In the wake of his debut album, Hahaha, Boston indie sensation Will Paquin kindly took some time to hang out with Melodic Magazine to let us into his world a little bit. After blowing up on TikTok in 2020 with his intricate, samba-inspired guitar licks, his debut single, “Chandelier” has earned nearly 300 million streams to date on Spotify alone. We got to pick Will’s brain about songwriting, touring, his overnight rise to prominence, and more. He’s living the dream, seeing the world, making phenomenal music, and is still a downright delight to talk to. Here’s our exclusive interview with Will Paquin.
Well, congratulations, first of all, on your new record, Hahaha. How has release week been treating you so far?
It’s been really great. I was really nervous about it for the past 7 months. It was finished around eight months ago, so it’s just been sitting there for what seems like forever. It feels like you can’t move past if it’s not publicly released. This whole time I had a lot of trouble trying to focus on other things because this album’s just been in the back of my mind for so long. I feel like the morning that I woke up and it was out, I immediately started to just think about other things, and it just felt so relieving, and the response has been super positive. I was just really excited for it to come out, finally.
A lot of your songs from 2021 were recorded in really quirky and unique spaces like closets and hotels and cars. In making Hahaha, were there any quirky recording situations? What does recording look like for you now?
Well, this is the first time I’ve been in a real studio making a full body of work. It’s also my first time recording with a band, so that was a whole new experience. It’s funny, I actually made all the demos for this album in this closet that I have, so the closet spirit is still there. They didn’t end up making the album, the demos are their own separate thing. I probably will release the demos because they’re all really cool in their own unique way.
I worked with my best friend who’s also a producer, Will [Levin]. He’s been my best friend since kindergarten, and he just knows my whole musical journey and my ups and downs along the way. So it was really good putting the album into his hands because I felt like I could trust him totally in doing what I was hoping to do, and executing it the way I was hoping to. That was really nice. It’s mostly just more relaxing. Doing everything yourself has its own merit, but it can be engulfing. Sometimes you feel like you can’t get away from your own music, so to have somebody else taking control even just a little bit makes a big difference. You’re almost able to see the song as a listener instead of a creator.
Tell me a little bit more about your friendship with Will and how it evolved into a collaborative, music-making relationship.
I was in his band in middle school, but it actually started way before that. In elementary school, he introduced me to The Beatles, and we pretty much just listened to The Beatles for two straight years. And that was very formative in both our musical influence and songwriting, producing influences. So, that was where it all began with him. I played drums in his band for a while and we stopped late into high school. I kind of just stopped doing music for most of high school and college.
Oh yeah, you were more into sports in college, is that right?
Yeah, I played rugby, which kind of plays a part in how I became a full-time musician. I tore both of my shoulders, and I got surgery for one of them, then COVID hit the week after I got surgery, so I was just in a sling with absolutely nothing to do. So I just started playing guitar again, and that’s how I got started making TikToks. And everything else just spurred from that. So I’m actually thankful to rugby. I figured out that I’m not really a rugby player, I’m not built for it. I’m very tall and lanky, and you have to be short and stocky. They just took me out at the knees every time and I was very injury prone in those three years.
Speaking of those early days on TikTok, “Chandelier” skyrocketed you into being a musician. You’ve shared how you don’t necessarily resonate with your own writing immediately, and it can take some time to settle into a song. What is your relationship to those early songs like “Chandelier” and “Now You Know” now that things have grown and changed so much?
It kind of changes often. I don’t really have a blanket opinion on all my early stuff. Some of my songs I felt were more like a product of me freaking out. And I think I look back more fondly on those than the songs I was just doing for fun or something.
Like, “Chandelier” was purely just a product of me flipping out that this was even a new possibility for me. I wrote the song and then recorded it in two days in my car, and I feel like that made a better product because I didn’t have any time at all to think about it. And then other songs like “Satellite” or “In Two” were just made in a flurry. And I look at those songs and I’m really proud of those ones.
