The musical brother behind Billie Eilish
Finneas O’connell has co-written and produced most of his sister’s songs. Chris Harvey meets him
O’connell and Eilish shared a bed with their parents until he was 10
When pop star Billie Eilish stepped out at the Met Gala for the first time last month in a lavish peach blush gown that paid homage to the golden age of Hollywood, she was joined on the red carpet by the man who has co-written and produced almost every one of her songs – her elder brother Finneas – dressed in a striking all-red suit and sequinned face covering.
Predictably, though, it was Eilish whose glamorous new image, first presented to the world on the cover of Vogue earlier this year, brought out the internet trolls. “People have been judging Billie for so long that I’m numb to it,” Finneas tells me, in his surprisingly gravelly rumble, when I catch up with him on the morning of their appearance at the Firefly music festival in Delaware. “I thought she looked beautiful… And I’m proud of her, always evolving. I think that is what makes her a fashion icon.”
We’re talking via video call; he’s in a hotel room in the dark, citing our contrasting time zones and his “puffy eye bags” as a reason for staying out of sight. “I think the internet is only getting meaner,” he adds, “even in the four years that we’ve been in the public eye.”
The 24-year-old – full name, Finneas Baird O’connell – recently released a song, The 90s, which begins, “You can sign me up/ For a world without the internet”.
“I think the value of the internet is pretty similar for everybody, famous or not,” – he gets to see his girlfriend, Youtuber Claudia Sulewski’s face when he’s away on tour, for instance – but… “I think the negative side of the internet is pretty wildly negative if you’re famous. Millions of people levelling criticism at you as a celebrity is pretty unbelievable.” At 19, his sister – full name, Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’connell – has just been announced as Glastonbury’s youngest ever headliner for 2022. It’s a journey that began back in 2015, when Finneas recorded the 13-year-old singing the song Ocean Eyes, which he’d originally written for his own band, and uploaded it to Soundcloud for a dance class she was attending. Within a fortnight, it had been played hundreds of thousands of times, and the pair suddenly found they had set sail towards global fame and Grammy-winning success from their bedrooms.
Finneas still can’t quite believe the 2020 awards, in which they left with pretty much every prize that could be won, including Best New Artist, Album of the Year, Song of the Year (for Bad Guy) and Producer of the Year. They added to that haul in 2021, including an award for their Bond theme, No Time to Die, recorded in three days on a tour bus in Texas. I mention Ed Sheeran’s complaint that award ceremonies are “lots of people wanting other people to fail” in rooms “filled with resentment and hatred”. Is it true?
“Maybe,” he says. “It’s definitely not true of Billie and I… That’s a pretty cynical view of it. People love to win Grammys, and then s--- all over the Grammys, and it’s not what I’m here to do.”
The two present a united front, as the behind-the-scenes Apple+ documentary Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry, released earlier this year, reveals. It captures not only how they make music (Finneas says his role in Billie’s music is “at most” 50 per cent and at times “maybe more like 40”), but how much they make each other laugh while doing so. Yet, half an hour in, they have a row. It happens while they’re recording in his bedroom at their parents’ home in Los Angeles: he wants her to sing a catchy melodic hook he has come up with for a song she’s written for her debut album; she thinks that’s “stupid”. In the kitchen, he confesses to camera that he has been told by the record company “to write a hit but not tell Billie that we have to write a hit”. She’s exasperated. “I hate writing songs,” she howls, “especially with you, because you’re so good at it.”
“I just didn’t want to blow it,” he says now. “I was trusted with producing this album for this artist that had great expectations on her shoulders, and I wanted to deliver [but] I think it’s important to note that I was wrong, essentially – we didn’t need to do what I was afraid we needed to do.”
There’s a self-evident truth in this: the resulting multi-platinum-selling album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? is a miraculous pop feat; its 2021 follow-up Happier Than Ever is even better (and even less reliant on traditional pop song structures).
Yet it’s important to note, too, that Finneas has just recorded his own debut solo album, Optimist, out next week, which is absolutely jam-packed with giant hooks and sing-along choruses, as well as a piano study for his rescue dog, Peaches Étude, which he says took him longer than anything else to record. “I’m a really bad pianist,” he moans.
Joking aside, though, Optimist is a work of startlingly mature songwriting that suggests comparisons with Billy Joel or Paul Simon. And, despite some witty lyrics, it also bespeaks deep existential anxiety.
“I’m unprepared/ For my loved ones to be gone/ Call them way too often now/ Worry way too much about mom”, he sings on It’s Only a Lifetime.
Eilish has talked openly about experiencing depression and anxiety and Finneas has struggled, too. In fact, anxiety holds the key to two of the things that stand out about this remarkable, high-achieving family: that Billie and Finneas were both home-schooled; and that they and their parents, Maggie Baird and Patrick O’connell, all slept in the same big bed until Finneas was 10.
“I had massive separation anxiety,” he says. “I wore the same one outfit with cowboy boots every day for three years. [And] we had parents who were part-time actors, going to auditions, acting as much as they could but you know, you’re very dependent on people giving you jobs, and it’s unreliable.” (Baird appeared in The X-files and had a brief cameo in Friends, as a casting director who turns down Joey Tribbiani, two years before Eilish was born; O’connell was a bartender in The West Wing and a reporter in Iron Man.)
“They had time to be home with us, and they were like, our kid is kind of weird, we should maybe home-school him because we can’t afford to put him in a nice private school.”
He points out that being homeschooled in LA is slightly different to other places in that it means being part of a “network of home-schoolers”, who “play soccer together or go to the Science Museum”, but he stresses, “we were given a lot of love and attention and power by our parents.
“I benefited from it, and was lucky. And we’re still super close. I mean, my parents are still on the road with Billie and I still would choose to spend the night hanging out with my family over most of my friends, most of the time.”
Crucially, Finneas learnt the basics of his future career from a songwriting class taught by his mother when he was 12 (as would Billie), although Baird has since pointed out, “I always say it was actually the Beatles who taught them to write songs”.
“Billie and I are pretty encyclopaedic about the Beatles,” Finneas says. “They’ve played the biggest role in our musical lives.” Other formative passions for him range from Ben Folds and the Canadian singer-songwriter Feist to Green Day and My Chemical Romance.
For a time, it seemed as though Finneas might follow in his parents’ footsteps and become an actor. He had roles in Modern Family and Glee.
For now, though, it seems his course is set.