Finneas O’Connell walks into a minimal, hip East LA coffee shop wearing shades, clutching a bag of what look like green tea cookies and sporting a grin that says, “I won five Grammys two nights ago. How about you?” Billie Eilish’s older brother and one-man hit-making machine shakes my hand, sits down and does a thing that seems to be something of a family habit: he slurps out his Invisalign teeth-straightening braces. Now, if you know anything about Finneas, his absurdly talented sister or, indeed, the now famous beginning to their multiplatinum-selling debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, you’ll get the reference and the near-comic absurdity of this happening. If not, well, frankly, where the hell have you been?
Two days after Finneas and Billie’s clean sweep at the Grammys – not least his win for Best Producer, of which he is charmingly most proud – we’re here to talk about how planet earth feels now that his career, life and, well, everything has gone interstellar. Talking to the 22-year-old about his beginnings and his trajectory, his new solo project (the EP Blood Harmony, released late last year), his working partnership with his green-haired sibling and the work they did on the new James Bond theme song, “No Time To Die”, one thing is clear: this is no ordinary artist, his success no blip, his dominance no fluke. Get used to saying his name out loud: his care, his commitment and his musical curiosity will ensure Finneas is around for quite some time to come.
GQ: So tell us, how does it feel to win five Grammys?
Finneas O’Connell: [Laughs.] I definitely didn’t dare to expect it. If you’re thinking about all the possibilities of your life, there are extreme negatives, which you hope don’t happen, and extreme positives, which you just aren’t willing to think about because you think you’ll jinx it. Look, I have never thought about winning five Grammys. How could I? I am not a very superstitious person, but I do believe in mental preparation. So, in regards to the Grammys, I didn’t expect the worst, but neither did I ever think in my wildest dreams... Put it this way: I was expecting medium-to-poor results.
Did you and Billie have any speeches prepared?
You know, it’s funny, I grew up watching the Grammys, I grew up watching the Oscars, and at the Oscars, to my knowledge, it seems like the speeches are 100 per cent planned and prepared. It seems like every actor reads from a piece of paper, or learns his or her lines, largely because they have so many people to thank – the cast, the crew, agents, and so on. People in the music industry just don’t seem to do that – at all. The reaction seems always very genuine; I know ours was. That being said, the same week of the Grammys, I was given another award – a Billboard Award for songwriting – and I did write a speech. As I was reading it out, however, I thought, “This is really stale.” I was going to write at least one speech for the Grammys, you know, just in case, but in the end I didn’t. Billie and I discussed who we were going to thank in the car, I think, on the way, but of course we forgot so many names.
What was going through your minds up there?
Well, I wanted to make a point up there, actually. Usually at the Grammys, whomever wins you always see this quorum of producers and songwriters all take the stage with the artist. It’s usually about 15 or 20 people and it’s often the same 15 people you’ve seen up there before, all slapping fives, shoulder hugging one another. It’s very industry. When we won and were up there I was trying to send a message, I suppose. Those other guys are up there for a reason, don’t get me wrong, they’re incredible. But what Billie and I did is we just stuck to our guns and made this record – on our own. And if you’re a kid out there making your records on your own, in your bedroom, all this is now in the realm of possibility for you too.
At one point, after the third or forth Grammy win, Billie and you both looked kinda embarrassed at the haul.
Billie certainly has that look down. And it’s all genuine. She was truly dumbfounded. We both were.
Have you always felt like something of an outsider in the industry?
To be honest, I’ve found so many more friends in the music industry than people I disagree with. I certainly haven’t been made to feel like an outsider. I do think there’s something unconventional about the way Billie and I work. Even when I was in the process of making When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, I remember driving around in a car with a friend of mine playing him “Bad Guy” for the first time. He was like, “So there’s like no chorus? At all?” And I was like, “Well, I guess not.” But it wasn’t done to be different. I just never thought of the structure of the song that way. It’s easy to analyse something after the fact.
Yet your production work for Billie, for the new James Bond record, for other artists you have worked with is very analytical in its approach – would you agree?
