FINNEAS in the Daylight
In our latest Digital Cover Story, the singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and Grammy-winning producer gives Paste the lowdown on getting the band back together, relinquishing control while still captaining the ship, the long album versus short album debate, writing fictional lyrics in the context of authenticity, and his new LP, FOR CRYIN’ OUT LOUD!
Photos by Olof GrindA heatwave has cast over Los Angeles on the day I arrive at Finneas O’Connell’s home studio. Surrounded by instruments and leaning against a keyboard, Finneas breaks a sweat while signing cards that will go in the CD copies of his new album, FOR CRYIN’ OUT LOUD! It’s a picture-perfect encapsulation of his schedule, which is always packed but a mode he greatly prefers. He even assures me that it’ll be better if he’s doing two things at once during our conversation, that it’ll be where his best answers come from. When he’s not working on his own music, he’s producing his sister’s, or he’s writing music for a boy band in a Pixar movie, or he’s working on the score of Apple TV+’s new show Disclaimer. Getting a part of an afternoon with Finneas feels like a small miracle.
In 2023, Finneas put his focus on producing Billie Eilish’s HIT ME HARD AND SOFT and scoring Disclaimer, the latter of the two consisting of months of seven-day work weeks. “I felt like I was doing fine on both and feeling guilty about each,” he says. “I’d be working on the TV show and feeling like, ‘Gosh, I feel guilty for not working more on the production of Billie’s record right now.’ And vice-versa—I’d be working with Billie and be like, ‘Oh, man, I gotta turn in more cues.’” The “pseudo-multitask,” as Finneas calls it, worked, but it wasn’t stress-free. Both projects wrapped up in December and Finneas went “PS5 mode.” “That was my first celebration, firing up a PlayStation 5,” he adds. “I played a lot of Call of Duty and then I played that Hogwarts Legacy game. It’s funny, you go from being too busy and stressed out to too free and stressed out because you’re too free.”
At the beginning of 2024, Finneas and Billie locked in with the Barbie campaign, making the rounds at awards shows and picking up hardware for “What Was I Made For?”—including a Best Original Song Oscar and a Grammy for Song of the Year. In a flash, that campaign turned into another campaign for HIT ME HARD AND SOFT, which came out in May—just two months after the Academy Awards ceremony wrapped. All of that kept Finneas busy, but in the back of his head he was looking onward at a project he had been “hypothesizing” since the previous winter: He wanted to form a band of friends to play on his new record. Of course, he would still be the producer and primary writer, but Finneas wanted to surround himself with talented people who’ve made an impact on him, be it loved ones or peers.
The first person he reached out to was Miles Morris, a drummer in the band Bad Suns—a band that Finneas has loved since he was a teenager. “I always particularly loved the drums on those records, and I got to know Miles a bit over the years,” he says. “I hit him up in December and said, ‘Are you guys making an album right now? I’d love to do some weeks with you.’ And he was down and, time permitting, we scheduled it around whenever their band was in writing mode.”
But the time it took to make FOR CRYIN’ OUT LOUD! was unbelievably short—14 days in total with the band, across weeks in March, April and May, with each day consisting of writing and recording at least one new song from noon to 7 PM. The ensemble always tracked in the daylight, and there were always candles lit in the room. “There were days when we’d write two songs,” Finneas snickers, “and we were writing and recording concurrently. I’d write a verse and sing it, and somebody would play something good and we’d be recording the whole time. It was fast, which felt really good.” Once the band would leave for the day, he’d take the session files home and fine-tune them through “semi-mixing” and re-tracked vocals.
Production for the LP was wrapped up in June, capping off a kinetic peak of creativity. Finneas likens the timeline to albums from the ‘90s and early 2000s that would come out not long after they were finished, especially pointing toward how Nirvana’s In Utero and Nevermind were both made in one- and two-week whirlwinds of intensity. “I’m not pretending like it’s a fast process by other people’s standards,” he says. “But, it’s fast by mine. It’s very satisfying to make stuff and have people hear it quickly.” Even Billie’s last album happened across a 12-month span and, as we’re all still putting the pieces together post-COVID lockdown, a sub-four-month turnaround on an album from a player of Finneas’s stardom feels like some sort of phenomenon. “The oldest song on [HIT ME HARD AND SOFT] often feels really old,” he continues. “Hopefully it doesn’t feel old to the listener, but to us, we’re like, ‘Man, this was at least a year ago.’ So, it’s very selfishly satisfying to be like, ‘I just had this idea in May and here’s the song.’”
