Renaissance man
As one half of the decade's greatest songwriting partnership, Finneas O'Connell has become a producer rewriting the rules of pop. Ahead of the release of his second solo record, he tells Felicity Martin about the simple joys of playing in a band again.
Finneas O’Connell wants you – yes, you – to play music with your friends. “I recommend it to anybody, even if you never make music professionally at all. Jamming in some capacity is so much fun,” he says.
The singer-producer is dialling in from his home studio in LA, keyboards stacked behind him, while one of his two rescue dogs, a miniature pinscher named Mousse, sits on his lap. For his second studio album as Finneas, For Cryin’ Out Loud!, the Grammy-winning producer stepped away from working completely solo and instead invited a bunch of his close pals to form a band.
“It was so nostalgic,” he says. “It was a treat to be just bouncing off of each other, like you're on a high school soccer team or something. You're making jokes and trying to make the best thing possible.” His cohort included Miles Morris of the LA band Bad Suns, Ricky Gourmet and David Marinelli, the latter of which Finneas sparred with aged 13 at a Battle of the Bands contest. The result, then, is more of a live feel than his debut, 2021’s Optimist – more guitars than software plugins. “I was outside of my producer bag – a bit like forcing yourself to brush your teeth with your other hand,” he admits. “It was a fun exercise to not be doing all sorts of crazy sound effects and stuff, because I love doing that. But I don't want to be the guy that only does one thing.”
To make the album, the vibe had to be right: Finneas used scents and lit candles to set the mood – Lola James Harper and Le Labo ones, he says. “We have such a funny relationship with smell, it can calm us down and make us relaxed. I like the way it can make an environment feel more comfortable. When a room either has no smell, or just the smell of the carpet or paint dried on the wall, [to me] that’s sterile.”
Daylight was another important factor for him. “I like to be able to see what time it is outside. I find it depressing if I'm in a studio that's got no windows, which is funny, because obviously studios have no windows because they're better for soundproofing. But I'll take the trade.
‘For crying out loud’ is a phrase that can be an expression of annoyance or frustration. You could also take it in a literal sense, as some might when listening to the more emotional tracks on the LP, which flits between longing ballads and upbeat pop tracks. “It’s a saying I’ve said my whole life,” Finneas says. “I thought that the whole album had a kind of a desperate, exasperated feeling to it.” For the past six years, he’s been in a relationship with influencer Claudia Sulewski – meaning this isn’t a heartbreak record, but some tracks are lyrically personal, while others are written from imagined perspectives, or with friends’ scenarios in mind.
Some tracks happened spontaneously. “Everybody would come up with different ideas, day of,” he says. “I had a notebook of little lyric ideas that I liked, but every day we'd start from scratch. My favourite songs were often the ones that came out of nowhere, just that day, everybody making stuff up on the spot.”
With the more personal writing, I ask, is it difficult mining your inner feelings for lyrics? “Sometimes there’s the person you think you are, and the person you really are,” he says. “[It’s about] letting yourself be vulnerable and open and being like, well, I'd like to be this person who's very confident and super romantic and self-effacing. And it's like, maybe in reality I'm a person who’s a bit more insecure, or easily hurt by a comment. I think it’s important to be a little more honest about who you really are.”
“You're going to be the most vulnerable if you have the most trust, [and] everybody in that room I trusted a lot,” he continues. “Writing songs like ‘Family Feud’ or ‘Same Old Story’... being in a room full of people that I feel safe around is what allows me to write those kinds of songs.”
In contrast to its name, "Family Feud" is a moving tribute to his little sister turned global megastar. Over gently plucked strings, he sings about their close sibling bond, their almost-shared eye colour, and Billie’s struggles with fame: “And you’re only 22 / and the world is watching you / judging everything you do.”
The track wasn’t necessarily intended for the album. It started out as a song that, quite sweetly, Finneas wrote just for her. “It's kind of an accident that it's even on there,” he says. “If I had written it and she'd said, ‘I love this, but I don't want you to put it out,’ I would never have put it out. She was very kind about it, and she was happy that it would see the light of day.”
Aged 22, Finneas was starting to work on Billie’s second album Happier Than Ever, a record that paired the duo’s confidently understated sound with woozy, cinematic flourishes. “I remember that age vividly, and putting this out at the same time as she’s starting her first tour without me, it’s a bunch of firsts,” he says. “We’ve done everything completely together up until this point. And I would still play every show with her, if I had a time machine and I could be in two places at once. I would love to do that.”
