Finneas O’Connell is absolutely fine with being the second most famous person in his family. Believe him when he says that he has no wish to take first place.
“Billie is so famous that people that aren’t fans of hers at all are taking photos of her while she’s walking through a park so that they can show their friend in a photo that they saw her,” he says. “Stuff like that, or paparazzi or articles, just make your life way harder.”
“Billie” is Billie Eilish Baird O’Connell, the world’s biggest pop star and also Finneas’s younger sister and collaborator. He co-wrote and produced both her 2019 debut, When We All Fall Asleep,Where Do We Go? and this year’s Happier Than Ever. A one-person pop factory, he has found time, too, to record his own solo LP, Optimist, which is released October 15th.
Imagine if my goal had been the Grammys or something ... You'd end up not enjoying your whole career
“They did sort of [overlap],” he says of Optimist and Happier Than Ever. “We were further along on her album. And I was writing these songs on the weekends and at night when she’d go home.”
Finneas is more than Eilish’s producer. He’s her creative equal when they’re working together: her best moments blend her unique songwriting persona – if there is a goth version an eye-roll emoji she is it – and his left-of-centre musicianship.
So it’s a surprise how different Optimist sounds. In place of the propulsive spookiness that is an Eilish hallmark, the project wears a big aching heart on its sleeve. You could spend a lifetime untangling Eilish’s baroque lyrics. On Optimist Finneas tells you exactly what he’s singing about.
“That’s definitely the goal,” he says. “Even down to the mix of the vocals. I want everyone to hear every lyric that I’m saying as I sing it. Because of the story I’m trying to tell with lyrics.”
He’s a lot to get off his chest. The Chris Martin-esque single A Concert Six Months For Now is steeped in ripped-from-his-journals heartache. It recalls an incident in which he bought tickets to see Fleet Foxes with his girlfriend, only for the relationship to end before the band made it to town.
But of course what the song is really about is solitude and disappointment and watching helplessly as your horizons narrow. And so it speaks perfectly to our present moment: the “Covid-ness” of the track is explicitly acknowledged in the video, in which Finneas croons to an empty Hollywood Bowl.
The Kids Are Dying, meanwhile, sees O’Connell, who occasionally sounds like a one-man Death Cab For Cutie, cautioning against mistaking short-live outrage for meaningful action (“I tried saving the world but then I got bored”). Most striking of all is The 90s, Finneas’ eulogy for the carefree days before social media, a halcyon epoch the 24-year-old is just about old enough remember.
His sister has stated that she’s stopped reading the messages under her Instagram posts because people’s thoughts about her – positive and negative – are too much for one individual to process. Finneas feels likewise, as he makes clear in his lyrics. “Sometimes I think about the 90s/I know that everyone romanticised it,”. “But you could sign me up/ For a world without the internet.”
He goes on to complain about “how easy they can find me … just by looking up my mom’s address”. The impression conveyed is of someone who become famous much too quickly and is still trying to get their head around it. And that social media has made that process all that more tortuous.
“I can’t make the internet go away,” Finneas shrugs. “I mean, obviously there’s nothing I can do about that. The Pandora’s Box is open. And of course we wouldn’t have a career without the internet. You can appreciate the good of it. And you can try your best to make yourself not subject yourself to the bad of it.”
And yet the negative aspects of online culture are hard to ignore, he continues. “It’s important to protect your mental health from places like Twitter mentions,” he says. “People are willing to say anonymously meaner things than they’ll ever say to you on a street. I find it more and more important to ignore the internet.”
Finneas was born in Los Angeles in 1997, the son of actress and screenwriter Maggie Baird and actor Patrick O’Connell. Billie came along four and a half years later. Home-schooled by his parents, Finneas started writing songs aged 12. As a teenager he dabbled in acting and, at 18, landed the part of ukulele-strumming gay troubadour Alistair in the final season of musical drama Glee.