FOR CRYIN’ OUT LOUD! provides an immediate contrast to Finneas’s last solo album, OPTIMIST—a self-contained project written, produced and recorded alone with Aron Forbes in 2021, save for string accompaniments from Isaiah Gage, Johan Lenox and Yasmeen Al-Mazeedi on “A Concert Six Months from Now.” It was a stripped-down affair, songs that embraced the theatrics of balladry and put Finneas’s vocal range on display. Having grown up in Los Angeles and come of age in the arms of a city colored by Hollywood’s most primal, awing and challenging nuances, Finneas electing to make a record allergic to the bombast that defines the very place he calls home was a measured and graceful attempt—and the results were crushing, as tracks like “What They’ll Say About Us” and “Only a Lifetime” allow catchiness to puncture the walls of despair glowing from within Finneas’s lyrical milieu. “You’re not gonna like it without any love,” he sang about living, and you felt every bit of it.
But now, Finneas is putting out a document of togetherness. FOR CRYIN’ OUT LOUD! is as in-the-moment as a record can get, existing in service to the space it was completed in. The pomposity exists because all of these musicians—Morris, Forbes, Ricky Gourmet, Matthew “Rat” Fildey and Lucy Healey—got together and made the thing, writing, singing, recording, workshopping and bouncing feedback off each other one day and one song (or two) at a time. It’s different than just making a record in your bedroom, and the pros and the cons of such an adventure end up looking the same. “In the room that I occupied, it was people that I really know,” he says. “So, you’re held to a higher standard of honesty. That was a purposeful cross to bear—[in] a room full of people that I trusted—like, ‘I can’t really lie on this record.’ I can sort of make up a thing, but I can’t just be like, ‘This is the way I am’ and it’s a lie. If I were making a record completely unsupervised, which was [OPTIMIST], I could lie up a storm, just say stuff that you know isn’t believable. Ultimately, it ended up being a really good thing, but it did make me take a couple extra beats before writing lyrics—like, ‘That’s not quite true.’”
FOR CRYIN’ OUT LOUD! offers songs with a lot of made-up details, but the fictionality is delivered within the context of authenticity. The people around Finneas are believing in what he’s saying. Does having that kind of trust, comfort and assurance encourage him to take more risks with his songwriting? “Sometimes, the risk side of it is that I might cringe myself out,” he laughs. “If I’m alone—if I’m the only person in the room and I do something, I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s pretty lame.’ If I’ve got a room full of my buddies and they’re like, ‘That sounds awesome,’ I’m braver. My friends are gassing me up.” On this new LP, Finneas belts on some of the tracks, especially “Same Old Story” and “Little Window,” and that turn in procedure is by dint of Morris ripping a hole through the room with his drumming. “If I’m in a quiet studio alone,” Finneas adds, “I might have a tendency to underplay everything a little more.”
These 10 new tracks are friendship songs at their core, made with a closeness that harbors the kind of momentum you can only get when you’re creating them in the company of good people and good energy. It’s why a song like “Cleats” is already one of Finneas’s all-time best, because the guitars from Gourmet and Fildey brighten into an all-around jam as Healey turns piano lines into silhouettes beneath his vocal. The making of OPTIMIST was, by Finneas’s account, a really lonely process. “To me, there are elements of your creative job that are solitary by virtue of something coming from your brain, the piece that you’re writing—it’s you,” he continues. “I think, outside of that, I’m a really social person. If I have a day where I’m working alone, the thing that I want to do at the end of that day is go see a bunch of my friends. Even if I have a day where I’m working with my friends, I want to keep hanging out. I’m kind of picky. There’s a lot of people I don’t want to hang out with, but the five people I like I want to hang out with all the time.”
