Album Preview: Liam Finn - FOMO

FOMO, Liam Finn's follow-up to 2007's I'll Be Lightning is due out next Monday June 13th. We caught up with Finn to chat about the album and asked him to pick his five favourite tracks and talk about them. You can stream the tracks below and read his commentary on them, and you can head over here to continue to read the full interview with Liam Finn.

‘Neurotic World’

That was the first song I wrote that I felt captured that atmosphere I keep talking about, and it was the first song that felt like a different direction and yet still really honest. I guess it immediately became the first track on the record from the get go and was something I kept referring back to as far as an atmosphere I wanted to create. Not that I wanted to create that atmosphere but that’s what I played to Burke Reid saying ‘this is the tone let’s take it from here’.

‘Roll of the Eye’

I wrote that on a trip out of New Zealand last year pretty early on in the writing process. It was the middle of Winter and I came over to Toronto and then Montreal and played with this Montreal band and tried to get out of my comfort zone a little and see if that would be more conducive to writing. I hung out in Montreal for a week and it was the end of their Summer and I was riding bikes around and it was just really awesome to play with different musicians and realize how much there was to gain out of collaborating and that’s where I made the decision that it was time to find a producer or find someone I could share the enjoyment of making a record with.

‘Cold Feet’

This is the one that I wrote and then immediately thought it was too poppy or too obvious, but it just kept getting stuck in my head and sentiment-wise it was just painting quite a beautiful picture of the sunset in the summer at a beach town and feeling nervous and yearning for someone – all those kind of things you do when you’re a teenager. It had a personal aspect to it and a fictional aspect and had a setting that was different from where I was, because I was imaging a white sandy beach and an American setting.

‘The Struggle’

I did this as kind of a rough demo - just tried to make everything as crunchy and industrial and tom waits-y as possible - and like ‘Cold Feet’ I didn’t take it seriously. It wasn’t over thought and the lyrics were about a really weird dream I’d had the night before where I had to have sex with Julian Assange, and that was the price to pay for selling my soul.

‘Jump Your Bones’

It is my favourite song on the record because it was made in different stages. Glenn Kotche the drummer of Wilco is one of my favourite drummers in the world, if not of all time. He does really experimental things that still sound percussive and drum-like and it sounds quite weird, and that inspired the beginning of the song. It had the atmosphere too plus it was really fun to work on so when we finished the record I still had that song to finish and I left it till last because I knew it would be fun and we finished it the day before we had to head on tour. It was a really nice full stop on the record and it’s nice to turn up extremely loud and blast and feel like you’ve finished the record.