“I’m glad it was the last season,” he says. “I would never have left. If that show had been six seasons I would never had done two seasons and thought, ‘I’m gonna quit’. So I’m very glad it ended because it let me go off and write music.”
Optimist represents the next chapter of his career. And yet, regardless of how it performs, it is fated to be overshadowed by Happier Than Ever. Eilish’s second LP is a blockbuster, with 60 million streams and quarter of a million physical sales and counting.
It is also a fantastic listen that avoids what Americans would call the “sophomore slump”. That’s impressive considering it engages with the potentially massively dreary matter of the downside of celebrity. Artists since the dawn of pop have complained about the burdens of wealth and fame. Eilish and Finneas somehow make this over-done subject matter fresh and engaging.
“I’m glad people like it,” says Finneas, adding that the fact the world was in lockdown through the recording process took the pressure off to an extent. “We had such a dream scenario to make it in. We were hanging out. And had no deadline, had no pressure. We just sort of made it until we felt like we were done. So it was fun.”
One of Happier Than Ever’s themes is body-shaming and how Eilish has been put on trial for refusing to accede to the patriarchal trope of baring flesh for the cameras. You’ll come across the occasional online comments about Finneas’ (admittedly very impressive) quiff. But in general he’s been spared the death ray of prurient attention directed at his sister. He must be struck by the double standards.
Being as famous as Billie is or, you know, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Beyoncé, Jay Z-level famous – that all seems like a drag
“It’s completely insane. It’s crazy that we’ve come so far and we still have so far left to go,” he says of body-shaming in pop. “It’s a total double standard. I shake my head at it. It seems so primitive. It was the same stuff we were doing in the 1950s.”
His sister’s first hit was Ocean Eyes. It was also the moment Finneas came into his own as a producer. He had written the song, which is about an ex, for his scrappy emo band, The Slightlys. How different his life might be had he not suggested Billie try her hand at singing it and had they not uploaded the recording to SoundCloud on November 18th, 2015.
“I wrote it and my band was playing it at shows. And it wasn’t sounding very good,” he says. “And I was like, ‘Billie, you should sing this song’. And she just made it sound incredible immediately. And that was when I knew I’d done the right thing. ‘Oh this is exactly how I want this to sound’. ”
Finneas never expected to become famous when he started writing songs with his sister in their ramshackle family home in LA’s Highland Park. And when he reflects on their success, it is with an air of disbelief.
“I set out with pretty small goals,” he says. “Although they didn’t seem small at the time. There is a venue in Los Angeles called the Fonda Theatre. It’s 1,200 people, which is a perfectly large amount of people. I swear to God, the biggest goal I had was to open there for a band. That was my goal. And I played three nights at the Fonda with Billie in 2018.”
He feels that by keeping his ambitions comparatively modest – to be the opening act at a venue the same size of Vicar Street – he’s found a way to be pleasantly surprised by everything he and his sister have achieved. All the things that have followed – the Grammy sweep for When We All Fall Asleep …, writing the theme for Bond movie No Time to Die – have come as wonderful surprises.
“Imagine if my goal had been the Grammys or something,” he says. “You’d end up not enjoying your whole career. I would encourage anyone in any field, but especially music, to set yourself really small goals. If I had written on my bucket list, ‘some day you are going to write a James Bond theme song or play Red Rocks or the Hollywood Bowl..’? Well, I’ve gotten to do that. What am I supposed to be do now – quit?”
The way he sees it, he has the best of both words. He appreciates his success. And he’s thrilled to have won Grammys and written for Bond. He also appreciates having the freedom to walk through a park without being mobbed. And no matter what happens with Optimist that’s how he would like life to continue.
“The spotlight is fun in smaller doses. Being as famous as Billie is or, you know, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Beyoncé, Jay Z-level famous – that all seems like a drag,” he says.
“That doesn’t seem like very much fun at all.”
Optimist by Finneas is released October 15th
