‘What’s it like to be the lawn?’…Circus Trees gets emotional on new record

Finola McCarthy (bottom left) lays in her driveway seven years ago. As her band’s latest record drops, moments like these have new significance. | photo by Robert McCarthy

It was raining outside and 11-year-old Finola McCarthy was lying on her back in the middle of her driveway.

A moment earlier, her father, Robert, had been talking about the importance of rain. The kids were young back then. 

“What’s it like to be the lawn?” Finola asked. Then she just tried to find out for herself by stepping out to play in the storm.

That was seven years ago.

“There is no wonder to me now why she is such a beautiful songwriter,” Robert said in a recent Facebook post reflecting on that moment. “She always had this incredibly unique perspective on things.”

The lyricist behind post-rock trio Circus Trees, Finola McCarthy has, indeed, long had things to say. With her band’s first full length album ‘Delusions,’ she’s finally singing about those thoughts, her life experience, and the general pain of growing up that she and her bandmates all relate to. 

‘Delusions’ is Circus Trees’ first full length album. | Album art by Dottie Davis and Aaron Garcia

“A lot of the songs on the album are a lot closer to home than the last album,” McCarthy said. “That album was a lot of scenarios in my head. But this is definitely more of something that we can all relate to.” 

Circus Trees is the joint project of sisters Finola, Edmee and Giuliana. Sad, slow, and heavy in sound, they dropped their debut single in 2018 and have grown rapidly since then. 

They released their debut EP, ‘Sakura,’ in March 2019. Sudden players in the niche New England post-rock scene, they earned national attention and secured a spot at Post Fest in Indianapolis just months later. Among other things, they collaborated with local musicians like Carissa Johnson and landed a spot opening for the band Caspian in a show that the coronavirus ultimately cancelled.

“To say it has been humbling would be a massive understatement,” the band wrote in a Facebook post from February. “The love, support, guidance, and embrace that the community has shown is beyond what words can describe.”

Through the meteoric rise, though, Finola says she and her sisters quickly tired of their setlist. They wanted to start from scratch, with a new sound, and emotional vulnerability. 

“We were like, ‘We need new stuff,’” McCarthy said. “...We kind of just took off from there. We were like ‘No slowing down. We’re doing this!”  

McCarthy wrote much of her band’s new record in her bedroom in marathon sessions behind a closed door. Slow going, she said she felt urgency, still, in bringing these songs to their final form. 

“I thought, ‘I need to write these songs now because I know it’s going to take a while before they’re even recorded,” she said. 

Finola McCarthy sits in her bedroom music nook with her pet rabbit, Maurice. McCarthy wrote much of the latest Circus Trees record from this space. | Photo by Samuel Bendix.

McCarthy poured over lyrics and stumbled through guitar parts, eventually recording acoustic demos to show to her sisters. 

Edmee, who plays bass for Circus Trees, is just 14. She got the demos and first listened to them in her ELA class down the road at Marlborough High School. That’s when the magnitude of her own band’s songwriting shift hit her. 

“I was like, ‘Holy shit, this album is going to mean so much more than ‘Sakura,’’” she said.

Wanting to flesh out her instrumental compositions, Edmee jockeyed with Giuliana, who drums for Circus Trees, for practice time in the McCarthys’ basement studio space. 

As Giuliana finally did settle in behind her kit, she confronted Delusions’ lyrical candor on her own terms. 

“I just started sitting back and listening to the lyrics,” she said. “I remember, immediately, I got hit with a wave of sadness. This hits hard.”

So much is changing in Circus Trees’ sound. That truth extends far beyond Finola’s lyrics. 

Formed as a band of younger teenagers, Giuliana and Edmee, in particular, say they’re attacking songs in a more technical, advanced manner than they did just a matter of months ago. 

The time signatures on ‘Delusions’ switch frequently, forcing Giuliana to get creative with her percussion accompaniment. 

Modest but proud, she’s remarked in recent months “I’ve got a lot better...I got good!” 

Edmee, meanwhile, has only been playing bass for two years. She switched to the instrument full time for ‘Delusions,’ however, abandoning the keys she’d played through previous shows. Her sound is now more sludgy, heavy and intricate in places within her band’s new record.

‘Delusions’ hits streaming services on August 17. The lead single off the album, “Wasted Air,” has already dropped. 

It’s a strange time. And this is hardly the climate Circus Trees expected to release these songs into as they first wrote them. 

But as the world looks inward, wrestling with the simultaneous horror of a pandemic, inequality and individual suffering, Circus Trees’ raw emotion may, in fact, reflect the times. 

“What’s it like to be the lawn?”  

Finola McCarthy, ultimately, isn’t sure. 

“What’s it like to the human?” 

Circus Trees has a few ideas about that one. 

It’s hard. It’s emotional. It’s complicated.