feelings of despair, betrayal and grief. After getting that out of my system, I resolved to fight back by “helping the helpers,” as Fred Rogers used to say. The MLK Jr. Community Center is a critical RI resource for the people most directly targeted by the current administration: immigrants, persons of colour or those struggling to put food on the table. The shells are symbolically significant, as prior to colonisation, the indigenous people of RI relied on the plentiful quahog as a food source, ornamentation and currency. Each shell bears half of George Washington’s famous quote from his 1790 letter to Newport’s Hebrew congregation in which he promised that the new government of the United States would give “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance,” a fitting reminder for our divided times. The idea has resonated strongly with visitors; halfway through the show we’ve already raised thousands of dollars.
The show is described as situated “between affection and unease.” Was there a particular piece where you found that balance hardest to strike?
Yes, the flag with gold zippers which is also the namesake of the show, Some Birthday, America. Even though altering an American flag is protected as political speech under the First Amendment, it was still heartbreaking to take a pair of scissors to our beloved national symbol. The insertion of gold zippers, which can be used to either divide or heal, introduces a sense of uncertainty and resignation because even when all the zippers are closed the flag is forever altered.
Photo credit: Madison van Wylen
Do you think of your work as being in conversation with other artists making 250th-anniversary art right now, or intentionally separate?
Artists are truth-tellers in times of crisis and I’m proud to add my body of work to the ongoing conversation my fellow artists are having about America as we turn 250.
Are there any artists or writers that you have found particularly inspiring lately, perhaps in relation to this body of work?
Yes. I thought the entire body of work newly commissioned by MOCA and The Brick for the recent MONUMENTS exhibition in LA was profound, particularly Kara Walker’s breathtaking Unmanned Drone, a brilliant reconstruction of the Confederate statue of General Stonewall Jackson. I deeply identify with Walker’s fearless alteration of the familiar to tell a different story and her piece is a punch to the gut. As for writers, Abigail Adams’s March 31, 1776 letter to her husband John in Philadelphia during the Second Continental Congress also inspired me. She sternly warned him: “If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.” The bold section of that quote became the centrepiece of one work in my show. Further, as American women are experiencing a brazen rollback of our rights, I consider it a rallying cry and the fuel for my next body of work.
Covering musicians for years taught me something unexpected. The most gut-wrenching albums often came from people whose marriages were falling apart. In 2019 I sat down with 47 independent artists and asked them about creating work during major life upheavals, and 68% said their separation became this intense source of material. What shocked me was how many said dealing with legal paperwork caused more stress than writing songs themselves.
Filing legal documents should be simple, right? Wrong. I watched a folk singer spend $4,200 on lawyer fees even though he and his wife had already worked everything out. No drama. No custody issues. Just needed signatures on paper. He could’ve used an online service to file for divorce online and saved himself three months of attorney emails.
When Art Meets Real Life Admin
Creative people hate bureaucracy. But I’ve noticed artists who avoid dealing with legal stuff because they think it’ll kill their creative energy end up way more drained by the avoidance itself. Procrastination is weirdly exhausting.
A singer-songwriter in Portland wrote five complete songs for an EP while her unsigned divorce papers sat on her kitchen table. Five whole months. She kept assuming she needed to pay someone a fortune to handle everything. Her bandmate eventually mentioned that uncontested cases, where both people actually agree on terms, don’t require expensive formal legal help. She finished her paperwork in 11 days.
The Cost of Waiting
My friend Jordan makes electronic music and runs a small label. His marriage ended in 2021 and he and his ex-wife figured everything out in two conversations. Apartment stuff got divided easily, no children involved, both had separate incomes. Jordan kept putting off the filing because he figured he needed at least $3,000 to start.
Didn’t need it. Found a service charging him $179 flat rate. Got his forms completed faster than he finished mixing his album. He told me, “I wasted six months stressing about lawyer appointments that I didn’t even need.”
The contested versus uncontested thing matters here. Fighting over assets or custody? Sure, get serious legal representation. Already worked everything out? You’re just filling out forms correctly.
Why Musicians Wait (And Shouldn’t)
Artists delay because we romanticize struggle. There’s this bizarre notion that suffering automatically creates better art. Maybe sometimes. But I’ve found clearing away practical problems actually opens up way more mental space for creativity.
A jazz pianist in Brooklyn told me she couldn’t write anything new until her divorce finalized. She called it “unfinished business playing on loop in my head.” Papers went through, and she recorded 14 new compositions in three months.
