Remi Wolf

The experience changed how she wrote, allowing all the “emo as fuck” feelings to be poured into her music. “I felt this permission to be honest and be my raw self,” she explains “Because of that, the writing process didn’t change but the writing changed. We became a family band.” While in Big Bear, Wolf cathartically channeled her heartbreak into “I Won’t Cry,” a big, honest power ballad.

“I was really fresh out of the absolute wreckage of the relationship,” she says. “I was in a very vulnerable state of feeling deeply unwanted.” The gut punch of a song was the one she recorded while laying sheets of lasagna, belting out the pleading chorus with her friends’ support.

“It was the first song I’ve ever written where I felt like if somebody else wrote this song, I’d be like ‘I wish I wrote that song,’” she says. “That song is about this toxic lack of self love and deep sadness, but also simultaneously being at peace that it’s over.”

After Big Bear, Wolf and the same squad from the house took three different trips to New York to record the album at Electric Lady. They would all stay at a nearby hotel down the street — their “glampground” — and walk to and from the studio together, exchanging “good nights” and “I love yous” in the elevator. In the basement studio, Wolf began to unlock the sonic palette of Mud before it ever got a name. She wanted live instrumentation, often playing drums herself on a song, and a “muddy” feeling to the production. There’s very little synth on the album, a huge difference from her past releases. “It’s the most minimalist I’ve ever been,” she says.

Both “Covered In Mud” and “Bottle” became “lighthouses” for the album. The smooth but lively tracks are as catchy and energetic as Wolf has always been, but you can feel the real down-in-the-dirt sound she was aiming for. The songs hone in on storytelling and deep details above pared down production; on “Mud,” Wolf was playing the drums in Electric Lady while freestyling the lyrics into the microphone.

She wrote over 100 songs for the album, picking apart demos and getting in the weeds of the album’s engineering more than ever before. It’s the first record, she says, where she fought for songs, sometimes starting demos over multiple times to get them right. Songs like lead single “Twiggy” and “Burn Me Blue” would go through multiple iterations until she started to crack the sonic code.

In January of this year, Wolf and her “family band” took one final trip, this time to Joshua Tree. She was about to turn 30 and nearly six months sober. She wrote one of the final songs for the album, the gorgeous, simple “Moon So High,” on the trip. As it was nearing completion, she realized it should be a duet and DM’d her internet friend John Mayer to hop on it.

Towards the end of making Mud, she started to feel an emotion she’s always struggled accessing: gratitude. She felt clearer than ever and like she was finally in the right place at the right time with the right people making the right album.