Ahead of True/False Film Festival this weekend, I talked to Sima Cunningham of the band Finom, which is playing at the Saturday Night Rose Showcase alongside Tenci and Resavoir. Finom has been a band since 2014, formed by Cunningham and Macie Stewart. The pair wanted to explore what they could accomplish playing rock music, combining their stunning vocal harmonies with angular, distorted guitars. After their first three LPs, they released their fourth effort with 2024’s Not God. With songs like “Dirt,” “A Petunia” and “As You Are” their sound breaches into new sonic territories, including more mellow moments that turn into Finom’s signature explosions of riffs and harmonies, featuring lyrics that ponder ego, relationships and catharsis.
Continue reading to see my interview with Sima Cunningham.
Q: How has your winter been?
A (Sima Cunningham): Man, my winter’s been great. Right now we have a couple of inches of snow in Chicago, which always makes it feel like proper winter instead of just brutal winter. It’s good, I just got back from Europe. Finom was just in Europe, we played some shows in Denmark, Germany and Finland. We did a bunch of saunas and polar plunges, like cut a hole in the ice and jumped into the water. So we’re feeling very alive right now.
Q: I see you have some Midwest, West Coast dates coming up. How do those dates differentiate from the European ones?
A: Well, I mean first of all it’s very funny because European audiences — particularly the countries that we were just in — they’re very stiff. So like, you kind of aren’t really sure if they’re having a good time until the very end, and then they really cheer their butts off. Yeah, we’re really looking forward to these Midwest and West Coast tours. We haven’t played in Colorado since 2019, so we’re heading out to Colorado by way of True/False in Como — which is one of our favorite festivals to play. We’ve been a couple times and we just really love it. It’s such an incredibly run festival, and the way it brings together film people and music people is special. It’ll be fun, we’re driving from Chicago in the van so that’s kind of like the Midwest tour vibe is a lot of driving. We’re going to be driving across Nebraska a lot. For the West Coast, we’re flying out to the West Coast and just driving straight down the coast. That’s going to be really beautiful, we’re going to see a lot of friends out there. It’ll be good to be back in Seattle. We did this thing with the Ballet Company in Seattle a couple years ago, so hoping we can invite some ballet dancers to our rock’n’roll show.
Q: How has touring Not God been different from other albums and with the touring world being a bit more normal again after 2020?
A: Touring Not God has been really wonderful just because there were these sort of really weird trying-to-get-the-world-back-on-course (aspects) and I would say that it’s still quite different from before pre-pandemic. There’s a lot of ways touring is just harder now, even more reason for people to come out and support artists that are doing it on the road because it’s a big lift to get out there. The Not God tour, the music has been feeling so wonderful. We’ve been playing as a quartet this time, which we’ve never really done. We’ve got V.V. Lightbody, who I think is also doing a set at True/False. V.V. Lightbody has been singing and playing bass with us, so that’s been really fun to have just a little bit more energy in the band. I think the record just feels really good to play. I think we’re feeling really in love with the music and it’s very cathartic. It’s a very cathartic album. It’s a lot about trying to speak truth to the ego-maniacal forces that surround us right now. I think probably one of the big differences is I have a kid now. So, my kid comes on tour with us sometimes, but that’s been really fun. She keeps us all in a good mood, she’s like our emotional-support human. But yeah, the music has been great, connecting with audiences has felt really even more profound and emotional. I’ve been really happy we’ve been doing all this touring this year.
Q: Watching some old performances, it seems like the incorporation of bass is a more recent addition in the live setup. What made you guys decide originally to just have two guitars and drums? Because that’s not the most conventional thing.
A: Trios are really powerful. We love playing in a power trio. I don’t know if it connects to something deeper about the triangle being the strongest shape, but I don’t know, there’s really just something about those three points. We just did this Europe tour as a trio, and that felt really, really great too because there’s a flexibility in it. I think there is just a sheer power in the quartet with a bass player because we always have this big low-end supporting whatever me and Macie are doing, but I think originally we just kind of felt like the basis of the band was about our vocals and guitar playing. And then we decided to bring in drums, so it was just for a while we were like “Oh it’s a thing we don’t have a bass player” and then Macie splits her signal into a guitar amp and a bass amp so then we had this fatter low-end that was already present still with just the three of us. I think more than even needing a bass player, I think we wanted more voices on this record. It’s just a lot of vocals and we wanted it to feel really full and I think that it’s a really beautiful thing for people to hear a three, four-part harmony. For a while we were like “no bass,” then we were like “ok bass” and now we’re like “yeah bass.”
Q: Yeah, it’s neat watching your guys’ Tiny Desk performance because if you weren’t looking for it you wouldn’t notice the absence of bass because you guys really do cover the high and low-end spectrum.
A: Yeah, we do that and also I have a pretty deep pick-up. My hot rail pick-up on my strat is really beefy, so it kind of makes it feel like it’s not two jangly guitars and then drums. But I’ve been experimenting with that now that we do have — it’s funny we went from being a no-bass band to now we always have to have two bass amps, Macie needs a bass amp and Vivian needs a bass amp. So, oh how the tables have turned.
