Anxious About Getting Older? Happy Birthday Finn Wolfhard!
Happy birthday, Finn Wolfhard! It’s a bit too early to be wishing the Canadian actor, writer, director, and for the primary purposes of this article, musician, such a date. Wolfhard turns twenty-three this coming December, but six months prior, on June 8, Wolfhard released his first solo album titled after the celebratory phrase. Naming the EP Happy Birthday may seem odd, but Wolfhard wrote many of the tracks on the album over the course of a singular year. Some of these songs were reworked for Wolfhard’s band The Aubreys, but of the fifty odd songs he challenged himself to write during 2022, only nine of them made the cut for his debut solo project.
Calpurnia performs at McMennamin’s Crystal Ballroom in Portland, OR (Jan 2019). Photo by Megan Lorich
Wolfhard’s star power lies in the hearts of Gen Z and, to an extent, Gen Alpha. As a child star, Wolfhard was fawned over by fangirls when he broke out in the adolescent ensemble crew of Stranger Things. This stardom was only pushed further when he was cast in the 2017 and 2019 film adaptations of Stephen King’s It. The fandoms behind both of these properties are enormous and Wolfhard was practically shoved underneath a microscope. Despite this constant attention, Wolfhard managed to dive into creative endeavors in a more public facing way during this high point in his career. Music was a key escape and a way that Wolfhard separated himself from his peers, not only posting guitar covers of Mac DeMarco songs online, but forming the band Calpurnia with longtime friends Ayla Tesler-Mabe, Jack Anderson, and Malcolm Craig who would continue on as the drummer for Wolfhard’s second musical project, The Aubreys, after Calpurnia broke up.
Both Calpurnia and The Aubreys saw massive success, though this arguably was driven by Wolfhard’s name recognition. Regardless, Wolfhard is taking a swing setting out on his own. Long-time collaborators like Cadien Lake James of the band Twin Peaks, who helped produce Calpurnia’s EP Scout, and members of Chicago-based band Lifeguard appear on Happy Birthday as well. Working with people you trust may make a sensitive process like creating art feel more secure, but that does not guarantee a successful project. Simply put… Is Finn Wolfhard any good?
If you were in high school in 2018, committing to the primary colored art hoe aesthetic, buying Fjallraven Kankens, listening to Mac DeMarco and Wallows records, desperately searching for a place that had a Fujifilm Instax in stock – your first listen of Happy Birthday is going to be like taking a shot of Malort after a year of being sober. In fact, after my first listen of Happy Birthday at the witching hours of the morning, Spotify has been providing me with daylists full of nothing but Wallows, Her’s, Greer, Car Seat Headrest, and so forth. To directly compare Happy Birthday to the indie-pop-rock boom of the late 2010’s would be a disservice to the album for multiple reasons.
Firstly, Calpurnia existed as a project from 2017 to 2019, directly during this time period. Wolfhard, along with his musical abilities and songwriting skills, have obviously grown in that time. He is no longer a teenager, but a man in his early twenties, as any hacky Buzzfeed article about “Thirty Child Stars That You Can’t Believe Are Grown Up!” will tell you. Second, Wolfhard addresses his identity, his anxieties, nostalgia, and childhood, throughout the tracks of Happy Birthday. The lyrics of the album’s tracks may be the most obvious proof of these themes, but the instrumentation itself also harkens to these topics because it fits into the conventions of late 2010’s indie rock – the first time Wolfhard experimented with music publicly. Lastly, Happy Birthday features a more garage rock edge than the other aforementioned projects, with many of Wolfhard’s other influences peeking through the tracks. Happy Birthday is made by a musician that geeks out about music, with influences commingling to create a distinct sound rather than to be an homage of anything specific. As mentioned, the nostalgia factor is present and undeniable, but there is something new to be gained from Happy Birthday.
The droning sounds of the album’s title track reflect Wolfhard’s anxieties the best. He asks what he’s done with his time, thereby questioning if his creative pursuits hold any merit. What does he want? As mentioned, Wolfhard has quested down many different artistic avenues, from acting, to music, and filmmaking as he had initially dreamed as a child. “Happy Birthday” is short, with only two stanzas of lyrics and a minute and a half of music, but it expertly lays down the foundations for its album’s themes. Instrumentally, the transition from “Happy Birthday” into “Choose the Latter,” the album’s first single, may seem a bit jarring, but kickstarting “Choose the Latter” with lyrics makes this transition feel like an audible match cut. Rather than choosing what to do with his time, Wolfhard is forced to choose between fight and flight. What will he do?
Similarly, “Eat” sees Wolfhard reflect on romantic attraction through the lens of depression. Anxiety and aging may be what Wolfhard has said Happy Birthday focuses on, but stagnation may be a better term. The lyrics of “Eat” may reflect this stagnation, but the instrumentation of the track drives the song at a breakneck speed. Wolfhard’s vocals are smothered in electric guitar and the drum kit, though they manage to shine through. “Objection!” takes the album back to a walking pace, though it remains the album’s longest song in terms of lyrics. We previously covered “Objection!” alongside its music video when it debuted as Happy Birthday’s third single.
The mid-way point of Happy Birthday is where things begin to slide. The last five tracks of the album are all slow, lethargic, and melancholy. Wolfhard reflects on a lost love through many of these tracks yet again, especially on “Trailers after dark” and “You.” But the references to romance on Happy Birthday are also closely tied to nostalgia from Wolfhard’s childhood. For example, Wolfhard described a television channel that only played movie trailers from his childhood served as the inspiration for “Trailers after dark” during the announcement of the track, which was the second single off the album. Yet anxiety still clings to each word in “Crown” and “Wait,” more questions being asked, more insecurities rising to the top, and uncertainty in the notes.
Debut album or not, Happy Birthday is short, clocking in at a whopping twenty-four minutes and forty-three seconds. Writing fifty songs in a year sounds less like a challenge and more like a death sentence, but Wolfhard managed to do it. However, this may have been to Happy Birthday’s detriment. Wolfhard has mentioned that many of the songs that he wrote during the challenge were “shit”. Perhaps if more time was spent on quality over quantity, Happy Birthday could have been a longer project. Listeners that know of this challenge can certainly hear this time constraint in the album’s lyrics. While Wolfhard is gifted with a pen, he may have taken too much inspiration from Shakespeare – “Brevity is the soul of wit.” Happy Birthday may not be the best album listening experience for most listeners, but it at least deserves one full listen through. You’ll certainly find one or two tracks that speak to you specifically to add to a playlist.
Finn Wolfhard is good. Don’t let people tell you that child stars can’t make music, that’s stupid. Just look at DJO and Wallows. And maybe not Corey Feldman.