The actual process? Not as emotionally heavy as people imagine. You answer questions about your situation, the system generates paperwork based on your state’s requirements, you review everything, then file with your local court. Straightforward for uncontested situations.
What Actually Matters
I’ve watched enough artists navigate this to know what genuinely helps. Being honest about whether your case is actually simple comes first. Both agree and there aren’t complicated assets? You don’t need the full legal treatment. Just starting helps too. Sounds basic, but I’ve seen people lose months to anxiety about taking that first step.
The creative community talks constantly about vulnerability and authenticity. But we skip over handling boring life stuff efficiently so we can return to making things. Your art deserves your complete attention instead of half your brain spinning about unsigned documents collecting dust.
Culture sites live on speed and proof. A sharp album review lands harder when you can confirm a release time, a track list, and which stores still stock vinyl.
OurCultureMag.com runs on that same mix of taste and facts, from music picks to film and TV guides. The hard part sits behind the scenes. Streaming pages change fast, ticket sites shape price by region, and stores swap stock status by the hour.
Scrapers can solve this, but only if you run them like a newsroom tool, not a bot swarm. Imperva reported that bots made up 49.6% of all internet traffic, so most big sites now treat odd traffic as a threat.
Start with the data that edits your story
Pick a tight set of fields before you write code. You want data you can use in a headline, a guide, or a quick update.
For film and TV, capture title, season, episode count, rating, and where it streams per region. For music, capture release date, label, formats, and a short list of links you can check by hand when things look off.
Set a fetch pace that matches real change. Ticket prices can shift in minutes, while a catalog page may only change once a day.
Build a “culture ID” for every item
Sites rename things all the time. Your pipeline needs a stable key that survives a rebrand, a URL change, or a new artwork crop.
Use the source’s own ID when you can. If you cannot, hash a mix of title, creator, and release date, then store alias titles as extra fields.
Scrape like a fan, not a flood
Most blocks come from patterns, not from one request. Keep your request rate low and steady, and match the site’s real user flow.
Fetch the page that lists items, then follow only the links you need. Cache responses and reuse them across teams, so one edit does not trigger a full re-crawl.
Send clean headers and accept cookies when the site needs them to show the right region. Rotate user agents, but do it with care, since wild shifts can look fake.
Reduce page weight before you parse
Many culture pages ship huge scripts, ad tags, and video. You can cut load time and risk by blocking heavy file types when you only need HTML.
Headless tools help with script-run pages, but they cost more and fail in new ways. Use them only when a plain HTTP fetch cannot see the data.
When geo locks hit, proxies keep your feed honest
Region locks distort culture coverage. A show can trend on social, yet not stream in your reader’s market, and a tour can show a different fee set by city.
Datacenter IPs work for low-risk pages, but many ticket and retail sites flag them fast. Residential proxies often blend in better because real homes use them too.
If you need stable sessions for cart flows or seat maps, pick sticky sessions. If you need broad checks across cities, rotate by region and keep a strict cap per IP.
Teams that need reliable geo checks often start with providers like Byteful.
Control drift with repeatable test routes
Run the same query from the same regions every time. Store the raw HTML for a short window, so you can prove what the site showed when an edit goes live.
Log block signals like captcha pages, odd redirects, and blank seat maps. Treat those as data too, since they tell you when the site changes its guard.
Turn messy pages into a clean culture feed
Parsing breaks when sites tweak layout. Write selectors that anchor on meaning, not on fragile class names.
Normalize dates, currency, and time zones at ingest. A tour date means nothing if you mix local time and UTC across sources.
Use change detection to cut noise. Alert only on meaningful shifts, like a new platform added, a price jump over a set percent, or a sold-out flag.
Design for editors and for SEO
Editors need fast checks. Keep a small dashboard view that shows the last fetch time, the current value, and a diff snippet.
Search needs clean, stable fields. Store canonical titles, alt titles, and structured entities, so your pages match what people type when they search.
Compliance rules you can defend in public
Read the site’s terms and respect access limits. If a source offers an API, use it, since it often sets clear bounds.
Avoid personal data unless you have a clear reason and a legal basis. Do not collect emails, device IDs, or session tokens from user pages.
Copyright still applies to culture work. Store facts and metadata, and keep full text or images out of your data store unless you hold rights or a clear license.
When you treat scraping as reporting support, you make better guides and cleaner updates. You also keep your operation stable when sites tighten rules.
