Sibling revelry
Grammy winning pop star has a powerhouse producer — her brother
LOS ANGELES The December morning that Grammy nominations were announced, Finneas O’connell woke up early. The 22-yearold had produced and co-written all the tracks on When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? the debut full-length by his sister, Billie Eilish. That album helped establish Eilish, now 18, as one of pop’s brightest and biggest new stars in 2019, which also made Finneas (the name he goes by) one of the most sought-after producers. The idea that at least one of the siblings might be nominated for a Grammy award didn’t seem out of reach.
Eilish wound up with six nominations, and Finneas with five, including album of the year, record and song of the year for the hit Bad Guy (which he co-wrote) and producer of the year (non-classical). They dominated the awards Sunday night, winning or sharing five each.
Despite those wins, he’s at that place, in the late-early stages of fame, where everything good seems possible and nothing too calamitous or traumatizing or weird has happened. He’s genuinely open and friendly, and appears to go unrecognized by everyone except friends.
In October, Finneas released Blood Harmony, a seven-song EP that was mostly cobbled together in dressing rooms and tour bus lounges and hotel rooms while on the road with Eilish. It’s a sleek, striking work, poppier and more linear than
When We All Fall Asleep. Finneas began playing instruments and writing songs when he was very young. It didn’t take long for his parents to realize he was special. “Patrick and I would hear something, and walk into the room and go, ‘Who wrote that?’” says his mother, Maggie Baird. “And he’d go, ‘I wrote that.’”
When Finneas was 12, he attended a songwriting class taught by Baird, a musician in her own right. Everything clicked into place. “It’s as if she handed him a songwriting Rubik’s cube, and he solved it in three seconds,” Patrick says.
In November 2015, he posted the song, Ocean Eyes, to Soundcloud and watched as it started to find an audience.
Finneas enlisted a manager he knew, and Eilish began talking to record labels. In many stories, this is where things would begin to break apart, where the prospect of money and fame could have ruined everything. If they had been friends instead of siblings, they might have fallen out. A romantic couple might have broken up. But Finneas and Eilish, who grew up close and were still stuck living together, had almost no choice but to carry on as a team. Finneas accompanied Eilish to meetings, and they’d talk about it on the way home. They had a management team invested in their joint success, which helped. But if they’d had different representation? Finneas doesn’t even want to think about it.
That a team of A-list writers and producers was not brought in to oversee Finneas — or get rid of him entirely — is remarkable. In a darker timeline, Eilish, having used Ocean Eyes to land a label deal, would have gone off to make her debut album with Max Martin, while her brother, the musical Rubik’s cube-solver, went back to uploading tracks to Soundcloud in his childhood bedroom.
“In the alternate reality where I wasn’t involved at all, and I’d been like, just, sweating my way through, trying to have a music career for years? And then my sibling had one and I wasn’t involved at all? I think I’d be very tortured by it,” he says.
He’ll be with Eilish when she tours the world this year, working on his own album in his spare moments.
While it’s not something he takes for granted, the longer they work together, the more it feels to him like a partnership that could last. Eilish might take a bigger role in the production of her work going forward, he thinks. Everything else they’ll figure out as they go along.
“It’s me being of service to whatever she needs,” he says. “Whenever duty calls, I say, ‘Yep. Let’s go.’” The Washington Post