Everything you need to know about Finneas O'Connell, Billie Eilish's brother and Grammy-winning producer
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Finneas O'Connell is a 22-year-old singer, songwriter, and Grammy-winning producer.
He is best known for his work with his sister, Billie Eilish, with whom he cowrote and produced her debut album, "When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?"
He has since helped cowrite and produce songs for pop heavyweights like Selena Gomez, Halsey, Camila Cabello, and Tove Lo.
O'Connell also performs as a solo artist under the mononym FINNEAS. He released his debut EP, "Blood Harmony," in 2019.
If you've been seeing the name "Finneas" with increasing frequency in the past year, from Vogue headlines to Spotify playlists, you're not hallucinating.
Indeed, Finneas O'Connell has quickly become a major figure in music, though much of his influence has been felt behind the scenes.
Here's everything you need to know about the 22-year-old polymath.
O'Connell is Billie Eilish's older brother, cowriter, and sole producer
The O'Connell siblings (Eilish's full name is Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O'Connell) were raised in Highland Park, an East Los Angeles suburb.
They were home-schooled by their parents, Maggie Baird and Patrick O'Connell, both actors who are mostly credited with roles in regional theater productions and voice-over work.
"During my life time, our parents were never able to fully financially support us off of their work as actors," O'Connell has said. "Our dad worked 12 hour days 7 days a week as a construction worker for Mattel and our mom was a teacher."
Both O'Connell and Eilish have praised their parents for encouraging their creativity while growing up. According to O'Connell, the siblings were surrounded by music in "every nook and cranny" of their house.
O'Connell starting writing songs when he was about 12 years old. In high school, he dabbled in acting — landing a reoccurring role in "Glee" and a cameo in "Modern Family" — and founded a band called The Slightlys.
"I am a performance junky so any time I get to be onstage or in front of a camera, I'm stoked," he told All Access Music in 2016.
—The Slightlys (@TheSlightlys) May 19, 2016
In 2015, O'Connell wrote a song called "Ocean Eyes" for his band. He ended up producing the song with Eilish's vocals, whose dance teacher wanted to choreograph a routine to original music.
"He told me he thought it would sound really good in my voice," Eilish told Teen Vogue. "He taught me the song and we sang it together along to his guitar and I loved it — it was stuck in my head for weeks. We kind of just decided that that was the song we were going to use for the dance."
The duo uploaded the song to SoundCloud so her teacher could access it, where it promptly caught the attention of music blogs, eventually went viral, and led to Eilish's record deal with Interscope.
Since then, O'Connell has cowritten and produced every song Eilish has ever released, from her debut EP "Don't Smile at Me" and debut album "When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?" to her James Bond theme song "No Time to Die."
When SiriusXM hosts asked if he's "territorial" about being Eilish's producer, O'Connell replied: "Yeah man, how many producers have worked with Billie? Count 'em."
"Here's actually why," he continued. "I just know her really well, and I know that I can make her really happy... I will not rest until Billie gets the results she wants."
He won the 2020 Grammy Award for producer of the year, non-classical
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Eilish and O'Connell each took home five Grammy Awards in 2020. "When We All Fall Asleep" won for album of the year and best pop vocal album, while "Bad Guy" won both song and record of the year. Eilish also won best new artist.
But O'Connell also took home an important award that wasn't telecast during the main event: producer of the year, non-classical. He was the only producer nominated who just worked on one Grammy-recognized project that year.
"Producer was the one [nomination] I was sure I wouldn't get," he told Billboard. "I produced one record this year. Super-producers do, like, six albums."
As a producer, O'Connell has become known for his homemade approach and textural, outré flourishes.
Eilish's songs rarely follow a conventional song structure, and many include unexpected sound effects that are artificially pitched, distorted, or disguised as traditional instruments: "Bury a Friend" includes recordings of a dental drill and an Easy-Bake Oven; the hook in "Bad Guy" incorporates the rhythm of a crosswalk timer in Australia; part of the snare effect in "Wish You Were Gay" is O'Connell cracking his knuckles; the sound of an airplane's call button is buried within the chords of "I Love You."
"Finneas is the most talented person I've ever met in my whole life, and I know a lot of talented people," Eilish told the Wall Street Journal. "He's so fast, too, which is so annoying. The way he thinks, I've always thought was so unique and inspiring. He's the main reason I wanted to do music in the first place."
O'Connell and Eilish recorded the vast majority of her debut album in his childhood bedroom
O'Connell says his sister likes to record her vocals while cross-legged on his bed, sitting among his Takashi Murakami flower pillows. He sits at his desk, sandwiched between two keyboards, which amounts to his makeshift home studio.