Q: Your story on the internet is that you’re these really talented classically trained musicians and then you were like “We want to make guitar music” — which is a great origin story. It made me wonder what inspired you guys to get noisy? Because when I think of stuff that’s inspiring for that, it’s like maybe Sonic Youth? Velvet Underground? Was it something else outside of the rock world entirely?
A: Yeah, it was. Honestly, I would not say that Sonic Youth is a big influence for us, even though a lot of people hear Sonic Youth in our music. It’s funny, I guess early on in some bio we decided to describe as “classically trained” because, yeah I guess that is true, both of us studied music a lot as kids, but now it feels kind of like follows us around like a ghost. Like “Oh remember you – you did suzuki once.” No, we both played in bands in high school. So, we were playing a lot of different kinds of music and both grew up playing — sure we played classical music — but we actually both grew up playing Irish music as well. We both grew up playing rock music. I sang in choir, and so we were exposed to a lot of different kinds of music. Actually, in my early twenties, in both of our early twenties, I was living in Chicago and working at this experimental jazz venue called Constellation. And there is where we got exposed to a lot of, I’d say more outsider and avant-garde/experimental music and musicians. And kind of that sort of very creative and free form of musical expression. It was really inspiring to both of us. And I think inspiring to both of us to maybe approach an instrument that we didn’t feel we were as trained on, which was the guitar. Both of us sort of use the guitar to play cowboy chords and do some songwriting, but I think by attending those shows we really were like “You know what? Actually, what if we didn’t think of the guitar as something we had to master before we start playing around with it? What if we can find other entry points into being electric guitar players?” So that’s really how our band came around. We knew we had this baseline of all kinds of musical ideas and experiences and knew how to sing together, but we wanted to play loud, weird guitars. And we did.
Q: Since coming into the guitar world, have you guys developed a favorite chord or a favorite guitar move?
A: Ooh, yes. Actually, yes I have. I love to do like a *wooolooooeeeerrrrlooooo* — sort of treat the guitar like a weird theremin and wobble up and down the neck. Also, I will say I still am a huge fan of the E chord. The good old fashioned E chord. It’s really satisfying to me. I still use a basic E chord in a fair amount of songs, that I don’t think that when I play it, it sounds like a cowboy chord, but I’m definitely just playing a straight up E chord, or maybe moving it up an octave. We have a lot of songs with the chord C, but the power chord C, we have songs where I have to play it a ton and it breaks my hand.
Q: When writing, how do you guys approach creating sounds you just like versus having a songwriting structure that you try to fulfill?
A: I think we have a little bit of both present, because we do really love songwriting and melody and we like to make music that ultimately people can walk away holding onto something and not feel sort of like “it came and went and I don’t remember any of it.” Sometimes there is music that is really amazing, but it’s sort of more of an experience in the moment, rather than it follows you home and I think we do want to make music that follows people home and stays with them. I think often we usually write the core of the song separate, then bring it together. In the process of playing it for each other uncover what we think the emotional direction or the sonic direction should go. I feel like “Haircut” is a really good example of this. Macie wrote “Haircut” and it’s like total fun banger. But when she first wrote it, it was very robotic. When we brought it into the studio with Jeff, the really weird parts are a Bitcrusher pedal that I was playing on guitar. We felt like we wanted to find something that felt expressive, and that was guitar, but didn’t sound like guitar, so that was how we landed on that sort of sound. We actually play a lot of acoustic guitar on Not God as well, which we hadn’t done a lot of on other Finom records.
Q: How was having Jeff Tweedy produce your record?
A: It was great! It was super great. We love Jeff, and he’s such a champion, not only to us, but also for making courageous music and being courageous artists. Our music is weird. It’s very very not easy to pigeonhole, it’s not really easy for us to make sense on normal playlists or whatever. It’s very much its own thing, and that is something we both feel really confident about. It’s not even that we feel confident about it, it’s just who we are naturally. But Jeff has really been supportive of us not leaning away from that. He’s really playful in the studio. He loves playing around with guitars and sounds. He appreciates songs and he was very honest about — sometimes you write and song and you’re sort of like “okay that’s it I think it’s done,” but he was good about being like “Agh, I think you can write just a little bit more on this song, and then it will be really satisfying.” That word satisfying, I hadn’t thought about so much in terms of making a record. But now I think about it a lot whenever we’re recording. Something can be good, but if it’s satisfying, it really has fulfilled its potential. Jeff was a really good guiding source on figuring that out.
Q: Kind of the opposite of that satisfaction thing, and especially since you’re not too easy to pigeonhole, were you guys ever writing from a place of wanting to do like the punk thing and be like “This isn’t for the listener, this is for us?”
A: I mean, I think we always are. I think we’re always writing for us and not the listener, and just hoping what we do connects with a listener. It’s not like we’re like “We don’t care. We don’t care if anyone ever listens to our music.” No we do, of course. We really hope we make music that resonates with people, but no we don’t ever write with the audience in mind. Not for an album, that would be for a specific thing. Like, we’ve written music for a movie or a tv show and we wanna capture this thing. But no, I think that would be too phony to try and do that. I’m sure a lot of other artists would say this too it’s like “sure it would probably serve us in the short term to try and write things that are exactly what the people want to hear,” but that’s what AI is for. If people want that, they can go listen to AI artists. I’m quite sure what people want when they come to music and when they come to artists is to be shown something authentic and to be made to think of something that they didn’t even know was a feeling or a thought or an experience that they had or wanted to live inside the perspective of.
