Finneas O’Connell likes to disappear. A tendency toward self-effacement may seem like an unexpected character trait for the youngest person ever to win a Producer of the Year Grammy, a prize that has pride of place in Finneas’s living room, alongside the other nine he’s earned for his work with his sister, Billie Eilish. But seated at the dining table in his LA home, the 27-year-old musician elaborates. “When you hear a song and you’re like, ‘Wow, who made this?’ That’s what I’m trying to do when I write,” he says. “He can really tap into the other person,” says frequent collaborator Ashe, née Ashlyn Rae Willson. “He is a phenomenal listener.”
But pulling a Houdini wasn’t an option for Finneas’s second solo album, For Cryin’ Out Loud! The LP (on sale next week), a collection of ballads and breezy bops, puts Finneas squarely in the spotlight, with a firm sense of the message he wants to send. Finneas now regards his first album, Optimist, recorded at home during the pandemic and released in 2021, as a bit too weighted with gravitas. Songs like “The 90s” and “The Kids Are All Dying”—“How can you sing about love when the kids are all dying?” goes the chorus—bear the weight of wanting to be about something greater. “I thought my small, lived experience wasn’t the most universal, so I sang about the world,” he says. “Ultimately, I don’t even know if I really like other people’s songs about the world,” he admits. “I like songs about personal experience.”
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From that realization, For Cryin’ Out Loud! was born. Finneas gestures at the space between us across the table. “I wanted it to feel like you’re having a drink, having a conversation.” To create that intimacy, Finneas recruited some of his closest friends, like Ricky Gourmet and David Marinelli, to collaborate, recording the entirety of it in a matter of weeks. “It was really chill, like high school band-room vibes,” says Marinelli, who played a modular synth on the album. “We would just go until it wasn’t fun anymore.” Eilish describes showing up at her brother’s house, “and he would have written and recorded something all in one day; it’s really impressive to make a live album like they did.”
“He always seemed to know that one way or another this was how it was going to turn out,” says Marinelli, who first met Finneas when they were 13-year-old rivals in an LA Battle of the Bands contest. (The two joined forces a year later to form the Slightlys.) “He’s kind of the king of manifesting,” Marinelli says. “But he would never, ever in 10 trillion years use that word.”
Manifesting—that overused, Gen Z buzzword—doesn’t feel like it applies to Finneas, who reads as more mature than his peers. “I’ve felt like an adult for probably 10 years,” he says. He describes his teen years as being “driven crazy by being too young to go to this thing or that, and not being able to drive.” Adding to the grown-up sensibility in Finneas’s life is his relationship of six years with YouTube influencer and actress Claudia Sulewski, with whom he shares a house and two rescue dogs—an extroverted pit bull named Peaches and Mousse, a miniature pinscher. “Inspiration source number one is new love. And heartbreak,” he says. “I have friends who are happy to blow up a relationship every two years to write a really good album. But what’s interesting is finding new ways to say a thing that I’ve said before, since I don’t have a heartbreak record happening to me.”
When Finneas casually describes himself as “less fun” compared to his younger sister, I ask if he ever feels like he’s living in Eilish’s shadow. “Maybe if for some reason I had been prevented from making solo music,” he says, not shrinking from the question. “But I’m not.” He even considers it an opportunity. “There’s a lot of people that have no idea I’ve ever put out music. So there’s a lot of new ground to cover,” Finneas says with a faint smile. “In some ways, that’s kind of thrilling.”
In this story: grooming, Luca Tullio; produced by Jarod Taber at Authorized Dealer.