The camera tilts up from the bottom to gradually reveal a vast crowd of anonymous workers wearing identical whole-body protective suits, respirators and oxygen tanks on their backs. They’re standing still, as if waiting for instructions. Set within a white, aseptic, futuristic environment, Chonghao Hua’s Burnout Current (2025)recreates an indistinct world, where standardisation has become the norm, and individuality is therefore no longer an obvious human trait: each worker appears to be interchangeable, inscrutable through their masks, and invisible under their uniforms.
As the video progresses and exhaustion accumulates, Hua treats it as labour’s structural component rather than its mere consequence. In the second scene, a defenceless body gets hoisted up by a crane while other workers witness unperturbed. The figure, treated like industrial cargo, is ambiguously being rescued or discarded; regardless, human life and industrial components are intertwined parts of the same operational logics, both equally aimed at endless productivity. Indeed, for Hua, burnout doesn’t interrupt completion, rather it feeds it.
Still image of “Burnout Current”,2025. Courtesy of the artist.
Across moving image and performance, the Chinese artist explores how the capitalist system of production depletes individual subjectivity, and how exploitation annihilates and revises human behaviour, needs, and biological cycles. His practice doesn’t position itself as a critique of work conditions but extends into a speculation of contemporary and future life, where values are reconsidered and reimagined, aptly evoking current debates about the supplantation of human labour carried out by AI––thus the future of work as we know it. Burnout Current epitomises this through eerie images of body parts on assembly lines and the uncanny absence of any social interaction. The space depicted functions like a Foucauldian panopticon, where surveillance, order, efficiency are internalised and performed by the workers themselves, perfectly in synch with the automated movements of the central robotic arm.
The Installation view of “Burnout Current” at the 1215 Gallery, Canada. Courtesy of the artist.
While the visuals remain pristine and sterile throughout the length of the video work, the closing sequence takes on some poignant colouring: the room turns blue, as one of the workers—the only one wearing an orange suit—sits in front of the working robotic arm. He then stands up and touches the machine, now still, in a strikingly affective manner, while piano music sublimates the encounter. Through the staging of this moment, Hua veers from the dystopian and produces a narrative where workers and machine may recognise each other, reconcile, or even, ultimately, converge.
Cristea Roberts Gallery’s summer exhibition showcases fifty years of editions and prints by artists who helped define and expand the visual language of the Pop-era. Titled Pop Revisited, the show returns to a movement born amid the postwar image boom, when glossy advertising and mass media gave rise to what Richard Hamilton famously described as an art that was popular, transient, expendable, mass-produced and glamorous.
Bringing together works by artists including Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, Jim Dine, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Bridget Riley, Joe Tilson and Tom Wesselmann, the exhibition explores the many ways artists responded to the explosion of consumer culture and mass imagery. Hamilton’s I’m dreaming of a black Christmas (1971) and Joe Tilson’s Is this Che Guevara? (1969) subvert the imagery of cultural icons, while Caulfield and Wesselmann are able to transform everyday domestic life scenes into enduring representations of collective nostalgia.
The exhibition also highlights printmaking as a defining medium of the Pop movement, reflecting the same systems of repetition and production that shaped contemporary visual culture. Alongside works by artists such as Jasper Johns, whose recurring motifs underscore the conceptual power of seriality, Pop Revisited extends beyond Pop Art to include Bridget Riley’s Op Art explorations of perception and optical experience.
The exhibition will be on view 23 July – 20 August 2026 at 43 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5JG.
Texas-born singer-songwriter Jess Williamson has announced A Mile South of Heaven, her sixth studio album and first for New West Records. It’s set to arrive on October 9. Today’s announcement comes with the release of the new single ‘Goodbye to All That’. Check it out and find the album cover and tracklist below.
The new single was inspired by Williamson’s favorite Joan Didion essay of the same name. “Didion’s essay is about leaving New York after eight years and how ‘it’s distinctly possible to stay too long at the fair,’” Williamson explained in a statement. “In my eighth year of living in LA, I felt it was time to leave. I wrote this song as my farewell to LA, but songs are powerful in sneaky ways, and the song itself changed my mind. I realised I wasn’t finished with life in LA.”
Written between LA and Marfa, A Mile South of Heavenfollows 2023’s Time Ain’t Accidental. “Depending on your outlook, a mile south of heaven may sound sad, or it may sound hopeful,” Williamson reflected. “We’re always a mile south of the impossible goals we set for ourselves, and my point is, maybe that’s ok, because a mile is pretty close. It’s about appreciating where we are now, because there is no finish line. There is always more work to be done.”
