Fionn is a duo band composed of twins, Brianne Finn-Morris and Alanna Finn-Morris, whose music is typically of the folk pop variety. They have been making music together since they were kids, beginning their career by busking at Granville Island at twelve years old, and have maintained that passion into adulthood and turned their love of music into something so special. The band is signed to 604 studios and has been releasing music since 2018. They released a self titled album as well as their EP Everyone’s A Critic, which had elements of folk and Celtic inspiration, followed by the album Candid Constellations which had a more dance pop feel to it. They have collaborated with artists such as Mauvey, Fake Shark, and more recently they were featured on the song “You and I” on the solo album of Marianas Trench frontman Josh Ramsay. They have played numerous shows around Vancouver and have also traveled around North America to play events like SXSW in Texas, as well as LA, Toronto, and more.

My first concert post pandemic was seeing Fionn and Ludic at the Fox Cabaret, which was a show that really sparked my love of the Vancouver scene that’s been here all along despite me being unaware of it. It opened my eyes to this community that has become so important to me, so I have a lot of gratitude towards that particular show.

Their latest album, I Might Start Smoking, was just released on June 9th, and I was able to chat with the duo prior to it's release as they shared some stories with me about the making of the album, their writing process, and live shows, which I am so excited to share with you all.

I love the origin story of the duo and how you would busk when you were really young. I would love to hear if you have a moment in your career so far where you have that “whoa we made it” moment looking back and reflecting on the beginning and how you've got here?

Brianne: I think for me it probably would have been opening for Marianas Trench at the Malkin Bowl last September.

Alanna: I was going to say that too.

Brianne: Just cause that's the biggest show that we've done, and we were also really big Marianas Trench fans growing up as teenagers.

You guys have been playing all around North America lately, how has that experience been getting to travel around and play shows?

Alanna: It's been so, so much fun.

Brianne: Yeah, we've just been so happy. We love playing in Vancouver, but because of the pandemic we've kind of only been playing in Vancouver for a few years, as most artists have experienced. So, it just feels great to kind of be going to other places and reaching new audiences

Alanna: Meeting lots of cool new people, and it's a bit of adventure which I think artists crave. Just having fun.

Do you have a favorite moment from a show so far?

Alanna: I think our show in Austin was amazing because there was one person that was at the front mouthing all of the words. I'm kind of used to my friends mouthing the words at Vancouver shows, but to be in Austin Texas and have somebody that into it was a first-time experience for us for sure. We met them afterwards and we hugged, and it was just such a wholesome, lovely experience.

Brianne: It was a really nice moment of connection.

Me: That's got to be cool to go somewhere where you're not from and everybody knows your stuff. I was looking at your analytics on Spotify and there are more people that listen to you in Toronto than they do in Vancouver, and then right below Vancouver being New York and Chicago. It’s so cool that there are people everywhere.

Brianne: It’s so hard to even fathom, to be honest. We're gonna go play in Toronto for the first time since 2018 in June and I'm really excited because we've already had some people reaching out to us being like, “we're coming to the show!”. That's such a magical feeling, we appreciate it so much, all the people that are listening from far away.

I'm curious to know, what do you guys hope that people will gain by listening to your music?

Alanna: We grew up listening to Taylor Swift, as all the girls of our generation did, and we just found her music so relatable. I feel like that's kind of what we go for with our lyric writing, we want to tell stories kind of in that Nashville songwriter way, and just have people relate. At least that's my goal.

Brianne: I guess music is just all about connecting people and making connections with people. I think that if people can relate to something that you're saying or singing about, it makes them feel less alone. And then if they come to your show and they meet other people, I feel like it creates a community, in a way, of people that feel the same way.

What's the writing process like for you guys, do you write together, separately, or a combo of both?

Brianne: Combo of both, yeah. We can't write together one-on-one, except one time we wrote a Christmas song together and maybe it was the magic of Christmas but that was the only time we didn't fight, because if we try and write just the two of us, we will fight. If we write with a third person involved, then we're on our best behavior and we won't fight.

I can imagine It's really challenging to work together at times, kind of like living with your coworkers in a way. How do you handle creative conflicts when you're writing?

Brianne: Well, if we're writing with a third person, we'll just be aggressively sending each other texts, only sometimes, but I don't know, how do we handle it? I think that because we're twins, even if we get in a heated fight, it usually gets brushed off really quickly.

Alanna: Yeah, pretty fast.