“Yeah, it's interesting. Do you know the jazz artist Jacob Collier? He’s brilliant. He's about my age, maybe a little older. He wrote an essay the other day about just this topic. He knows a lot about music theory, and he wrote an essay about whether he feels it's important to know music theory or not - as a musician. His conclusion was no, he I doesn’t think it is important to know music theory necessarily because this won’t make you a better musician. I take this view. I am just fascinated by music and I want to know how to identify all the things I love about it; to me music theory is like learning another language and then being able to explain how much you love something more clearly. I’m just obsessed with music i guess. I don't analyze songs because I think it will make me a better songwriter, I just do it out of sheer curiosity. Billie and I, for example, don't let theory inform how we write a song.”
In what way?
“Okay this is a weird analogy maybe, but think of making music like painting a house. You started painting it and you realize the color that you thought was a pretty solid red was like, totally purple. And you're like, “Wow, might have a purple house here!” When we wrote the album, Billie and I could see it wasn’t the colour we were expecting, but we choose to do just keep on painting anyway. And I think a lot of other people just go, “Oh no! This isn’t what we planned!” And they go back to the drawing board, back to Home Depot, and they grab a different paint swatch altogether and they try again. Does that make any sense? We just want our music to come alive, and take shape rather than fit into any preconceived box or idea. It evolves.”
What do you remember most of writing that first record with Billie?
“Hard work. People say it took only a year and a half but that’s not counting, you know, the rest of lives prior to that. Although, of course, writing together, working together, you know we’d never really done that before... We’d done the EP, sure, but before that we’d only ever made one song at a time. With the EP, suddenly we have to make like six songs, and it was stressful for me. And then doing the album; it feels like going from a short film to a feature length blockbuster. Not only do you need song ideas, and cool production but also you need to take in the bigger view; songs that work together, compliment one another and so on. Songs that don’t cancel one another out. For the EP we were scared and young and not as confident ourselves in what we were doing. At first we rented out a studio space near Eagle Rock [East Los Angeles] because we thought it would help us focus. It didn't really help us focus! It sucked. So we went back to working in our bedrooms.”
Why couldn’t you work together in a studio?
“I think it was the clock in, clock out, mentality of those places; this didn’t work for us. I'm a big believer in the benefit of a home studio. You're sitting there and maybe you don’t know the next line. So you go outside for a second, maybe. Make a sandwich. Play with the dog. Or watch an episode of The Office, whatever. And then it clicks, you run back into the room, and you’ve got it. It’s not like your creativity is on the clock. People always seem to make a big deal over where Billie and I wrote the album; like that bedroom is a sacred space or something. The whole point is that there was nothing special about it! That we could make music anywhere. Well, anywhere that’s not a professional, rented out studio. I think when you're driving your car somewhere, parking and unlocking the studio door, going in and turning all the lights on and firing everything up, sometimes even that much effort, that 20 minutes, you're like, burned out. So that project, the EP, was really kind of a harrowing experience. It also made us feel like maybe making an album would be impossible. We realised how hard it really is. But finally, just by sort of the fact that we got older, we got better at collaborating, and making the album became, well easier. We became much more trusting of one another, creatively. We were much more articulate with our emotions.”
What you and Billie have is a working partnership. A creative allegiance. But you are also siblings. You must fight. And bicker. Disgree. How did you feel your way through all that stuff to come out the otherwise so supportive of one another?
“Billie has some very strong opinions, not least with visuals. Which is exactly as I want it. I think people superimpose their own relationship with their own family on ours when they think about me and my sister. They say either one of two things: they either go, that's so cool, or they go, I could never do that with my sibling. And I totally get that because everyone's relationships are different and very personal. I think more and more the important thing is: we love each other. We are best friends because we're siblings. But separate from that, we just have a really good working relationship. And it's very possible that we could have one and not the other in either direction. We could not like each other as much as people but work really well together, or we could not work very well together but love one another as people. We seem to have both right now. So I'm excited as we go into making the second album - which, thank god we’re doing, as otherwise I’d be in a complete state of panic, especially after Grammys night. Just, you know, the pressure and expectation without having done anything would be too much to take!”
How far into the new record with Billie are you?
“Put it this way: we have broken ground. We have the shovel. We have hit soil. And we’ve started digging. But it’s only a very shallow grave at the moment.”
Tell me about your own solo record, “Blood Harmony”.