Q: I noticed that change and a little bit of anxiety are some themes of Not God. You kind of touched on this at the start too, but do you guys find your songwriting process to be cathartic?
A: Yeah, absolutely. Actually, I was talking about this the other day when someone was asking about “As You Are” and that song really is about loving someone through change and how that tension can exist. The album is a lot about ego death and wanting to kill the ego in you, the egos around you that kind of dominate our brain waves. So, I think it’s definitely super cathartic. Writing these songs, I think both of us were feeling all kinds of feelings of nostalgia, sadness, anxiety, profound love, anger, but also a lot of hopefulness through that. I think people are still really processing everything that happened in the pandemic and how do we be after that? And then now how do we be in our current political reality? And how do we not just become numb? How do we actually find strength within ourselves, reconnect with our inner-monologues — or not just our inner-monologues — but reconnect with our spine and figure out how to walk forward with confidence and character.
Q: That’s a tricky thing with ego and confidence, and I think I can see that reflected in the album.
A: Yeah, it’s really hard because you need confidence in order to feel love for yourself. If you feel love for yourself then you’ll feel love outwards towards other people, right? And we’re seeing this on a national scale. There’s this crisis of confidence. All of these people who feel fear and hatred, and are not confident because, for many reasons, but often it’s because there are horrible systems keeping people oppressed in this country. And none of that engenders a feeling of confidence or of love. It engenders feelings of “I need to look out for mine and my own” and all of that is really detrimental. I do think that trying to make music that both recognizes the pain that we’re all experiencing but tries to help give musical pathways towards transforming that into more feelings of love is what I hope that we are doing a very small piece of.
Q: The festival landscape has been kind of different post-COVID and with the way people manage them. How do you guys remain optimistic about going to festivals and touring?
A: I think that all that matters right now is the connection between artists and the people who love them. I’ve seen this so much, it’s about the direct artist-fan connection because they’re feeding and fueling each other. All of the other people around it are trying to feed off of this very pure relationship. It’s important to just remember that every fan that comes out to a show is a part of the thing that matters. The industry that has built up around it, like sure whatever, sometimes it’s meaningful sometimes and sometimes it’s not meaningful. What’s the most important thing is people playing their shows and playing their music to the people who care about their music. The fans in turn, showing up, caring about the music, sharing that music with other people they love, supporting the artist directly by buying merch, that’s what really matters. Everything else… it’s a little dark out there, and it’s easy to get cynical, and for good reason. There’s so many parts of the music industry that are either crumbling or becoming massively unequal, and the gap between the elite people who are making tons of money and the working class musicians is just growing exponentially. Yeah, we’re giving too much power to entities like Spotify. I understand that it’s a tool for people to listen, and you know I’ve got my own streaming service that I listen through, but we just to not let companies like that dictate how we participate in one of the most beautiful things in the world, which is music and people who love music. Musicians and people who love music being in a space together and saying “Hey, I love what you do, I’m supporting what you do” and us, artists saying “Hey, we so appreciate you being here, seeing your faces, the fact that you care about what we are doing” so let’s just focus on strengthening that relationship first and foremost.
Q: Yeah, it’s tough with tools becoming more than just tools. It seems like with social media, it has taken precedence over real life connection with things and the way people interact with things.
A: Yeah, I hope in the next couple of years we really figure out better ways to let people know about what we’re doing. Right now most artists feel trapped by social media because we can’t do without it. Otherwise we’d have no way of communicating with our audience or our fans, or telling people “Hey we’re on tour, we have an album.” But also, they’ve set up so even if we decide we’re not going to do social media for 6 months, then they punish us for not engaging for those 6 months. It’s a nasty cycle, so I’m hoping that your generation figures it out. I feel like everyone just wants email, do you guys email?
Q: Yeah I know a lot of people here in the J-school really like newsletters. A buddy of mine in a band, they have social media too, but they send out customized html newsletters. I saw a New York Times Style feature about this group using flip-phones…
A: The Luddites?
Q: I know a few folks who have tried the flip-phone switch…
A: It’s hard! It’s really hard.
Q: I could definitely see that happening. Columbia has the space for it. It’s just engrained to a level that makes it pretty difficult.
A: It’s super engrained. I’m glad that younger people are at least recognizing that this is literally a mental epidemic and we have to create emotional internal regulation tools so that we’re not becoming addicts. That’s what I really do love about shows, and has been powerful on this last round of tour. There is nothing more powerful than being in a room with a bunch of other people, especially if you’re all singing together at the same time. That is literally one of the most human things that you can do. Of course there’s so many amazing ways for people to connect online, but it is not the same and people should understand that. Connecting with people online should be treated like dessert, like you have a little bit of it, but that should not be the main way you’re connecting with other human beings.