I’ve never seen Stranger Things. To me, Finn Wolfhard is Kai Slater’s friend. The same Kai Slater from Sharp Pins and Lifeguard, who produced Happy Birthday, Finn’s debut solo album. The reason why I’m here at Rough Trade in Rockefeller Center. There’s also AC. It’s 90 degrees on the beginning of June, a threshold between late spring and summer, of farewells and possibility. 

I drag my friend Zuham along, excepting to be caught in a storm of teenage girls, but they don’t bother checking our tickets for the listening party. In fact, the worker doesn’t even announce when the record begins. It just starts on a bluetooth Marshall speaker in the back corner of the store. I could’ve easily done this at home. I grab a free signed copy of a Happy Birthday 4-inch, because there’s no one to compete with except for one girl who brought her mother. 

The first track is a short atmospheric burst, I hardly realize it’s playing until his voice envelopes me in its honesty: “Happy Birthday / What have I done? / It's my birthday and I waste precious time.” He introduces the bittersweetness of growing up which also hits me as someone who first listened to his other bands Calpurnia and the Aubreys when I was freshly 19 circling the S-Bahn in Berlin. We’re both now older, but still looking back and working with the fruits of our youth. 

Happy Birthday stems from a 50-song challenge back in 2022. My debut poetry collection GLIB has roots in a poem-a-day month I did. Part of making art is religiously making as much as you can when creatively inclined and then shaping what’s there. It’s hard because you’re simultaneously growing as an artist and person by the time the public get to see something you did three years ago. 

“Choose the Latter” begins with one of Finn’s favorite lyrics off the album: “If there was a choice / To be scraping by / On my own time.” The song is jangly––think Sharp Pins, Sparklehorse, and Teenage Fanclub who are all listed on his Spotify inspo playlist. 

I want to start dancing as “Eat” comes on, a noisier surf-punk-y track influenced by his early taste in FIDLAR and The Frights, but everyone else in the store is shuffling through records. It’s fun, and I could imagine a younger version of myself putting it on one of my skating playlists. For now, I nod along. Stone sober. Wishing I was with everyone I used to know in San Francisco back when we’d sneak White Claws and Four Lokos everywhere. 

Despite being from Vancouver, Finn does have a West Coast vibe. There’s something laid-back. Raw vibes. I wish I could go to one of his shows but they’re all back in the world I left behind. But he remains an invisible thread throughout my life––my friend Will from the Bay-Area based band Now is about to go on tour with Sharp Pins. I wonder when Finn will make the bill. Maybe we’ll meet in the middle, in Chicago, where the record was made.

“Objection” is one of my favorites from the record. I can tell it’s inspired partly by Big Star, Feist, and Alvvays. The upbeat melody propels you forward. It’s walking home alone and facing all these anxieties, but knowing your friends are right around the corner. 

He slows down in the next couple songs, “Everytown there’s a darling” and “Trailers after dark.” These are meditations in fall. There’s stillness. But then “Crown” picks the energy back up with its Sonic Youth/Lifeguard reminiscent distortion. I’d love to see it live.

“You” is a Twin Peaks-meets-Mac DeMarco ballad with beautiful strings accompanying his stripped-down guitar. He croons: “I don't have everything but you.”

My favorite albums are always the ones that make me feel, something. It’s usually nostalgia, and Finn manages to evoke it so vividly. Happy Birthday was intimately made on an 8-track tape between Kai’s apartment, his band’s rehearsal space, and Palisades Studios. You feel the warmth and camaraderie, the fuzz, the way the songs are lived in. Tiny snippets into his world.

I don’t realize it’s his final song, but the record ends perfectly on “Wait.” As a verb, it’s tiring. As a command, it’s helpless. Finn sings, “I can't sing anymore / How many more?” There’s a restlessness. He gets it: “I can’t sleep in.” I wonder, too, how many more poems I’ll have to write. When will it all end? “Wait” is also a hesitance for the record to finish, for him to now go out and make another. But there’s hope even if the hangout has to come to a close. I faintly hear a kettle boiling in Kai’s kitchen. Followed by footsteps.

Then it’s over like a birthday ending. If the party was only 24 minutes long. We wait for the worker to play it again, but he just blasts “Summer Babe” by Pavement.