Brianne: It's never really a lingering thing. So, I think that's just the nature of being sisters and being twins as well. It's different than if it was somebody outside your family that was in your band, but we've already always done everything together, so it kind of just like feels like sibling spats, you know?

How do you feel that the next album is going to be different from work that you've put out already?

Alanna: Well, I feel like it's a lot different than Candid Constellations for sure, because it's just more organic. It still kind of has a pop element, but more of an alt pop element. Its a bit more like Everyone's A Critic so we kind of went completely in the opposite direction of Everyone's A Critic and now came back.

Brianne: Yeah, we’ve kind of come back a little bit, but we've come back with having learned a lot from writing a pop album as well that I think we brought into this one. It's all kind of just a mixture of everything.

Alanna: I think this is the record where we finally have established our sound. I feel like it's been years of trying to figure it out.

Brianne: Yeah, we feel like we know who we are, and we know what we're doing.

Do you have any influences, other musical artists that you think have played a part inspiration wise in this project?

Alanna: We were playing around with some Celtic sounding background harmonies. So, we're kind of inspired by the Cranberries for those, trying to find ways to lace that in with the alt pop sound.

Brianne: Yeah, there was a bit of that. Obviously, our girl Taylor Swift always, from the honesty and the lyrics and trying to tell a story. We've both really been into this girl Chappell Roan recently because she's kind of an up-and-coming artist in the States and she's so good.

Alanna: Caroline Polachek, I remember we were listening to a lot of Caroline Polachek at the beginning of the album, again, because she has sort of Celtic elements. I listened to her tons of times, and I never really noticed the Celtic elements until somebody pointed them out to me. It’s very subtle, it's not too obvious, so we were kind of going for that vibe a little bit.

If you were to describe the album in three words, what would they be?

Alanna: This might kind of be four but, “second coming of age”.

Brianne: Tongue and cheek. But with serious elements underneath.

The Josh Ramsey collaboration was so cool, and I would love to hear a bit about how that came to be?

Brianne: We were working with him on some songs for Candid Constellations and he's like “guys, I wrote this song”, it was originally supposed to be something that he was writing for another band and asked us to sing harmonies on the demo. So, then he was like “I'm actually gonna put it on my album, do you guys wanna feature on it?” and we were so honored.

Alanna: So cool, it was so lovely of him to have us because on that record, everybody else who is featured are people that we grew up listening to.

Brianne: And looked up to our whole lives. It was really such an honor, and then getting to make the music video for it was so fun.

If you could collaborate with any local artists, who would they be?

Alanna: It would be really, really fun to do a collab with Madisyn Gifford. She's on 604 as well and she's also from White Rock, so she's kind of living a parallel life.

Brianne: Vox Rea as well.

Alanna: Peach Pit is cool.

Do you have a favorite line that you guys have written, either from a released or unreleased track?

Alanna: Ooo, I'll pick a line that you wrote, and you pick a line that I wrote.

Brianne: Ok, I have one already.

Alanna: Aww you already have one? Okay, hold on I gotta think. So, Brianne has a song called “I'll Meet You In The Next Life” and there's one line that’s like “that freckled face phantom you watched running down the bay/ every day she'll fade in a sea of August rain.” And in the context of the song, that line always just makes me so sad, because it's like the idea of having somebody once and then not having them anymore and I feel like that line stabs at the heart.

Me: Yeah wow, that's really cool imagery too, there's several poetic devices being used in the one lyric, that's crazy.

Brianne: Aw, thank you! Okay, Alanna's is from the song that’s actually going to be the title of the album, “I Might Start Smoking” is the song, and there's just so many good lines in it. There's two, actually, I'm going to give two. This is from the pre chorus “I might just daydream till I die/ so drunk on every lost July.” that's very relatable. And then the other one is “God fill my bathtub up with cash/ I've seen the world through tinted glass/ stuck in the back of someone else's ride.”

What are some goals that you have for the band for the future?

Brianne: I think we just really want to do a proper tour. We have been playing out of Vancouver and going around a bit, but we'd love to either get an opening slot on a cool tour or book our own. So that's kind of our biggest goal at the moment.

Alanna: Yeah, I feel like when we start touring, that'll really feel like living the dream, cause so far recording has felt like living the dream and putting out music. There's just something about performing on the day-to-day, you know, a band on the road would just be the dream. Even when we were kids, we’d turn our stuffed animals into a band and put them “on the road”. We'd make a little bus and bus them around the room.