I’m still proud of the other songs, but I don’t listen to them, frankly, like I’ll listen to [the more rushed ones]. I don’t really listen to my own music, I can’t do that yet. I have noticed I can listen to Hahaha though. It’s the only thing I’ve been able to go back and listen to. I listened to the whole thing immediately when it came out, and usually I can’t do that.
Your aim with Hahaha was to just create something that was really fun to play live. It’s definitely a big tonal shift from your previous work, there’s a lot of levity and fun packed into these songs. Is it as simple as just making fun songs, or is it reflective of where you’re at in life?
Yeah, I mean, it definitely is. I’ve spent a lot of time making soft, intricate, inward-looking songs. Before this album I did a whole EP where the entire goal was to be soft and introspective and quiet. I played those songs live, and I found myself not having much fun playing them. I was about to go on this giant tour and realized I didn’t have a lot of songs I was excited to play in a live setting. As I was on that tour, I was writing these songs and testing them out. The first song on the album, “We Really Done It This Time,” I wrote the day before we left because I just wanted something energetic and fun. I do a lot of intricate guitar things, but it’s a pain to play live. I just wanted a burst of energy in the set. I was unsure, but my band was adamant we play it, and it proved to be true—it was the favorite every single night. That woke me up from my previous ways of thinking about writing.
I got off that tour and flew through the whole album really quickly. Even while recording, there were songs I tacked on at the end and finished the same day, like “I Work So Hard,” which I actually started in middle school. Will [Levin] remembered it from back then and pushed me to include it, and now it’s one of my favorites. The whole thing took no time at all. Most of the recording was done in a handful of days, with just a couple of weeks of overdubbing. All the songs are pretty much live takes with the band. The album is bare bones, maybe 20 tracks on the most intricate song, versus 100 on my past recordings. I think that’s why I enjoy listening to it—I didn’t really think that hard about the entire thing. It’s a habit of mine to overthink, and I just threw that away for this process.
I think from listening several times that it translates into the music so well. It has this really raw emotion to it that doesn’t feel overthought or overprocessed. It kind of reminds me of the early 2000s hardcore/punk scene that was so much fun for a lot of us because of its unrefined, raw quality.
Yeah, I do credit Will [Levin] for kind of throwing me back into my angsty, middle school self. Some of my early influences, I was super obsessed with Thee Oh Sees and Ty Segall, and all of those SoCal garage rock people. I was really into that first album that Waves put out. That’s what I was listening to all through middle school, and then I went off that wave for a long time. But it always stuck with me, the raw stuff they all put out. I always have a great appreciation for that, so I think we tried to tap into that with this album as much as we can.
I remember Will called me in the middle of my tour and I was talking to him about doing this album, and I was like, “I don’t really know the direction I should go.” I had shown him the demo of “We Really Done It” and he said, “You should make an entire album out of songs like that.” And that’s pretty much what we did, and I’m really glad. I have a lot of self-doubt because everyone tells you not to venture from your sound. Everyone knows me for “Chandelier,” everyone wants me to be doing the fancy finger-plucking stuff. But to make a whole album out of that would not be very fun for me. And it would take like four years because those songs don’t really come naturally to me. There were a lot of moments where I thought, “People aren’t gonna know what I’m doing, people don’t know me for rock stuff.” But at the end of the day, I just don’t really care. I just have to do the music that I want to do.
You’re still an independent artist, you’re not constrained to a label or anything like that, which is perfect for the position you’re in where you want to take things in a different direction. I don’t know what it’s like to record an album under a label, but you don’t always hear great things about it from creative artists that do want to branch out, y’know?
Yeah! I always forget about that aspect. I’m so lucky to be able to pretty much just do whatever I want. I don’t ever truly consider what I should make. I always have doubts on the stuff that I want to make, but I never actually follow through with doing something that someone is expecting of me.
Part of what I love about TikTok is that it pulls artists out of the weeds who we may not have seen otherwise, and gives them the traction to start out independent instead of hunting for record deals. I know that process happened really quickly for you; can you take me back to a moment where it all hit you?