A Mile South of Heaven Cover Artwork:
A Mile South of Heaven Tracklist:
1. Goodbye to All That
2. High Heels and Blue Jeans
3. Country Mile
4. A Mile South of Heaven
5. Tracking the Tropics
6. Dark Day in Dallas
7. Hum of the City
8. Texas Time
9. Someone Else’s Horse
10. Legends Die
11. Battle Scar
12. The Gem and Mineral Show
For Finn Wolfhard, it’s been good to focus on the music. Despite a persistently busy schedule – not to mention international fame – he still follows the pace of his favorite independent artists when it comes to writing and releasing records. In the span of a year that has included wrapping up his decade-long run in Stranger Things, Wolfhard has put out two solo albums, Happy Birthday and the recently-unveiled Fire From the Hip, whose title alludes to the spontaneous energy with which it sprung following a fall 2025 tour. Though still very much active in the film industry, he’s taken on a couple of music-related projects in recent years, from starring in and contributing original folk-rock songs to Jesse Eisenberg’s 2022 feature directorial debut, When You Finish Saving the World, to currently working on a Replacements biopic with his father Eric. In the past decade, he’s also gone from playing a younger version of PUP frontman Stefan Babcock to directing a clip for Atlanta’s Lunar Vacation to, just this year, helming the first-ever official video for George Harrison’s ‘Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth)’. The new album’s cover may be framed as a duel between Wolfhard’s conflicting impulses, but as creative fuel – and with a little help from his friends – they’ve produced his most confident and vibrant collection yet.
We caught up with Finn Wolfhard to talk about recording his new album, working with members of the Slaps and Twin Peaks, loyalty in friendships, and more.
I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing many of your musical peers and collaborators, including Lunar Vacation, the Slaps, and Lifeguard. I realized that all these bands, except for Lunar Vacation, have only put out one official studio record so far, so I’m curious who it was you maybe talked or looked up to when it came to thinking about a sophomore album. Were concerned at all with what you wanted it to represent, given the quick turnaround?
As far as the fast turnaround went, it ended up working out so well. I’m so lucky that it’s coming out as fast as it is, because I don’t know if I’ll ever get that again. I had this record sort of ready, or at least all the demos, by the time that Happy Birthday came out. It was one of those things where we had to wait such a long time between recording Happy Birthday and releasing, where we were underneath planning the recording of this one. We had feelers out there already for vinyl and just getting people ready for it earlier on. I’m a huge fan of people being able to release their records in the way that they want. I have a few friends that are doing it that way, like Kai from Lifeguard with his band Sharp Pins, he’s on K Records. It seems like they have a really cool momentum and way of releasing stuff. Slaps, they’re independent, they’re great, they put out music sort of like whenever they can and have been doing it all by themselves for a long time. Twin Peaks is another band that I’m close to and that are legends. A long time ago, they had the Sweet ‘17 singles, where they would put out two singles, and then by the end of the year, they had a huge record. They would compile all the songs together and just put it out. I love that.
It can be really tough, especially with music, where people write a record and it’s so personal, but then they start to write other stuff, they start to experience life in different ways, and maybe that record isn’t as much at the forefront of their minds. They’re not feeling the same things that they were when they were writing that record. Sometimes, the luxury is being able to just do it when it’s on the top of your mind and and go out and tour it.
Fire From the Hip was tracked in February, and you finished the last tour in October. What was the energy those live shows left you with? Did you have the time to take pause and reflect on how it maybe had affected you?
It felt really good to play these to play the songs off Happy Birthday and some of these new songs on the October leg in Europe with the Slaps guys and Gep [Repasky] from Lunar Vacation, who now, sadly, can’t be on tour with me for this tour, because they’re pursuing Lunar full time. But we just had the best time. It was one of those things where we were playing two or three songs from Fire From the Hip on that tour, and it felt very good to play them live. The way that we were playing it live, it felt like we should just take this, whatever we have right now, and just put it into a record. I remember walking in London with the Slaps guys and saying to them, “I think I want to do another record. I think we should just go and do one.” And they were like, “Yeah, man, let’s do it.”