But putting OPTIMIST out wasn’t much of a benchmark for Finneas three years ago—just a handful of months before that record’s release, he produced Billie’s sophomore LP Happier Than Ever and, together, the siblings zeroed in on uniform and restrained torch songs flushed with somber catchiness. For the rest of the year, they campaigned for Billie’s song “No Time to Die” during awards season, and the track wound up winning Best Original Song at the Oscars in March 2022. Happier Than Ever scored highly on Metacritic, but those same reviewers were far more split on OPTIMIST, a project Finneas admittedly didn’t have the greatest time making, at least not in comparison to the joy that underscored the FOR CRYIN’ OUT LOUD! sessions.
“I didn’t think, ‘This is the best thing I’ve ever made, only I could have made this alone,’” he says of OPTIMIST. “I was like, ‘I did my best.’ Outside of the benefits of the fact that I worked with a bunch of talented people, I was like, ‘I’m gonna have a better time if I’m doing all of this stuff with people around me.’” Finneas has never been the kind of musician that needs months and months to write anything, but OPTIMIST taught him, almost more than anything, that knowing when to pick the pen up versus when to put it down requires lived experience. “I write [songs] really fast and then, a month later, I’ll go, ‘I can beat that second verse’ and I’ll rewrite the second verse,” he says. “But, it takes the perspective of hearing it and being like, ‘That’s not the best I could do.’”
If you spend enough time with musicians, you start to understand how universal all of their beginnings are. Most people grew up on band music; the first artist I ever loved was AC/DC and, as I’m getting older, I’m finding even more pleasure in those four- or five-person dynamics—both on-stage and on the record. Finneas shares a similar history, going from novice, to bandleader, to one-half of one of this century’s greatest songwriting partnerships, to bandleader again. “I didn’t even really understand music outside of the context of a band,” he says. “When I was in high school and I was starting bands, it took me years before I even knew what a synth was. I thought bands were guitar and bass and drums and vocals. My understanding of the roles in music took a long time.”
Feeding into that childhood fascination and making music that isn’t just one or two people in a room, but a living, breathing organism of players with varying techniques and hues of brilliance, satiated Finneas’s desire to turn his multi-instrumentalist fundamentals into something bigger, bolder. It was different from his usual efforts, where he and Forbes would hole up in a Frogtown studio in the Elysian Valley and, slowly, build ensemble recordings together. “I play drums on a song, which either means I’m crappily playing a real kit of drums and then quantizing them, or I’m playing samples and building a kit out of them, and then I parse together two guitar tracks and then I play a bass line, play a couple synth parts,” he says. “It’s still all coming from my brain, which can be cool and fun, but it’s also limited by my imagination. You get a room full of people, like Ricky [Gourmet]—who played all the guitar on this album—or David [Marinelli]—who played all this modular, LCD Soundsystem-style stuff—and we’d come away from seven hours with all of this stuff going on. There might be moments where I mute a verse of something, but everybody’s interplaying.”
Everything explodes into life on FOR CRYIN’ OUT LOUD!, as the walls of the Frogtown studio don’t feel like they’re closing in quite as tightly as they did throughout OPTIMIST. It’s hard to quantify this new record as being something of a breakthrough, as Finneas has been at the forefront of popular music for five years now—be it of his own accord or while standing alongside his sister—but when he is regaling the work that went into its making, calling it anything but that would be a disservice. “Live arrangement style, which is what I spent my high school years doing in bands—albeit mediocre bands, we were really crappy—the thesis was the same: Here we are, the drums are gonna lay out, and then they’re gonna come in and they’re gonna really crescendo,” Finneas explains. “Everything happening in real time, playing off each other, feeding off each other—it’s so satisfying.” He pauses for a moment to swap his signed stack of CD cards for a blank pile. “It sounds really good,” he declares.
