Back in February, Finneas O’Connell attended the Grammy awards with his younger sister and collaborator, Billie Eilish. They were nominated several times over for the third global hit album they have co-written together, Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft, and its best track “Birds of a Feather”, Spotify’s most streamed song of 2024. For once, they didn’t win, losing out to Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar. They’ll have to wait to add to their nine Grammys.
Finneas didn’t mind. “Everybody in the music business, except for me, is really competitive. Most people in the music industry are pissed when they lose an award.” Many fans, too: so much so that in the aftermath Finneas issued a warning on Instagram. “I don’t wanna see ANYONE with a photo of me or billie as their PFP [Profile picture] gettin’ in fights with other artists’ fans in comment sections!! Be at peace!”
“I posted it for two reasons,” he says. “One is we have had years where we swept [the awards], but your internet presence is flooded by the fandoms of the other artists just belittling the shit out of you – ‘your album sucked, how dare you beat Ariana Grande.’ And I super get it, but it’s still annoying. But I don’t want [fans] to think that they’re doing this on my behalf, or Billie’s behalf. We’re good. I super disagree with that. This isn’t an election. Nothing was at stake.”
Finneas O’Connell and Billie Eilish onstage in New York last year (Photo: Kevin Mazur/Getty /Live Nation)It was interesting that he directly addressed the toxicity of some aspects of standom. “I want to be clear. I don’t think what I did was addressing a toxicity,” he says. “To me, I think it’s misguided. I come from a place of being a huge fan of artists, especially as a 14-year-old. Like, I sobbed when Adam Lambert didn’t win American Idol. I bawled!” He lets out his infectious cackling laugh that can just appear from nowhere. Finneas is pretty serious until he’s not.
Like the 27-year-old says, he can afford to be more relaxed about awards and metrics (“’Birds of a Feather’ never reached number one in the US – who cares?”) given his supernova success. The first two albums he co-wrote and produced with his 22-year-old sister – Eilish’s 2019 debut, the haunted electro goth-pop When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? and its more mature, restrained 2021 follow-up Happier Than Ever – changed the face of pop music. Add in the Academy Awards for songs written for high-profile franchises – 2020’s “No Time To Die” for James Bond and 2023’s Barbie hit “What Was I Made For?” – and Eilish is arguably the pop star of the century so far.
But it also made Finneas one of the decade’s most in-demand songwriters and producers: his rollcall of collaborations with TikTok-era stars include Selena Gomez, Camila Cabello, Halsey and Tove Lo. And now there is a solo career gathering steam. I meet Finneas at the north London office of his record label the day before he begins a UK tour in support of his second solo album, last year’s For Cryin’ Out Loud! The 5,500 capacity Hammersmith Apollo might not be at Eilish’s level, but it’s beyond his expectations. “That’s a bigger show than I ever imagined playing solo,” he says, reclining on an easy chair in a light denim jacket and khaki trousers. “I’m very flattered.”
Finneas performs on the first night of his ‘For Cryin’ Out Loud!’ European tour earlier this month at The 3Olympia Theatre Dublin (Photo: Debbie Hickey /Getty)He’d actually quit touring in Eilish’s band in 2023 because he’s not keen on travel. “I have a pretty hard time being on the road. I really like my goofy routines in LA.” But to tour on his own, he wanted to make an album that would be fun to play live. Hence he rejected the earnest introspection of his 2021 debut album Optimist in favour of getting some mates in a room and jamming out songs.
Was that also a way of shielding himself from expectation? “[Optimist] underperformed,” he says. “At least in my fantasy of how it would perform. So it wasn’t like I had some sophomore album with a bunch of high expectations. The dumbest thing I could do was repeat the thing that didn’t do super well.”
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Out of it came an album that – though it doesn’t match the leftfield invention or sullen magnetism of his work with Eilish – is a fine collection of breezy, tuneful pop-rock songs that prove a leap forward from Optimist. “Oh yeah, it’s much better than the first one,” he says, laughing. The title is a family phrase he’s initially repurposed for the title track. “It’s about being exasperated about your loved ones, about loving somebody who’s trying to self-destruct, self-sabotage. It became a moniker for the whole album about conflict and unrequited love or unrequited connection.”
Some songs like “Starf**ker” and “What’s It Going to Take to Break Your Heart?” sound like breakup songs, though he remains in a committed relationship with his influencer girlfriend Claudia Sulewski, with whom he lives in Los Feliz, Los Angeles. “Well, they are breakup songs. I’m just not in a breakup.”
