He Really Did it This Time: A Conversation with Will Paquin on His New Record and Being a Recovering Perfectionist

Photo credit: Gabriella Mulisano x Illustration: Taya Welter

There are some melodies that stand the test of time and outgrow their creators almost instantly. Will Paquin’s “Chandelier” is one of those. The second it begins, you’re pulled back into a time when you first heard it, a flash of recognition. It can be best described as something bright rising up, finding a way back into your consciousness from a pool of half-forgotten memories. It’s the kind of song that is so big, it fills venues and forges fanbases on its own. Trying to shift gears into a new direction is tricky as those songs tend to linger in the collective memory like something sealed off, preserved, and hard to move past. Where do you go from there, how do you build on something that’s already taken on a life of its own?

Will Paquin’s answer is to start from the ground up. His debut full-length album « Hahaha » builds a new body of work that stretches beyond what he’s known for, expanding both his sound and his sense of process. A recovering perfectionist in his own words, Paquin has come a long way from the Chandelier days where he was recording music solo in his car in absolute secrecy, not allowing anyone hear or touch the demos. «Getting out of my own way has been a big thing for this record. A lot of my early songs were me doing things on my own, in a very DIY matter. It wasn’t necessarily because I wanted to have all the control when it comes to my music, but because I was afraid to work with other people and give my songs into their hands. » he explains. « Over the years, I’m learning to give up control because sometimes you’re your own worst enemy and you can keep yourself from completing things. » It’s easy being a perfectionist, when you’re the only person who is implicated in a project, we came to agree with Will during our interview, yet, as he reflects: « Sometimes, collaboration makes your music more special. That’s an angle that I’ve came to like a lot. » 

The collaborative spirit runs through the entire album: the instruments sound more assured, layered, and grounded, giving Paquin’s guitar melodies a steadier foundation and greater purpose. For the first time, Will has had his band with him during the recording, for that everyone to be able to add their juicy twist into what they’re putting out on the table. Everything feels in motion, like this new machine that’s now powered not by habit but by energy and conversation. « I didn't have that much time to finish all these songs. And I think that speediness and the urgency helped us move things forward in the best way. Normally, I would have sat with the songs a lot longer, and convince myself that my first ideas were bad. » he explains. 

That old habit of self-questioning surfaces more than once in our conversation, a reminder of how deeply it once loomed over his creative process. It makes the completion of a full-length body of work all the more compelling to examine. As listeners, we hear what happens when he's given the space to build something from start to finish, a cohesive story arc told in sound. His mind drifts into the unexplored at times, and novelty glimmers in the cracks of certain tracks, most notably on I Need to Know, a standout moment on the album. It’s a Led Zeppelin-esque cut that finds Paquin at his most ambitious, his voice straining and surging as if trying to ask a dozen questions all at once, urgency bleeding through every line, instruments barely keeping up with his energy. When I tell him that it's my favorite album he just bursts out laughing: "Oh really?" is his first response. " I was listening to a lot of like Fugazi and to this band called Snooper. I was really fired by that genre, like the more punk-adjacent music. I made a very goofy demo of a song just as a joke that nods to that, with no intention of it being in the album as it had nothing to do with the rest of the songs. And then I showed it to Will and he was like, you need to record this." he explains. Paquin recalls a piece of advice from his producer, Will, that shifted how he viewed his own work: “You need to trust the first night of making something. If you’re really excited about it, trust yourself—don’t trust your ears months later.” It’s a core concept that ended up shaping the album’s arc. I Need to Know, a track that nearly didn’t make the cut, owes its place to that first-night instinct.

We Really Done It This Time is also one of the album’s most prominent moments. Built around a loop of simple, repetitive lines and an effortlessly catchy melody, it shows Paquin’s ability to elevate minimalism into something radiant. What could’ve been a throwaway refrain becomes a glimmering statement, an unexpected but striking way to open the album. Roll the Dice is a soft, sun-warmed track that gently drifts into the territory of Julian Casablancas’ stripped down solo work. There’s a woozy, late-afternoon quality to it, it's unhurried and quietly magnetic. Everything plays like a memory caught mid-fade, honest and fragmented. “I just want to be young again and see you for the first time, in a dark room, a flash of light, suddenly I see everything.” Paquin sings, his voice suspended somewhere between nostalgia and the weight of the present time. It’s one of the most emotionally immediate moments on the record, and a clear reflection of his new-found creative ethos. “Sometimes the first idea can be the purest form of a song,” he says. “To me, all of these tracks feel pure because they’re essentially the first versions of what I imagined each song could be.”

The guitar-driven melodic sensibilities that have long defined Paquin’s sound remain intact here, sharp and quite ear-catching. Even as the album drifts into new textures and experiments with form, it never feels like a departure so much as a natural extension. "It could potentially be a good song if the guitar part is really strong, but most of the time I always try to have the actual song come first. And I always have to catch myself because I always have these guitar parts that I think would make really good songs and then I can't think of lyrics or I can't think of a melody to go over it."

"I have so many guitar parts in my own voice memo that we'll probably just never make something done it because they're good guitar parts, but I don't think they make good songs."

Not every idea needs to be chased to its end until the initial excitement of making it in the first place is lost, that’s something Paquin seems to understand more clearly now. Hahaha doesn’t sound like the work of someone trying to do everything at once. Instead, it’s the sound of someone learning what to leave behind, shedding the excess noise of perfectionism and control in favor of space and honesty. There’s a rare clarity embedded in its looseness, a sense of purpose beneath the seeming casualness.