It should come as no surprise that, in the wake of HIT ME HARD AND SOFT, Finneas’s next chapter also ratcheted up the craft. Songs like “BIRDS OF A FEATHER” and “L’AMOUR DE MA VIE” and “LUNCH” all pack a punch, built with an eagle-eye affixed to the wonders of ornate, zig-zagging, dark-tinted pop ephemera. The siblings’ humble Logic Pro and Fender Acoustasonic beginnings full of gloomy, trip-hop-inspired synth music has become a tempest of ornate, crushing and clubby exult. Finneas’s arrangement on “L’AMOUR DE MA VIE,” in particular, and the way the soundscape turns inside out via a non-sequitur, is some of the most inventive and exciting work he’s done, and that translates into his own material, as “Cleats” and “Sweet Cherries” oscillate through yummy tempo shifts that sink their hooks into you through intoxicating, funky medleys.
To watch Finneas go through a slow-burn metamorphosis like this, where he is no longer just a guy with a keyboard playing coffee-shop indie in the Paste Studios and has the luxury of being able to pay session players and rent a studio out for weeks at a time, it’s one of pop music’s most understated joys. For all of the reasons that celebrity and sales certifications and follower counts can make our greatest heroes feel, even in the digital age, more inaccessible than ever, it’s good to see Finneas go from watching Berklee clinics on YouTube in high school to having eight Grammy wins before even dropping his debut record. One of the good guys took a victory lap this time, and he’s still making music with guys he’s known since he was a teenager.
“David and I have been playing music together since we were in high school,” he says. “Billie would have something during the day, and I’d be like, ‘All right, we’re gonna set up the drums in Billie’s room, run all XLR cables under her door and into my room.’ That’s how we were recording, and it was like, ‘We’re trying our best.’ It sounded terrible, but we tried.” (Since Glee’s viewership diminished by the time season six aired in 2015, a then-18-year-old Finneas had the luxury of being added to the cast without having to exist forever in the Dwight Schrute of it all, where he is forever known as the ukulele-playing gay Alistair. He spent the money he made from the role on recording demos with his band and buying gear. In a way, for all of the real Gleeks out there like me, it’s comforting to know that, in a really distant and roundabout way, Glee was a stepping stone toward FOR CRYIN’ OUT LOUD! getting made.)
FOR CRYIN’ OUT LOUD!’s opening track, “Starfucker,” was the only song that Finneas wrote, arranged and recorded all by himself. It’s like a Broadway show, how he chooses to present it on the project—in that it mimics a record being built from the ground up, as Finneas’s isolation, by the time it turns into “What’s It Gonna Take to Break Your Heart?,” becomes something grand. “I always think of everything from a theatrical standpoint,” he says. “If this were a play, you’d come out alone and you have a spotlight and you play your thing, and then the whole band joins in.” But, Finneas also wasn’t sure where else “Starfucker” would go. “What road leads to that song?” he asks. “I wasn’t sure, but I thought it was a cool entry point.” Likewise, there was no world where “Lotus Eater” was anything but the record’s finale, as it builds and builds and builds out of “Family Feud”’s penultimate wisdom and worry and into something conclusive. It’s like Finneas, our righteous and decorated conductor, stands up, pulls back the curtain, sings out “Not such a mystery now,” before revealing a deluge of splashy guitar notes, looping synthesizers, gusts of wind and all else that could ever swirl hypnotically into an ending.
Relinquishing control in a band environment has been, as Finneas puts it, a years-long exercise. He’s still afforded the role of being captain, but over time, he’s felt like the work has not always thrived with just his ideas being considered. “Who wouldn’t want to be in the reality of the best case scenario?” he says. “If it takes five minutes longer for someone else to come up with a guitar part that would be better than the guitar part I come up with? Sick.” Finneas is known for playing piano, it’s the thing he did for four minutes at every award show last winter while his sister sat on a stool and belted out one of the best ballads of this decade. But on FOR CRYIN’ OUT LOUD, Lucy Healey plays 80% of the piano parts. “She has really different instincts than me,” Finneas says. “I’d sit her down at the keys and I’d be like, ‘Okay, play something.’ And I’d hear, in my head, what I think I’d play on it, and then she’d play a totally different thing—and it was great! It really opened up the songs in a certain way. If I were more insecure, I would have been like, ‘No, no, that’s not how I hear it.’ There were times where hers was great for part of it, and then I played for part of it. Everybody wins, everybody chips in.”