It actually caused so much disruption in my life that it was really painful. I started failing a bunch of my classes, I started talking to labels every single day. I think I talked to every single label within maybe two weeks. And at that time, I was just completely losing my mind. I was 20 and I had always played guitar and loved making music. But that’s a dream I had killed, like 10 years prior. I had a great internship, I was studying advertising and fully prepared to go into that world. And then something comes my way that is really exciting, but also disrupts everything I had worked for. I failed all my classes that year, I got fired from my internship, my girlfriend broke up with me, it seemed like everything crumbled. It was really hard, and that’s why I feel like it took five years to make an album. It took me almost three of those years to even consider myself a musician or serious artist.
It literally happened overnight, I woke up and my entire life was different. There was a really funny moment that first week when a big DJ hit me up, basically to take my song and make it theirs. I had recorded everything myself in my car, and I was proud of it. I sent them the final of “Chandelier,” and the manager got back to me and said, “Honestly bro, this is garbage.” They wanted me to send stems so they could redo it, and I almost did. But I stuck to my guns and said, “I don’t think you’re right.” I’ve taken that mindset this entire time, especially with labels. I’ve talked to a bunch, but I just have to be independent right now. That Ty Segall, DIY spirit has stuck with me since middle school. There were so many funny moments. I talked to a lawyer who gave me horrible advice, just clearly preying on me. Comical conversations with 50-year-old people, and as a 20-year-old, it really does make you feel like you don’t know anything.
Yeah, they can have a way of using this legalese kind of jargon to talk down at you, and you’re like, “I guess you know what you’re talking about better than I do.” But what a great example of what can happen if you, like you said, stick to your guns and have faith in the music you’re creating.
Exactly. I mean, maybe I’ll sign to a label at some point but I really like the life I live right now, and I’m just trying to sustain it for as long as I can. That’s the goal. I don’t need to be any sort of super duper successful person, as long as I can just maintain this, I’ll be very happy. I’ve already fulfilled my dreams by 5x. I remember my dream in middle school was to play just one show where some people knew my music. If I could just do that, I would be fully content to never do music again. It was almost a cop-out, telling myself that I can just kill that dream. But now I’ve done it, I’ve played hundreds of shows, and I’m going to Europe in November which is totally unreal that that’s even a possibility for me. And I’m playing songs that are fun to rock out to. We actually tested a lot of the songs out in Europe in May, and they were big hits in some places. And then other places people were really… confused. But for the most part it was a great success, so I’m excited to go back there now that they understand what’s going on.
What are your favorite and least favorite things about touring?
It would be easy to say the shows… I remember I was deathly sick during the last tour I went on last year. There was this big stretch of the most important shows – New York City, Boston, Philly, DC – and I was dead for all of those shows. I was so angry about it. I’d say my least favorite part is probably getting sick because I do get sick every single time. Everything sucks when you’re sick, but playing the shows is really redeeming, that makes up for all of it.
Talking to people after the shows is probably my favorite part of touring. Just hearing people’s stories about how my music has influenced them or helped them through tough times or whatever. You also meet really awesome people and you can stay in touch with them, and then when they come back to the [next] show you remember them. My career previously has been so digital, a lot of it doesn’t feel real. I’ll make a TikTok and it’ll get like 2 million views, and it doesn’t really mean anything, it’s just a number on a screen.
Touring really is as direct as you could possibly get. Just playing your songs in front of people and seeing them react either positively or negatively – because I’ve had both – is the biggest lesson you could learn. For me, songwriting, recording, arranging, producing it all, I’ve always had trouble with all those aspects and just playing it live and seeing the reactions is the best direction you can get. I love touring a lot, even when it goes bad, and it definitely does sometimes, it’s a lot of fun.
I think when I was a kid, all my friends and I were also really into music, and touring was THE dream. We wanted to live in a bus or a van so badly. What I’m learning is that there’s a lot of good and bad to touring, I think. I don’t think my back would survive a tour cycle at this point, haha!
Yeah, it’s hard on the body. I was just talking to my girlfriend about how a big aspect of touring is just feeling so ugly. You’re just so disgusting, most days you don’t shower, you don’t do laundry for a month, your face is disgusting, your hair is disgusting… you’ll look in the mirror right before you go onstage and you’re like, “Oh my god, I have to go on stage in front of people under lights showing my ugly-ass face like this??” That’s a huge aspect of touring, but I’ve become accustomed to it.
