- 2025-09-23
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MUSIC
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The Favors (FINNEAS & Ashe) Releases Debut Album “The Dream”
Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter FINNEAS and Nashville-based singer-songwriter Ashe's new band The Favors released their debut album “The Dream” on September 19, 2025 via Darkroom Records.
The album comprises 12 tracks, which FINNEAS and Ashe recorded with Ricky Gourmet (guitar), and David Marinelli (drums) in Los Angeles, produced by FINNEAS.
This marks their first collaboration since “Till Forever Falls Apart”, which was featured Ashe's 2021 album “Ashlyn”.
Ashe reached out FINNEAS after the release of her third studio album “Willson”.
Ashe said, “When I reached out, I thought I was done with music. I'd lost the joy in it. Selfishly, I was wondering, 'How do I make this fun again for me? How do I fall back in love with it?' I texted Finneas and said, 'Hear me out. Should we start a band? We make one album, release it, and call it a day'. He responded with the cutest thing ever, 'This solves all of my problems'. I didn't know what problems he had, but I figured I would happily solve them. Six months later, we were recording.”
FINNEAS said, “Ashe and I have known each other for almost nine years. We've been in one another's creative lives for a long time. She came to the table with a conceptual view of this band as a pre-existing entity. I loved it, and I leaned into
it right away.”- Ashe said, “Making our album The Dream was incontrovertibly the dream. Made largely in secret over the course of three weeks of writing and producing, stitched together in about a year and a half. FINNEAS brought in two of his best friends, Ricky [Gourmet] (guitar), and David [Marinelli] (drums), who've now become dear friends of mine. We wrote and arranged the songs together in a living room turned studio in Los Angeles. These are the best memories. Dramatic as it sounds, I've never had more fun making music in my life.”
FINNEAS said, “We had a day of puzzling the tracklist together on a whiteboard. Sometimes when you make an album, in truth, you have, like, two that you'd die for and you kind of structure everything around them. This album, similarly to how I felt with 'HIT ME HARD AND SOFT', I was like, 'How do we get into this? How do we get out of this?', because, when they have all this individual identity, you really want them all to have a great moment.” - FINNEAS and Ashe said of the album, “In some ways it’s been decades in the making. These are the best memories of writing together; unfiltered, no expectations, zero pressure- no one asked us for this, this was for us until we realized we made something unique enough to share. We didn’t set out to make a certain type of record, we just wanted to write. what came of that was an accidental romantic comedy we couldn’t turn off, full of twists and deception and playfulness and waking up naked in basements and realizing the cost of loving is losing. Our hope is you can hear the unmitigated joy we felt making this album in each song. thank you for indulging our harebrained scheme of starting a band... We invite you to listen to what we hope is your new favorite album.”
FINNEAS and Ashe explained some tracks for the album.
“The Little Mess You Made”
FINNEAS: “The last time the world heard us together, it was on such a sweet, tender song and we loved the idea that out the gate you get to hear us fighting for our lives, fighting with each other. I think a first single has to go out into the world as your representative in a kind of a funny way - there are a couple jazzy tunes I love on this album, there's a couple ballads I love, but if they had been the first single, you might be lead to believe that we made a jazz album. This song felt like it encompassed the project in a nice way. An introduction to the favors if you will.”
“The Hudson”
FINNEAS: “Part of the band identity involves these characters who are singing about an experience to each other. It's a musical theater design, and it rarely happens in pop. You can picture two individuals in an apartment overlooking The Hudson singing about the same thing. We asked Alex Lockett, who I am a huge fan of, to direct this video. He captures NYC in a way that I love so much; he wrote up this beautiful concept and Ashe and I got to star in it. Since we live in a world where people read into everything so eagerly, it's important to me to emphasize the difference between our real life friendship and our onscreen performance in this video. Life does not always imitate art.What is real, is our love and respect for each other as friends and collaborators- hope we did you justice, Alex!!”
“Necessary Evils”
Ashe: “I mean, I think I brought I was listening with Simon & Garfunkel on a walk, and I was staying with FINNEAS and his girlfriend, Claudia at the time, and, you know, was up at some god awful hour, and came in, and I was like, I might have another song for us. And sat down at the piano and showed him a bit. And I think it's like, interesting to me to talk about love in a sense of like talking about the cost of it. Like the cost of loving is that you're you're probably gonna have your heart broken whether they leave you or pass away. And I think that there's something really interesting about that. So we kind of wrote from that place, and I think that it's interesting. I'm glad we did it for BBC, because it is my a little bit of my atonement, and that I wanted to cut the song from the record a year ago, and it was so the wrong answer. And so now I feel like I'm kind of making up for like, what a terrible decision that would have been, and I'm so grateful that we kept it in.”
“Times Square Jesus”
FINNEAS: “In Times Square and Hollywood, you have Jesus, the Naked Cowboy, Elmo, or whoever else you walk by and pay your respects to. Even if you don't live a religious life, you're still confronted by religion. When you are, you can't help but think about your own life, regrets, desires, or baggage. If the 'Times Square Jesus' told you to confess, you might think of the person you're secretly in love with.”
“David's Brother”
FINNEAS: “The premise of the song is like, you've kind of let your life fall apart, you've gotten dumped, or you've gotten out of a relationship. And you think, 'Tonight I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna try to make myself feel better', go to a bar. And then you run into the person who broke your heart at the bar. And you think like, 'I should have just stayed home.' And so in the kind of weaving of this story, we were trying to think of like, what bar you might have gone out to. And a lot of this album takes place in New York, and then the few songs take place in LA. And so there's this one bar called 4100 and Ash is from Nashville. And it was like, 'I'm from Nashville. Like, if you don't go to 4100 that's not an interesting name of a bar to say in a song.' And we were like, 'Okay, who's always at this bar?' And then David, who dropped on the whole record, my brother's always at that bar. We all hysterically.”
Ashe: “I mean, I think you can kind of hear in all the songs David's brother in particular, you can kind of tell we're having more fun than we should making an album like you can kind of sense that which is special for us, and hopefully for the listener.”
“Lake George”
FINNEAS: “It has a personal backstory. We went on a family road trip, and we stayed at the house in Lake George where my father had spent all time as a kid. My dad scattered his mother's ashes there. It was old, and there was no electricity, but it was beautiful. The owner eventually sold it. So, I'm superimposing this into a romantic story of a couple going on a trip. Maybe they're not together anymore, and they might have to sell this house where the parents' ashes are. There's a theme of love-and-death.”
Ashe: “We had already finished the album, but we had kinda flirted with the idea of like, 'If there's another song that'd be great'. And when FINNEAS woke up was like 'I got something to show you. What do you think of this?'. And it was the beginnings of 'Lake George'. But I was sitting alone, while he was sleeping, on the piano so it definitely, the chorus melody, lends itself to [be accidentally] my lead. But what I thought was really cool was the way FINNEAS and Aron Forbes were mixing this record as mixing it in a way where we could both take the lead.”
“Home Sweet Home”
FINNEAS: “It nods to a bar on the Lower East Side called 'Home Sweet Home'. There's a loose thread [on the record] of going to L.A. to pursue your dream. You might fail or succeed, but New York is where your past is, your old flame is, and your history is. At the end of the album, you're going back to everything you tried to run away from.” - source : Apple Music