I remember we were in an Uber, and I was like, “What do you guys think about Fire From the Hip?” And they’re like, “That’s a cool saying.” I was like, “Yeah, it’s kind of impulsive, and it just makes sense.” When it came to the art, I was like, “Oh, Fire From the Hip, maybe it’s like a duel.” This idea of, I constantly I feel at odds with myself, where I’m fighting between someone who’s confident and then also super worried all the time. And what if it was like a Barry Lyndon recreation where it’s that duel, but it’s me doing myself. It all just came together very seamlessly and fast. It was special to have the guys and my band with me and just to bounce ideas off them and talk through it with them. And I was lucky to have Gep on the record a lot; she came for the last three days. I basically was like, “All right, let’s go through every song and have them sing on it.”
With the cover art, how did all the different layers come together from the moment you came up with the idea?
We had my friend Hudson [McNeese] and Louis [Nicely], who are a photographer-videographer duo, and they were there the whole process, shooting 16mm and photos. The idea was, we were just going to shoot the cover on-site, at the studio. It was freezing cold; you would literally go outside and your nose hair would freeze. My idea was to shoot it on large format. Louis had a large format camera, so we went out, we shot it, and it was so cold that the metal slide they were using was getting stuck, and there were only a few options. We actually shot more, but it was so cold that the camera froze up. I was really happy with the photos, but I felt like there was a lot of negative space with the rock wall behind, and it’s still very much featured on the vinyl. When you open it up, it’s a die cut, so when you open it up, it’s just this little window of me pointing the gun at me, but when you take it out of the sleeve, it shows more of the whole photo.
I just wanted a little more of a pop of colour, so when I was mixing here in Vancouver with Cadien [Lake James] and Andrew [Humphrey], I was like, “I gotta figure out this record cover. It’s very close, but I don’t know. I think it needs something.” Cadien has a background in design, and he does all the Twin Peaks covers. He was like, “Just throw it into Photoshop, let’s fuck around with it.” Immediately, he’s like, “Oh, what about pink? That’s its own very specific vibe, and it would be a very striking vinyl.” And I was like, “What if it was this old English font? What if we use mediaeval writing to offset it a little bit and make it a bit weird?” And then my friend Grant Prettyman, he did the layout, so it was a big group effort.
Happy Birthday was a collaborative process with Kai, but given the focused studio time you had recording this album, did it feel collaborative in a different way?
To me, why I make music is because it’s collaborative and you’re sharing something together. At the same time, on Happy Birthday, me and Kai co-produced it, so I would defer to Kai if there were production things that I wasn’t sure about. He’s so fucking talented and I loved his production so much. When we were touring, I was talking to the backing band, to the Slaps guys and to Gep, and the resounding thing was that if we make another record, I should produce it. And I was like, “I don’t know. I don’t know if I have the confidence to do it.” And they were all like, “Dude, you’re already basically producing and directing the live show. You’re doing that now. You do all that, you produce all the demos by yourself. Why would you not do that?” And I was like, “Yeah, I guess.” I don’t know why I thought I couldn’t do it.” But I guess it makes sense that I did and it was really fun. I feel like it was a muscle that I got so much better at, and I really knew what I wanted when it came to the sound of the record. Especially the drum sound — I think me and Josh from the Slaps, and Andrew, my partner in crime throughout the whole process, we spent the first few days on the drum sound.
For me, the big challenge was the balance between knowing what I wanted for the record as a solo record, and also, I want people to be able to play the parts that they want to play. I want people to be able to express themselves in the way they want, but sometimes those are not mutually. Sometimes, someone wanting to play a part that they really like, in my head that’s a cool part, but it’s not right for the song. The whole point of music is being able to play in the way that you want, but at a certain point, it’s what the song needs. It’s not what you want to play. And that’s what was so great about everyone, they were there to serve the song. They would always be so cool about me being like, “All right, let’s try something else.” I was just getting used to that and trying to put up the boundary of, “OK, we’re all a band, but also, it’s a solo record and in the end, it’s up to me.”
I’m curious about one part that might have been an example of someone coming up with an instrumental section on the spot. It’s the dreamy outro on ‘Nice to Meet You Again’ — what I love about is that you don’t really feel the meaning of “again” until that final minute.
Yeah, that was fully Cadien and Clay [Frankel]. They played on the record with me for a few songs, and it was really special because their ideas were amazing. It was the first time they’d both been in the studio together since Twin Peaks had technically broken up. They were still friends after the band had broken up — they were still really close friends and brothers in so many ways, but they had never, I think, fully played music together. ‘Nice to Meet You Again’ was the first time. For me and the other guys, we grew up on Twin Peaks, they’re heroes of ours. To see them just firing back and forth — there was a moment where, it was funny, I walk into this live room, and I look at Clay and he’s got his guitar and he goes, “All right, what’s the vibe of the song?” And I go, “It’s the Faces. It’s Ooh La La.” And he goes, “Say no more.”