Do you have a favorite city or a city that you’re really looking forward to going back to on this next tour?
I’m looking forward to Boston because that’s my hometown and I’ve never actually played a headline show in Boston before. I’ve played house shows, in college and some in high school, but I’ve never done a real headline show, so I’m really hyped for that. I’m excited for Utrecht in the Netherlands. We played the Netherlands in May and it was the most fun show. We met a bunch of awesome people and we hung out with them the whole night, it was great. So I’m excited to go see them again. We also played another smaller city in the Netherlands, and that was the most fun show I’ve ever played.
I always hear good things about the Netherlands and that little section of Europe.
Yeah, touring in Europe versus the US is like night and day, it’s just totally different. And they’re both good in their own rights, just different. I’m so excited for Europe, I’m about to see a lot of places I’ve never been to like Berlin, Poland, Italy. But yeah, Boston, Utrecht and London, too. We had a really awesome show in London last tour, so that’ll be fun.
Okay, I have kind of a silly question. Can you tell me more about the Garage Band album you made in seventh grade??
Haha! I made this Garage Band album in middle school, when I was 13. I have it on my desktop, and those songs rock. I listen back to them and they’re so good. “I Work So Hard” wasn’t from that album, but it was from another album that I was starting to work on after, but I never finished it. All those songs are just as raw as I could have gotten. And it’s funny because they’re so angsty and I’m just thinking back on like, what was I so angsty about at 13? Life was so unserious for me back then, I don’t know what I was so angry about. The songs are really fast and they’re distorted, and you can’t hear a single thing I’m saying. And I think they sound really sick! I probably will release it on Bandcamp or something just to complete that cycle.
Is there anything you’re writing now that you feel like you can see on a record down the road, similar to how Hahaha came together?
Yeah, I’m kind of getting started on what is gonna be on the next album, but I’m trying not to really think about it because I’ve got this whole tour to get through. But I do have about four songs that I’m gonna immediately begin working on once I get back from the tour. I basically have no idea what I’m gonna do after I get done at the end of November, I have no plan at all. The only thing I have on my list is I’ve got this short film that I’m going to score. My girlfriend directed it and it finished filming a few weeks ago, so they’re gonna finish that out and then I’m gonna score the whole thing. I’ve scored things before, but nothing this long, so that’ll be interesting. I’m just gonna make another album, probably, and then tour again.
What are you listening to in your spare time these days?
I’m listening to a lot of This American Life on NPR.
I’m obsessed with this band Can right now. I just read the biography of Can, it was very in-depth and meticulous, so now I know everything there is to know about Can. I listened to their entire discography recently, too, and I’m obsessed. It’s like an unhealthy obsession, but I’m just starting to come off the frenzy now. And they got me into a lot of other Krautrock bands like Ashra and Neu! I got stuck in this airport for like 10 hours and I read the final half of the Can biography in that time and was just listening to Krautrock the entire time in this airport. So now, when I think of Krautrock I think of airports, which I think is kind of fitting music for airport activities. That’s what I’d say I’m mainly into right now. I have crazy dry spells listening to music. I really try not to listen to music as background noise because I feel like I stop actually listening. So when I don’t have anything [specific] that I’m listening to, I pretty much don’t listen to music until something strikes me. I haven’t had much time to really be listening to much recently. When you go on tour, you listen to every song you’ve ever heard by the end of it. You just have so much time, you go through every song you’ve ever enjoyed in your entire life, so I’m excited to get out and do that. And you get to hear the music everyone in your band has listened to in their entire life too, and that’s always inspiring.
Thanks again for chatting with me, it’s been so cool getting to know you! I’m stoked to see what comes next for you, and I’ll see you in Toronto!
Yeah, awesome, thanks for having me!
Hahaha is available to stream wherever you listen to music. Don’t miss Will on tour this fall! Tickets are available here.
Keep up with Will Paquin: Instagram // TikTok // Spotify // YouTube // Website
