Remi Wolf stopped by the Genius office to break down her hit song “Cinderella.” Produced by Remi herself alongside longtime collaborator Solomonophonic, the track is off her second album Big Ideas. On today’s episode of Verified, Remi dives deep into the inspiration behind the song, discussing themes like self-discovery, embracing all aspects of life, and being her own fairy godmother and more!
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MusicTranscript
00:00With my songwriting in general, I like to talk about these heavier topics to me, but
00:06I'm not a serious person.
00:09It's not in my personality to be really, really, really intense about these things.
00:15So I think that comes through in the way that I write.
00:18Just allowing myself to be silly and go there is really important to me.
00:22It's how I express myself.
00:30I wrote the song back in 2023.
00:33I think I was like a year and a half into tour, and I'd done like 11 tours.
00:37So it was crazy.
00:38Crazy times.
00:39Essentially, I was like very ungrounded, and I was having kind of like life mood swings,
00:46and everything was just incredibly chaotic.
00:49That's kind of the basis of this whole song.
01:00I'm so quick when I switch it up for the mellow.
01:04Yellow and purple are complementary colors.
01:06They're quite literally opposite of each other, which was kind of just a commentary on how
01:11quickly I was cycling through feelings and moods and people and versions of myself.
01:18In my music, I kind of explore this idea of duality a lot, and two things can be true
01:24simultaneously within ourselves.
01:28The complexity of emotions and of people and of situations is, at the end of the day, what
01:34makes life exciting and fun and crazy and messy.
01:38I think I just welcome it all.
01:47I was on tour.
01:48I was in a hotel every day.
01:51We were like an eight-person team, and six of us were dudes, and two of us were girls.
01:56So I was truly just with my boys all the time.
01:59Lovely boys.
02:00Loved them so much.
02:01But it was me and the boys.
02:09When it's time to move my hips from left to right, I listen to Paul Simon and Michael
02:14MacDonald, the Doobie Brothers, and Evelyn Champagne-Kang.
02:19Sometimes you just need to be all consumed by positive energy, and for me, those artists
02:26all kind of have that within their music, and it's something that I love, and I love
02:31to kind of recreate in my music, too.
02:37The tide is low.
02:38The moon is bright.
02:39I'm having a great time.
02:41I'm moving my hips from left to right.
02:43I'm dancing.
02:44I'm vibing.
02:45I think I was trying to paint the picture of I'm having this great time, and then I
02:47see something on my phone, and then all of a sudden, I'm in this anxious spiral again.
02:56Like Cinderella, making babies all the company's time, ooh.
03:04Being in this industry, there's moments of being so glorified, but at the end of the
03:09day, it's really hard, dirty, nasty work, 95% of the time.
03:15The Cinderella thing is kind of feeling like this princess at 5% of my life, and then the
03:24other 95% is having to pump out children, being my songs, and then all that being funded
03:31by a label.
03:32It's a very strange existence.
03:44In this time of my life, I felt like I kind of always needed one person that was my best
03:49friend that could hold me up.
03:52Time is a word that people have used to mean best friend, or partner, or just like buddy.
04:00But what I go on to explain later in the song is that I found that I had to do it for myself.
04:22When you're in that mindset of feeling really bad about yourself and feeling insecure, my
04:31tendency is that I want to run away, or I want to use some sort of vice to get myself
04:37out of it instead of facing it head on.
04:40Me buying the boat to the private island would literally be me running away and being by
04:45myself.
04:46Sometimes when somebody buys a boat, you're like, all right, are you having a midlife
04:49crisis or something?
04:52What are you running from, queen?
05:15This is the fairy godmother moment of the song where it's like, I see the beam of light
05:21and the alternate version of myself is coming down and is like, hey, you're chill, dude.
05:29Everything's fine.
05:30You're going through all this stuff and you're doing a good job.
05:34When I wrote this song, I did not have that in me.
05:36I feel like I have manifested that through writing this song and I've kind of been able
05:42to do that for myself more and more.
05:44It was almost like setting an intention.
05:46I always imagined that fairy godmother voice as Michael McDonald's voice, wanting him to
05:52sing it.
05:53And who knows?
05:54Maybe it'll happen.
05:55Yeah.
05:56It was always Michael coming down, but me as Michael.
06:02I never know if anything's a hit.
06:03I mean, people really like it, which is awesome, but I tend to like to be blissfully ignorant
06:10and kind of hands off and in the clouds when it comes to that type of stuff because you
06:14can get really in the weeds emotionally if you pay too much attention.
06:18I kind of just like to be living my life and not caring about how my music is being received
06:24and perceived by the world.
06:25And I think what helps with that is that I really am proud of my songs.
06:29I really like them.
06:30If I like it, then no one can hurt me.