As they worked on her album, the siblings wrote the tracklist on O'Connell's bedroom wall, checking off each song when it was mixed and mastered.
"Probably 75-80% of the songs are written with us sitting next to each other at a piano or with a guitar, singing a melody together," he told Variety. "It's like a relay race — we really feel like we both have to kill our portion of it to get to the finish line."
"There's a crazy intimacy, I think, to what we're doing," he said in a video for AWAL. "There's such a private feeling to what we're doing, because we're not at a recording studio where different people are there every day, and people are down the hall — like, it's our house, and it's where we live, and it's where we have experienced everything."
"That allows us to make some kind of music that feels wholeheartedly exposed, as far as like, who we really are as people and as siblings and as children of our parents. I think it's just really honest."
O'Connell also performs in Eilish's band when she goes on tour. He duets with his sister when she performs "I Love You" and "Everything I Wanted," both of which feature his vocals, though he's not credited as a featured artist.
He has cowritten and produced songs for other pop heavyweights
O'Connell has been tapped by major artists to help cowrite or produce songs, including Selena Gomez, Halsey, Camila Cabello, and Tove Lo.
"I think as a cowriter and a producer working with other people, you have to just channel a lot of empathy," he told KROQ. "I think as long as you can empathize with people and put yourself in their shoes, you can turn that into writing about how that would make you feel."
But don't expect any of his collaborations to bear the unmistakable "Billie sound."
"As soon as you make anything that people like, you get all these new artists hitting you up like 'I want to sound just like Billie Eilish,'" he told Variety. "And I'm always like, 'Absolutely not.' I'm interested in doing things in the pop world that are as far away from Billie as possible, and have them stand in stark contrast."
O'Connell also performs as a solo artist under the mononym FINNEAS
O'Connell told SiriusXM that any song released under Eilish's name — even if he wrote the lyrics by himself, like "When the Party's Over" — is a song that she relates to, empathizes with, and uses as a vehicle for self-expression.
On the other hand, if he keeps a song for himself, it typically feels "overwhelmingly personal," like "I Lost a Friend," or is really fun for him to sing, like "Shelter."
O'Connell has consistently released songs as FINNEAS since his debut solo single, "New Girl," in 2016. He signed to AWAL in 2018, a division of Kobalt Music Group that allows artists to retain majority ownership of their music.
O'Connell released his debut EP as FINNEAS, titled "Blood Harmony," on October 4, 2019. It includes his current single, "Let's Fall in Love for the Night."
"A friend of mine, Justin Raisen, who's one of my favorite writers and people... he listened to a bunch of my music and called my stuff dark crooner. Crooner like Sinatra and it just has this sonic darkness," O'Connell told Atwood Magazine, when asked to describe himself as an artist.
"I feel like if I call myself a 'dark crooner' there's a pretentiousness to that, but for him to call me that was very flattering and significant, because I grew up listening to and loving Frank Sinatra and that whole world."
He currently lives with his girlfriend, YouTuber Claudia Sulewski, for whom he wrote the love song 'Claudia'
O'Connell and Sulewski began dating in September 2018 after they were connected through mutual friends. Last year, the couple moved into their own home and adopted a dog named Peaches.
Most recently, since social distancing guidelines were put into place, O'Connell and Sulewski launched a podcast together called "We Bought a House."
O'Connell has written at least three songs about his girlfriend: "Die Alone," "Angel," and, of course, "Claudia."
Sulewski actually painted the cover art for "Claudia," which O'Connell wrote the same day they met.
"The night after we met you sent me a video of you singing with no context," Sulewski wrote about the song on Instagram. "scrambling to google the lyrics in case it was just a cover — it turned out to be this song. I couldn't do the same so I painted you how I felt. been falling for you since day one."
O'Connell doesn't mind that he's often referred to as 'Billie Eilish's brother'
In interviews and online, O'Connell frequently makes a point to emphasize how grateful he is to work with his sister, and how proud he is of her success.
"Seen some headlines saying 'Finneas is more than just billie's brother' and I know that's well meaning but I just want to state that being Billie's brother is the best thing in the entire world and it's all I ever want to be," he wrote on Twitter in October. "Glad you like my songs too though."
—FINNEAS (@finneas) October 15, 2019
In fact, he told Variety that he's "not very interested in fame or notoriety at all."
"I'd be pretty bummed out if I woke up one day and I was, like, super, super famous," he said. "But the flip-side of that is that I'm really passionate about my music, I'm really proud of it and I want it to be heard by as many people as possible, and I'm willing to embrace whatever comes with that."
Read more:
14 songs you probably didn't know were written or produced by Billie Eilish's brother Finneas
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