Earlier this month, Finneas O'Connell - best known as Billie Eilish's older brother, producer and cowriter - released his second studio album, For Cryin' Out Loud!
O'Connell has since been busy promoting the record, stopping by BBC Radio 1's Live Lounge to perform album highlight Lotus Eater and - as is Live Lounge tradition - deliver a cover song of his choice. O'Connell opted to take on Radiohead's Fake Plastic Trees, a haunting and spare track from the band's breakout 1995 album The Bends.
In his equally sombre rendition, O'Connell swapped out Thom Yorke's acoustic guitar for an upright piano, bringing in a guitar towards the end of the performance to lend the chorus some additional momentum. Taking on Yorke's tricky falsetto passages with admirable gusto, his voice nonetheless prompted a number of comparisons to Coldplay's Chris Martin in the comments. "One of the best covers of this I've heard," said commenter @majorlybad.
Viewers also praised O'Connell's decision to sing without Auto-Tune: "No miming and no pitch correction," said @rome8180. "Refreshing. You can tell there's no pitch correction because some of the high falsetto notes are a little bit flat. And guess what? That's okay. It doesn't lessen the emotional impact. If anything it's better because you can feel the humanity and you know that it's actually being done live."
While O'Connell is busy promoting his latest project and preparing for a series of international shows, his sister Billie is in the middle of her Hit Me Hard And Soft tour, the first that's seen her perform without her co-writer and producer. Despite O'Connell's absence, Eilish told the Los Angeles Times that Finneas will be joining her "as his schedule permits", and that the pair will continue to collaborate in future. “It’s really not the end of anything," she said. "You can’t be in two places at once.”
This isn't the first time Fake Plastic Trees has been covered on BBC Radio 1; back in 2020, Phoebe Bridgers and Arlo Parks joined forces for a similarly stripped-back version of the song, also centred around the piano.
