Foster The People: Good Mourning Sunshine Tour

Mark Foster didn’t show up at The Church, his old friend and collaborator Paul Epworth’s studio in North London, expecting to dive full force into a new Foster the People album. He arrived without any expectations at all, just excited to be traveling internationally for the first time in a couple years, and eager to reconnect with Epworth after almost a decade. He didn’t realize at the time that Paradise State of Mind was about to be born, its title track written and recorded hours after he set foot in the door. It was spring of 2022, and Foster had accompanied his partner on a work trip to the U.K. He knew he’d be there a couple months, and he was happy to have no real plans. It had been five years since Sacred Hearts Club, the band’s previous album, and so many intense things had happened in the world at large, and in Foster’s world in particular, that he hadn’t really felt ready to jump back into the fray of public life. Musical ideas had visited him, but none of them felt inviting. “I thought long and hard about what I wanted to make,” he says. “I almost made a punk record, and just went straight at everything. But I kept pausing because the energy didn’t feel quite right, and it wasn’t making me feel any better. I started thinking, ‘How can I make a record that is healing for me, and maybe for people who listen to it, too?’” The trip to the U.K. brought a fresh perspective, and a chance to look at that creative puzzle in the company of trusted collaborators. And The Church itself felt like a welcoming nest – this beautiful, historic structure that had been converted from a proper house of worship to a more metaphorical one in 1980 by Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart, and which had previously hosted recordings by Bob Dylan and Radiohead and Adele. Foster entered the studio with nothing and started building from the ground up, that very first day. He grabbed a bass and started to lay down a groove, Epworth jumped on the drums, and singer-songwriter Jack Peñate, who had…