By which he means he’s drawing on previous experience and what he calls “my personal dynamics” with friends and family. He says that’s more interesting and emotional to write about than Optimist’s state-of-the-world themes. “Lotus Eater”, about the intangible mystery of people, was written after his growing realisation that what he’s said in past interviews hasn’t always aged well. “It’s an awareness that beliefs about myself are changing. I’m often saying things with real authority. Then after three years I think ‘I was full of shit on that.'”
He thinks people are just waking up to the permeance of the internet, but says “it is worse for people who are 200 per cent more famous than I am”. Like famous-since-she-was-13 Eilish – everything she says is news. “It’s a gift and a curse that it’s all she knows. The difference between [our experiences] is like a Dingo in Australia and a Labrador or something. She doesn’t have that grief of suddenly not being able to go to a grocery store. She never did it. She does a pretty good job of having a self-sufficient life, all things considered.”
Finneas O’Connell and Billie Eilish last year at the Academy Awards in Hollywood (Photo: Marleen Moise/ Getty Images)He suddenly becomes animated with frustration. “But it is shocking. I’ll plan out a thing for us to do. I’ll be like, ‘It’s dark out, let’s take the dogs on a walk.’ And she’s just so famous, man.” He acts out drivers recognising her and stopping to reverse their cars to gawp. “We have to run away. It’s crazy.”
It’s what makes the song “Family Feud”, a lovely ballad about their rare instances of shared intimacy, so notable. It sounds almost wistful for the pre-fame years. “All our dreams came true, and I’m very grateful. So it’s not about wishing it didn’t happen. I think it’s about the moments in my current life, just sat together in my living room, where I think, ‘Oh, I guess this is the way that it would have been.’”
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The siblings have always been close. Both home-schooled by their actor-musician parents in Los Angeles’ Highland Park neighbourhood, their careers can be traced back to singing in the city’s Children’s Chorus. At 12, Finneas took a songwriting class with his mother that led him to his high school band The Slightlys. In 2015, he decided to give a song he’d written for The Slightlys called “Ocean Eyes” to Eilish, then 13, thinking it suited her voice better than his. It was uploaded to SoundCloud, and the rest is history.
They’ve worked “10,000 hours together” since that first release of “Ocean Eyes”. On the day we meet, an interview published with Eilish quotes her as saying they can read each other’s minds. “Yes, we totally can. Not ‘what colour am I thinking of?’. But do we know what we’re thinking? Absolutely. You hear most bands and duos fall out. Working together is easier than ever.” So you’ve never fallen out? “No. Like, we bicker, ‘I like this better. I like this better.’ But no. Not close.”
It is hard to imagine them ever disagreeing on the fundamentals. When talk turns to the Barbie film (“I know I’m brainwashed, but I think that movie is like the best movie ever”) he says “the backlash to that movie was so deeply sexist and misogynistic”. Swathes of conservatives and high profile right-wing American figures noisily accused the film’s feminist themes of being “woke” anti-male propaganda.
Finneas says that the current tumult in America, and Donald Trump’s election, was foreshadowed by the reaction. “If people were that mad going into a movie called Barbie, we were in trouble. Which we were.” What does he make of the political landscape in America? “My God,” he exclaims, looking to the heavens. “I’ll say plainly that I worry.”
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He says an antidote for artists is to continue to create; he makes a somewhat convoluted comparison to Mozart travelling to England to play for King George III in 1774 just before the American Revolutionary War. But what about the responsibility to speak out? It was noticeable at both the Grammys and the Oscars how few artists made any kind of political statement. “Yeah, I thought that was lame.”
He says if Eilish had won a Grammy, he’d have brought up climate change in his acceptance speech. He thinks artists were stung by their anti-Trump electioneering “being resoundingly rejected” in the way people actually voted – both Finneas and Eilish spoke up for Kamala Harris. “Probably a lot of musicians are feeling like, ‘Okay, well I guess it doesn’t matter what I think.’ But I think it does. Anything that is normalised matters, good or bad.”
In the meantime, Finneas will keep on. But at 27, he’s achieved so much – what else is there? A move into theatre and musicals is one new ambition, he says. “But if I only had six months to live, the only thing I would be really sad about would be not getting to have kids. I’d say ‘Oh, that sucks.’ Everything else, I’d be like – ‘Man, I had such a lucky life.’”
‘For Cryin’ Out Loud!’ is out now. Finneas is at BST Hyde Park on 4 July
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