At 27, Finneas O’Connell has achieved almost everything it is possible to achieve in pop music. If you measure achievements by Grammys (x10), Academy Awards (x2), number ones (US and UK), album sales (10 million+), earworms (duh), his songwriting/production partnership with his sister Billie Eilish, 22, is peerless.
And yet the pressures on the O’Connell siblings are of an entirely different amplitude. Eilish (that’s actually her middle name) is out there on stage, in the press, on the socials, hitting the notes, spilling her guts. Finneas (as he is known) is almost always by her side – but he’s crouched over a laptop or strumming a guitar, providing the cover as his little sister draws the fire. He’s aware it’s the easier side of the bargain.
“Sometimes, I’ve walked offstage with Billie and said: “That was a fun show!” And she’s said: “Really? I was working really hard the whole time.’” He laughs. As the frontperson “… you’re focused, you’re concentrated, you’re trying to hit the notes, you’re engaging, you’re looking them in the eyes, somebody passes out and you’ve got to deal with it – it can be really challenging. I have a lot of respect for it. It’s a way harder role than being the guy in the back playing the keyboard.”
Which makes Finneas’s latest flex rather daunting. With his new solo album, For Cryin’ Out Loud!, he is now centre stage. He’s fronted bands before, in high school. But it was only when he handed one of his songs to his then-14-year-old little sister that lightning struck.
Finneas is speaking to me from the room where it happens in the home he shares with his influencer girlfriend, Claudia Sulewski, in the LA suburb of Los Feliz. He’s wearing a baggy T-shirt from an Australian koala sanctuary, a faintly 1990s centre-parting and the ease of someone who maybe doesn’t have so much to prove. The only subjects off limits are Billie’s sexuality – and to be fair, I’m not sure I would want to sit around discussing my sister’s sex life either – and US politics. Finneas and Billie released a short video last month endorsing Kamala Harris and Tim Walz and that’s all that needs to be said on the subject.
Finneas proves charming, engaging company – he’s very much a walking my dogs and hanging with my buddies kind of chill LA dude – and is fairly even-handed about the trials of hyper-fame in the social media age. He used to be pretty prickly, he admits. Now when someone shows him videos of himself just a few years ago, he barely agrees with anything that guy says. Likewise, his first album, the misleadingly named Optimist, was a rather angsty affair, recorded solo in his bedroom during lockdown (“gloomy, on edge, and disappointingly hollow” was one verdict). But For Cryin’ Out Loud! is surprisingly breezy, full of cute rhymes, sunny hooks and relatable situations. “Maybe she’s a late bloomer / Or maybe it’s a fake rumor,” he sings on Cleats, which is about a girl he fancied when he was 13 who turned out to be gay.
He recorded almost all of it live, in a room, with his musician mates, a fairly archaic way of working in an age when most music is made in bedrooms with computers. But that was a deliberate strategy. “The thing I didn’t want to do that I did last time was to be lonely,” he says. “I was just alone in a room for a month making the Optimist album. And I thought, ‘I just can’t keep doing this.’ I thought it would probably be better if I had a bunch of my friends around helping me.”
Hence the playfulness in the tunes – almost Beatlesesque in places (“my number one influence, always and forever”). He swears that 90 per cent of the lyrics were sketched out there in the studio too, which might be a way of forestalling any deep analysis. But Starf***er catches the ear, an account of a “narcissist” who left him because he wasn’t cool enough. Name names? “I don’t think the person it is about will ever know it is about them,” he laughs. “I didn’t want to dox them. But it’s not isolated to one person, it’s a thing I see a lot, people who create an artifice around who they are as a person. It’s a character people are playing.”
He also says he is a little over the trend for hyper-specific lyrics – singer-songwriters namechecking their antidepressants and the like. “I’m more drawn to music that’s a little on the ambiguous side. There’s a lot of music in the last 10 years that’s been like, ‘You walked me home down this street at this time of day and we stopped at 7-Eleven and bought this…’ Whereas when I listen to a great Beatles song or a great Feist song, say, it’s coming from a very real personal experience but it also has a broad stroke that allows me as the listener to hear myself in the song. That’s my goal.”
For all the charms of For Cryin’ Out Loud!, it’s unlikely it will reach the kind of audience that Billie has with her latest album, Hit Me Hard and Soft (even if there are enough superfans to guarantee a warm reception). Still, after almost a decade of winning awards – he and Billie are the youngest people to win two Oscars – you can bank a few achievements. “What you have to be careful of is that all of the achievement feels really nice and there’s kind of an impulse to get addicted to it.” He recalls that when Billboard first introduced the Hot 100 Songwriters and Producers chart in 2019, he was number one for five weeks. “That was f***ing crazy. But I remember thinking: hey, you won’t be number one soon. That doesn’t take away from the fact that you were. It’s not your goal to do this all the time. You don’t need to invent a new way to feel bad about yourself. ”
When I ask which of his career achievements mean the most to him, he says: “I think I’m most proud of my relationship with my sister and my parents.” How on earth do they get on so well? “We just really love each other,” he says. “We’re not super-far in age – she’s 22 and I’m 27. We’ve always just had a lot of respect for each other. Whenever I talk to people who have contentious relationships with their siblings, they often have nothing in common… but Billie and I have this big common ground which is music. We both love making music, performing music, listening to music. And I also just really like hanging out with her. She’s funny and talented and kind and thoughtful. If she’s coming over that day, I’m like, ‘Great, I get to hang out with my sister.’”
Their parents, Maggie Baird and Patrick O’Connell, clearly did a lot right. It can’t have hurt that Maggie is herself a musician and actor and ran songwriting classes. One early prompt for the children was to write a song from the perspective of a character in a movie they love. Finneas says: “I had a computer in my bedroom. I was trying to learn how to produce music for a friend of mine and then I asked Billie if she’d be interested in singing on some songs and it was all just very spontaneous.”
He still feels that brotherly protectiveness. “I have more of a feeling of protectiveness towards her than I do myself. I want to defend her more than I do myself. It’s a powerful impulse. It’s a strange experience. You know your close friend or your sibling or your parents so intimately. And then there’s this whole universe of people who have these weird preconceptions. People can have such extreme reactions. You’re like: ‘I know this person! They’re a sweetheart.’ It feels so unfair.” And yes he does see what people say: “We’re all on the same internet.”
As for his own music, well, making music with a bunch of your musician friends is clearly a reward in itself. And way more fun than going to the Oscars. “You have a say in what music you make. You don’t have a say in whether you win an award. It’s much better to fall in love with the thing you have control over.”