Finneas doesn’t care about things abstractly, instead pursuing ideals that best fit the period of creativity he’s working out of. Right now, he’s in “short album territory,” refusing to sacrifice a good, sonorous dynamic for the sake of making the same song several times over. “If you’re an artist and you’ve just written 17 unbelievable songs and they go well together and they have to all come out, Godspeed,” he says. “I live in LA, so I think of everything in the context of driving. I love an album that’s like, the drive there and back and I’ve listened to the whole album. Everything’s 45 minutes away, or it’s 20 minutes and then it’s a round-trip [listen].” Even HIT ME HARD AND SOFT is 44 minutes long, an approximate runtime deliberately constructed to fit into the ramifications of a vinyl pressing and keep it out of double-LP territory. And, when that’s the case, it pushes you to fill those 44 minutes with the best shit you’ve got.
FOR CRYIN’ OUT LOUD is 40 minutes long, but it’s only 10 tracks—a striking difference to the Tortured Poets Departments and Cowboy Carters of the pop pantheon in 2024. Finneas and his band, because they were so jammy during the writing process, wrote a few songs that doubled up and checked the same box—and those were the songs that fell by the wayside or got cut. “I’d rather have one song that is accomplishing this thing than have four of them,” he says. “And, to me, the other thing was—and I was worried about this most of all when I went in to make this record—I was worried it wouldn’t sound like me, because I was being collaborative and letting all these people play all over the album. I was like, ‘Oh, maybe this will sound like a side project or someone else’s vision.’ And, personally, I think it sounds so much like me.” FOR CRYIN’ OUT LOUD! isn’t identical to OPTIMIST by any metric, but Finneas was happy with how much of his identity lived on the album. “There were moments where we were jamming, and it was a cool jam and I have it recorded, but I was like, ‘Suddenly, we’re making an Audioslave song, or a Depeche Mode song. I can’t wear this, it’s a hat that doesn’t look good on me.”
It’s hard to determine whether or not the phrase “For Crying Out Loud” is regional or generational, but it certainly feels like an extension of birthright—as it’s been in my lexicon, and Finneas’s, for my whole life. It’s a phrase of exasperation, but, in Finneas’s case, he sees it as a double-entendre, too. “I liked the idea of a robot reading it and trying to understand it,” he says, alluding to how the phrase can be read two ways: “For crying Out Loud!” and “For: Crying Out Loud.” But the phrase, and the album, points to a commonality of relationships in turmoil, miscommunication and the human exercise of better understanding the people you love. “For Crying Out Loud!” the song is a loving argument, while the piano-led “Starfucker” is confrontational, and the psych-funk “Sweet Cherries” and the sensual pop pleasures of “What’s It Gonna Take to Break Your Heart?” offer a push and pull between both forces. “2001” is a Kubrick-referencing story about loving somebody who is in their own way and self-defeating, while “Cleats” is about “being 13 and being in love with your best friend who turns out to be gay.”
There are kernals of truth on FOR CRYIN’ OUT LOUD!, scenarios Finneas has lived through either personally and tangentially via friends where the protagonists and antagonists of each dynamic are blurred. “Cleats” is a prime example of that fiction becoming truth, as it’s a story about not knowing what you want because your body is telling you that you want everything. “I’m always trying to paint the most compelling image within the context of ‘this is an experience that I’m pulling from,’” Finneas says. “I’m not really interested in rap beef/doxxing people/saying names. It’s the feeling of that thing made in a more ambiguous, picturesque way. You go through puberty and, suddenly, you feel slightly different about either people of the same sex, people of the opposite sex, whatever it is—and the person you’re closest with, you’re like, ‘I think I have a crush on this person. We’re so similar.’ Either it’s a new person or it isn’t, and you’re like, ‘Well, obviously this is what it is!’ Well, yeah, but this is still just friendship. You’ve just hit puberty. You’ve crossed over this thing into having any form of adolescent identity.”