“It’s a combination,” he continues, “of a feeling of wanting to be protective over a person, but also recognising that they’re their own person, that they’re gonna go through life and figure everything out on their own, because that's the way we all do. It’s a reconciliation with a lack of control. When you love somebody, you want to make sure that everything goes perfectly for them all the time. And I think it’s kind of making peace with the idea that I don’t have control over that.”
Album track "2001" was named after Stanley Kubrick’s cult 2001: A Space Odyssey, but Finneas notes that it also happened to be the year of Billie’s birth. “I didn't do myself a favour with that title,” he says. “It was a metaphor about being on the ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ and not really understanding somebody, but then everyone was like, ‘Oh, the year Billie was born?’ So, you know, lessons.”
"By virtue of having done it this time, I'm likely to then make a record in a different way the next time, because that'll be another change."
His bedroom-production technique with his sibling has been well-documented, with Finneas using Logic Pro and the Fender Acoustasonic to create gloomy synth-pop and low-slung ballads, as well as on the bassier moments of 2019’s When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? Recently, Finneas revealed in an interview that he’d made Billie a production studio of her own, prompting farfetched news headlines that the pair were separating. “She had a little setup back in 2017, and she made the end of ‘bad guy’ in her room, as a demo,” he says. “It sounded sick and then, basically, she got busy. She got super focused on being an artist, and spent all this time performing and making music videos and stuff. I just had this feeling that if she had the time, she’d be a really brilliant producer. So I’m excited that she’s getting more into it.”
He says it’s too early to pinpoint a production style of sorts, but “she’s got one of the best ears for harmony that I've ever heard. She does the most beautiful vocal arrangements.”
Finneas’ sister is just one of a long list of collaborators that he’s worked with, including Demi Lovato, Tate McRae, Selena Gomez, Camila Cabello, and even Ringo Starr. How does his approach to his solo output differ from all this collaboration? “I'm way more critical of my own voice,” he answers. “I don't think I'm as good a singer as Billie by a million miles. So she does a vocal take or two, and I’m like, ‘Wow, that's amazing!’ you know? Then I do a vocal take or 200 and I'm like, I could still do better. It’s more challenging to record myself, for sure.”
Where much of Billie and Finneas’s sound transmits a darkly soft energy, there’s a clubbier vibe thudding through the outro to ‘L’Amour De Ma Vie’ on this year’s Hit Me Hard And Soft. Where did that come from? “The short answer is going out dancing,” he replies. “I feel like I hadn’t been to the quote unquote club before 2022. I started going and experiencing music that you might have heard on a playlist or in a car, in a different way. You have this different appreciation for it.” He praises the “very fierce” COBRAH and Charli xcx, whose rework of "Guess" he co-produced alongside The Dare, as favourites (“it’s been such a treat to see her take over the world this summer,” he tells me).
Last year Finneas mentioned sending SOPHIE’s ‘Ponyboy’ to director Alfonso Cuarón as a reference, and Optimist track "The 90s" has a distinctly 100 gecs or hyperpop influence to it. Finneas distances himself from the style: “There was a bit of the Internet dunking on me for that song, like, ‘Oh, he's trying to copy this thing.’ I felt like I learned my lesson there, but I have a lot of appreciation for it as a genre.”
Nostalgia runs through much of For Cryin’ Out Loud!, like on the late ‘90s pop-referencing single "Cleats", and not just for its Honey, I Shrunk The Kids-style video featuring an iPod. With reverb-laden drums opening "What’s It Gonna Take To Break Your Heart?" and Spandau Ballet-like guitar licks, and ‘90s indie style strums on "Little Window", it’s reflective of someone with a wide musical knowledge, although Finneas is coy about naming specific influences when I ask.
I’m requested not to ask him about US politics, although he and his sister recently put out a joint statement on Instagram endorsing Kamala: “We are voting for Harris-Walz. The choice is clear.” The comments underneath the post are rabid in their support of Trump, accusing the duo of being ‘paid’ to make their video (anyone who has followed either of them will know that they’ve been consistently outspoken on things such as women’s reproductive rights, gender equality and the climate crisis). It’s a taste of the “world watching” and “judging” his sister that he sings about on "Family Feud" – and an example of how frustrating that endless scrutiny must be.
He might not be able to get in a time machine to join Billie on all her Hit Me Hard And Soft dates, but Finneas is set to take For Cryin’ Out Loud! on a world tour with the friends and collaborators who shaped it. “It’s a crowded stage, but it’s really fun,” he says. “In high school, that was kind of all I knew in terms of making music,” he says about the band formation. “So this was a return to form in that sense. That said, probably by virtue of having done it this time, I'm likely to then make a record in a different way the next time, because that'll be another change.”
Get the Best Fit take on the week in music direct to your inbox every Friday
