Much in the same way a band like Wolf Parade managed to harness the full potential of both of its deeply eccentric songwriters/vocalists rather than one canceling out the other, Finom has long explored the balance between its co-conspirators Sima Cunningham and Macie Stewart. With the latter making a solo bid in 2021 with Mouth Full of Glass, Cunningham has since followed suit with her own debut collection of recordings. High Roller will be released at the end of the month, with the newly unveiled “Your Bones” exemplifying the need for music released under the songwriter’s given name (albeit, being steeped deeply in Chicago’s music scene for quite some time, with the help of a laundry list of familiar collaborators).
The acoustic-led folk track leaves plenty of space for Cunningham’s diaristic lyrics before instrumental swells later in the recording tease out some of the emotions evoked by lyrics about intimate personal relationships. “‘Your Bones’ is about giving the closest people in your life the space to go through whatever they are going through,” Cunningham shares. “For a long time I’ve been trying to practice being by people’s side, but not asking them to fix whatever is weighing on them.”
The track arrives with a video created by Cunningham’s childhood friend Jake Saner, which sees the artist traversing their shared hometown’s familiar downtown imagery. “When [Jake] heard the song, [he] told me we should film a beautiful snapshot of my life—and capture it on Kodak Super 8 film. So that’s what we did. I like to think of the architecture of Chicago being the bones that I grew up amongst. Now, seeing the video, and whenever I sing the song, I think about all the space I want to give my daughter to feel big feelings and develop her own perspective on the world.”
“I took inspiration from the black-and-white photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Fan Ho, each of whom capture a sense of both isolation and community in urban settings through spacious compositions,” Saner adds. “As the video progresses this photographic aesthetic evolves into a grainy 1960s handheld, rock-doc quality when Sima finds connection with her people.”
Check out the results below, and keep an eye out for some familiar faces among Cunningham’s people.