And then I went into the other room and we jammed it out a few times. We all played it live, and everyone’s singing backup, it was a great vibe. At a certain point, Cadien and Clay were like, “And what if we did this?” At this point, I had lost creative control, but in the best possible way, where I did not want to interrupt their mind meld. It was one of those things where I had no idea what they were talking about. Everyone was just watching it happen. Cadien was like, “Finn, are you good with that?” And I was like, “Honestly, I have no idea what the fuck you guys are talking about. But yes, let’s do it.” And that’s the best part of the song, to me. I’m glad I didn’t say anything, because it would have been insane if I did. They really elevated things. That’s what’s great about collaborating with people that you respect, they bring their own juice into the song.
And the magic — I’ve had this line from the record stuck in my head: “We come to this place for the magic/ And isn’t it tragic/ To see the sausage get made.” Obviously, you’re talking about the movies in a specific context, but it sounds like the magic of music-making maybe isn’t taken away so easily when you can have moments like that.
100%. That’s my big goal in being in these really tricky but creative industries — it’s very easy to get jaded, and to me, it’s always about finding those moments. I’m really lucky that I’ve been able to find it over and over again.
You’ve talked about going for a more hi-fi sound with this record. More than an aesthetic decision or way of shifting things up, was it also a matter of confidence, not only in terms of production but vulnerability? ‘Trail’, for example, could have been recorded with a lo-fi, muffled sort of intimacy, but the feelings are amplified in that way.
A big reason why I didn’t end up going with a more lo-fi recording style is because I think that these songs lent themselves to a more lush production quality. It just depends on the song, but for this specific record, I really wanted the songs to be able to be really open, compressed, and have a lot of breathing room. That song specifically, the guitar sound of it, I was looking a lot to the song by The Replacements called ‘Skyway’. It’s this really pristine, beautiful, acoustic guitar, but it’s also weirdly compressed. A fou-track always sounds great, but I’m glad tried it on a grander scale with the 24-track reel-to-reel, just because we also had more people. It would have been easier probably to just get an eight-track Tascam, set it up, and just do eight tracks. But this was great, because you still had this feeling of imperfection and analogue, but also you’re allowing the songs to sound beautiful at the same time. I love lo-fi, but it was nice testing the hi-fi tape out.
Taking a look at the official tracklist, I realized ‘The Climb (Not That One)’ is the final track – it was earlier in my promo stream. It almost homes in on the idea of loyalty in friendship, which is a big theme on the record. I feel like young people worry all the time about making friends, but I wonder what music has maybe taught you about keeping them.
For sure. It’s weird, music is such a vulnerable thing — you think it’s not, until it is. And with music and playing music with other people, I feel like, it’s everything you’re not saying. There’s so much unsaid. You’re expressing yourself — and sometimes it’s not enough, expressing yourself through music — and it’s been a great outlet to communicate with people. Even a tour and being with the Slaps guys, you’re with each other every day, you have to be honest with each other and be able to support each other. And, in a lot of ways, like, be patient with each other, because everyone is going through their own thing.
‘The Climb’ is not at all about anyone in music. ‘The Climb’ is about a childhood friend that I’m since not in contact with. There’s the last lyric about being a loyal friend: “To you I’m not, to me I am.” It’s this idea of: you can only give someone so much, and so much of your patience or support, and if someone’s not taking it, that’s up to them. If you gave it all you got and you really tried, that’s really all you can do and all you can give someone. I think that’s the most important part of friendship: being able to show up, being there for someone who’s maybe still figuring things out. And if it’s not being reciprocated, things naturally start to run their course; that’s just how friendships work.
And then they come back — that’s what’s amazing about friendships. I’m pretty lucky that I haven’t had a lot of crazy drama with friends, but it’s really interesting, the amount of friends that I have that I was once super close with, and then, for whatever reason, we just fell out of touch. We didn’t have anything in common or there was a mini falling out, and four years later, we’re friends again. It’s a really odd thing, because with friendships, you know someone so deeply, it’s like you know someone more than anything. I started making music to make friends, also. You connect to people through this, so it’s definitely a huge theme in what I try to write.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Finn Wolfhard’s Fire From the Hip is out now via Night Shift Productions.
