Formula Indie Sessions _ Interview with Fin Talbot

Introduction of the project: Born amidst the chaos of quarantine, Fin Talbot is a unique blend of Chicago’s grit and Dublin’s charm.

What is your earliest memory connected to music?

• I think we would all have our own unique story to tell about our earliest memories connected to music but all of us have been musicians for almost all of our lives since we were young so it’s hard to remember a time when music wasn’t the main thing in our lives.

How did your passion for creating music begin?

• As I mentioned we’ve all been musicians since we were kids and started playing in bands in middle and high school. There’s really nothing any of us could see ourselves doing with our lives besides this, I don’t think there’s anything more interesting in the world than trying to write songs and being able to perform your music for people and grow an audience.

What’s the story behind your current music project?

• Fin Talbot originally started as a solo project by Sean Fagan and then I joined (Dan Glines) and my brother John Glines. Sean and I had been in a band years before and were excited to work together again, we both felt like we had unfinished business. We worked as a 3 piece for a little while before finding our drummer Jovan Armstrong so since then we’ve been playing a lot of shows locally in Chicago and working on new material that we hope to release soon in 2026.

How would you describe your sound to someone who has never heard your music before?

• We are a rock band but that often can be a very loaded term being that there are many sub-genres and niches when it comes to rock in particular. The 90’s/early 2000’s indie/alternative music scenes is what we lived through and draw on most heavily so I would say our music falls into those categories but our music is diverse in terms of how certain songs may fit the indie label more and other songs might be heavier and fit the hard-rock label more. It’s always difficult to explain our music to people so it’s honestly more fun for us to have people going into things with no expectations and just make up their own minds when they hear our songs. We like hearing the feedback from people and having them tell us what they think we are.

What is one thing you’ve learned that completely changed the way you make music?

• One of the biggest things we’ve learned along the way is understanding how to create a vision and structure in the writing process. Songs start with a simple motif or idea that you get excited about but then you have to understand how to fit that into a larger structure and vision. Having this process be specific and detailed at the beginning of the writing process has helped us avoid writer’s block and unlocked new ways of thinking about our songs.

What tools, instruments, or software are essential in your creative process?

• We like to be as involved as possible in shaping how all of our songs are going to turn out. Once we have a tune that’s mostly finished we track and record it in our rehearsal space and then work on producing and mixing a demo at our home studio working in pro tools before taking the demo to a bigger studio to record the final mix. As you can tell by our music we are big on using unique effects from guitar pedals or VST’s in pro tools to make unique sounds and create interesting transitions or motifs. A lot of the fun of writing songs is taking something you’ve written and messing around with effects pedals or doing weird stuff in pro tools until you’ve created something cool that you weren’t even setting out to do. I think it’s super important for any band or artist to learn as much about engineering and mixing as much as they can because of how it informs your song writing.

Which indie artist or song are you loving right now?

• We love to give shoutouts to Chicago bands whenever we can so we’d say Wilco if people are unfamiliar, they’ve been a great Chicago rock band for years now.

How have your personal experiences influenced your music and artistic vision?

• We’ve all been playing music and performing for most of our lives so the accumulation of all those experiences influences music and artistic vision. We definitely feel like we’re much better musicians and writers than we were in previous projects because we’re able to draw from those experiences and it’s shaped who we are now so we feel like we are in a very exciting time now in our lives creatively because of our past.

What emotions or messages do you hope listeners take from your work?

• Every song we write will express different or contrasting emotions or messages but it’s always important for us to work on creating songs that are rooted in a specific vision and story that we are telling.

 What’s the most important lesson music has taught you so far?

• Music has taught us how powerful the live experience really is from the shows we’ve played. People love all kinds of entertainment, but there’s something uniquely electric about being in a room together, sharing music in real time. Getting to perform for different crowds is a privilege, and the energy and connection in those moments is exhilarating in a way nothing else can quite match. 

What is a dream venue or festival you would love to perform at?

• As native Chicagoans the easy answer for us would be to play Riot Fest. It’s honestly the best big festival in the states at the moment in terms of its consistency of the lineup each year being sick. 

If you could collaborate with any artist, past or present, who would it be and why?

• I think as a group right now we love to collaborate with Max Steger, formerly of the Chicago rock band Empires. Sean and I were in a different band years ago and Max was a producer and co-writer on our tunes so we love to have him produce some of our songs in the future if things align!

Where can our listeners follow and support your music? (Website,Spotify, IG, links)

• The band’s linktree Fin Talbot has our instagram, spotify, and other socials so we love people to check our music first on spotify but definitely give us a follow on instagram to check out our latest content and news about shows and releases.

Looking toward the future, what’s your dream for the next chapter of your musical journey?

• Going into the new year our focus right now is to finish writing an EP of the new songs we’ve been writing. We are still pretty young as a group and have been releasing songs one at a time over the last year or so but now we are super stoked to drop an EP and move the group forward in a really exciting way. Hopefully we will be recording everything in the spring and will be able to play shows in the summer with the new tunes.

What do you hope listeners will discover about you along the way?

• We hope listeners discover that we’re a band that isn’t interested in staying in one lane. Rock is our base, but each song explores a different energy or perspective. Our goal is to keep our music feeling fresh and unpredictable, so listening feels like an experience rather than repetition. I think too many bands often write songs that are very similar to their other songs and we hope to avoid those kinds of creative traps.

Link: Lonely Souls – Fin Talbot (Official Music Video)

Link: Fox 32 Chicago Live performance from October