“Yeah it’s gone really well. I was nervous to begin with but I take that as a sign that I’m pushing myself in the right direction. Touring wise I’m not doing a solo tour so much as hopping on a bunch of festival dates that I was already planning with Billie, which is, sort of technically proficient because it's you're sharing the same festival crew, you're already there for the same day. Everybody's happier because my crew gets a pay bump because they're doing two sets that day; it feels financially responsible. Actually the record is picking up again in terms of numbers: there’s this one's called “Let's Fall In Love For The Night’ and it's doing the best it's ever done, even though it's like a year and a half old now. I'm thrilled about that because although I’m really excited about the batch of solo songs I'm working on, I’m just less far into the album than I should be. My fantasy would be that I’d be almost done, but in reality I’m only half way through.”
People often talk about your overnight success, but that’s simply not true is it?
Well, no before all this, there were two things that were really formative for me. I was on a TV show called Glee. I mean, I was on the real tail end of that show; it was already way past its peak. But still, for me aged 17 landing something like that was a big deal. It taught me a lot about being part of something so mainstream, something that you didn’t actually have much control over. Right now, that is not really the fantasy. It's not tremendously fulfilling, for me, to have someone else go, ‘Here are the dance moves. Here's the song, go sing it. Here are the clothes you have to wear.’ Don’t get me wrong Glee was a really fun process, and there were a lot of really talented writers and actors on that show but I think it made me reevaluate what I wanted out of all this. Did I want to just be in the music industry? In any shape or form? Would I have said ‘Yes!’ to being in a boy band, simply because I was desperate to be in the room, in the industry? Yes! Of course! But Glee made me realise that I could allow myself to have more direction. And now Billie and I check one another: do we really want to be doing this or that? Do we actually like it? And if we don’t, it stops.”
Congratulations on the James Bond song: No Time To Die. Do people care about James Bond in the States?
[laughs] Well I think people in the States care about Bond now. Okay, maybe specifically Billie and I really care about Bond. We love it. Always have done. Bond is the ultimate franchise. What Barbara [Broccoli] has done with Daniel Craig and the past few movies; it’s incredible. Have you ever met Broccoli? She’s not as you might imagine. She’s not interested in making a wrong move with her movies, if you know what I am saying. We were blown away to be given a shot and truly respect her vision for the whole package.”
How did you land the Bond gig? It’s all very secretive, no?
“Well, it’s not like Barbara calls you up and you are asked to write a James Bond song. You write the song, and then they tell you whether it's going to work. It’s not yours until it’s approved for the movie, in some ways. I get it; and it adds to a certain amount of, let’s say, excitement. And pressure. I would be the same: I would never, as a director, say to an artist that they can write whatever they like for my $100 million movie. It’s more, ‘Well if you write the perfect song, it’s yours.” Luckily, she liked our ideas.”
How do you even begin writing such a thing?
“We wrote No Time to Die on a tour bus. Specifically, in the bunks of our tour bus. We were given the first 20 pages of the script. I guess that’s up to the point when the song comes in during the movie, right? That’s how all the Bond films open up. So we were able to read the first 20 pages, which was obviously incredible. It gave us such a good steer and such insight into where the song would fall, and the tone. It makes it easier than having to write the whole song based on the entire movie; or in fact none of the movie. So Billie and I wrote the song, recorded the demo, sent it to them and then we finished it in London with Hans Zimmer doing the orchestral arrangements and also Johnny Marr from The Smiths. I mean, James Bond? Hans Zimmer? Johnny Marr? Mind blowing.”
Did you consider changing the title?
I always think with a James Bond song, it should be the title. I know there’s the Jack White one, “Another Way To Die’ but I couldn't write a song called, for example, Quantum of Solace. I couldn’t! It’s a really cool title of a Bond movie, but a really hard song title to write to. Yeah, we lucked out because No Time to Die is a great song title. Unlike Quantum of Solace. Or Casino Royale. Not very evocative song titles. Although so much of Bond gets over analyzed to a certain extent. I know he’s part of your heritage over in Britain, intertwined with the culture and so on - but also, James Bond is just the coolest fictional character of all time. Right? And all those flaws he has, they just enrich the character. They make Bond more human. I think it was Skyfall where they really tested him; where we really got to see Craig's Bond in full flight. It was astonishing. And ultimately that’s all story telling; so James Bond was a perfect brief for me and Billie in many ways. The brief of our lives.”
Wow. I can’t wait to see it.
Me neither, dude.
Blood Harmony is out now.
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