Since Finneas’s Paste session in 2019, he’s been slowly surrounding himself with more and more pieces of gear and more and more people. FOR CRYIN’ OUT LOUD! is not going to be the record that defines him forever, but it is the record that defines him right now. The ideas that his collaborators brought to Frogtown were fresh, and he was excited to receive them, but it was a song like “Family Feud” that, through shocking difficulty, nearly broke him—largely because it’s the kind of story that you don’t have to read between the lines to know what’s real versus what’s fake. When Finneas sings the first verse (“Mom and dad are out of town, the two of us are grown ups now / Pepper had to be put down / Hard to take, hard to own, not hard to break a collarbone / A little late, but not alone”), you know he’s speaking to his sister.
But when he sings the next few lines—“and you’re only 22, and the world is watching you, judging everything you do”—you can’t help but feel like you’re making sense of celebrity and love right alongside him. Finneas wrote “Family Feud” for his sister and his sister only, but it is, undoubtedly, the sweetest chapter of FOR CRYIN’ OUT LOUD!—a moment where the veil drops and Finneas lets us in, where he lets us know that he too worries about Billie’s relationship to fame and, ultimately, how that affects their bond. “I got really emotional writing that, and that’s kind of atypical for me,” he says. “I often find that writing the more vulnerable, devastating songs is a luxurious experience. I was writing that first verse of ‘Family Feud’ and I got a real lump in my throat and had to go sit in the car for a while. But that’s how I know I’m contributing something meaningful.”
Finneas has already been to the top of the proverbial mountain. He’s the most-decorated producer of his generation, winning Producer of the Year at the Grammys when he was just 23 years old. Add a few Academy Awards to that and there aren’t many EGOT candidates more likely than him (except his sister, of course). He’s surpassed all of his wildest dreams, but it’s all just one half of the story. There’s the work he does with Billie Eilish, and then there are albums like OPTIMIST and FOR CRYIN’ OUT LOUD!. Something is driving him to push a piano into his living room for two days so he can search for the best acoustics to soundtrack his whims.
I ask Finneas what he’s chasing after now, and he immediately begins recounting a story about Bruno Mars and how, throughout every era of the pop superstar’s career—from “Grenade,” to Unorthodox Jukebox, to “Uptown Funk,” to 24K Magic—he’s always showing more, excelling at something else he has to offer, whether it’s dancing, or shredding on guitar, or crushing on the drum kit. “I’m not Bruno Mars,” Finneas says. “He’s a more talented man than I am, but part of what compels me to have a solo project is continued self-expression. If the only thing you ever know about me is that I have been a collaborator to Billie, I totally respect that and I feel beyond lucky to have done that. But I have more to offer. There’s more hours in the day, and there’s more that I want to do and pursue. That’s the be-all-end-all. I don’t think that I’m fully expressed. If I were just a solo artist, I would not feel fully expressed, either. I’d be like, ‘I gotta go produce records for somebody else.’”
Listening to FOR CRYIN’ OUT LOUD!, however, one thing’s for certain: Finneas O’Connell loves his job. He loves this music-making business, for better or for worse. As his busy summer has been winding down, one truth has especially revealed itself to him: “I’m pretty geeked out on the process,” he says. “Last year was only process: the Barbie song, Billie’s album didn’t come out, Disclaimer didn’t come out. I was just process, and that’s kind of a funny thing to have as an identity, because nobody is seeing the fruits of your labor. You’re kind of just toiling, but it turns out that I really fuck with that part of the process. There are times where it feels so good to release something and share it, and I’m excited for people to hear this album, but, man, I loved making it.”
FOR CRYIN’ OUT LOUD! could flop, or it could dominate, but neither of those results will change how Finneas felt while he was making it. “That’s a victory to me, and the thing I was really chasing,” he says. “Sometimes I’ve been involved in making stuff that was really stressful to make, but it did really well. But, I’m still left with this taste in my mouth of, like, ‘That almost killed me.’ With this album, I wanted to just be gassed the whole time. I wanted to feel so good about the whole thing. Music is so multi-faceted, and anything you do in a repetitive way you can fall out of love with, because you’re numb to it. The continued pursuit of re-inspiring myself, it’s really paying off for me.”
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.