Finneas O’Connell is the youngest person to ever win a Grammy Award for Producer of the Year, Non-Classical. Rising to fame as the producer for, and collaborator with, his sister, Billie Eilish, he has also gone on to work with such artists as Nicki Minaj, Selena Gomez, Justin Bieber, Kid Cudi, John Legend, and Ringo Starr. Only 27 years old, he’s already won ten Grammys and been nominated 17 other times, while also winning two Academy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards. Having started out recording hits in his suburban bedroom, Finneas has proved that records can be made anywhere. His solo album, For Cryin’ Out Loud!, came out in 2024.
The spaciousness of your recordings is striking. You’ve said you've gotten more minimal as time has gone on. Customarily, a lot of people do the opposite. The more tracks that become available, the more that are filled.
That is true. As a fan and an audience member, I've always loved when I can identify what's going on. I know so little about visual art, but it’s a little like when you see a painting and you can tell what it is but there are only seven lines. There’s a kind of magic in our relationship to our brain and a piece of art like that. It’s almost like a Rorschach test, seeing all of the things that are between the lines. I've always tried to think of music as a kind of parallel. From a musical perspective, you give everything all this oxygen, right? Especially with Billie’s voice, I noticed right away when I started to produce music for her – it’s like being in a messy room and pushing stuff off the carpet to clear a space. I wanted Billie’s voice to have this three-dimensionality in a song – something you could see if you closed your eyes. The only way I could do that was to carve all of this space out, so the less stuff that was I putting in there, the better. Sometimes saying, “Less stuff,” is maybe being self-effacing, since there might be 35 different synths and drums. But they're all blended, they're soft, and they've got this ‘verby thing going on. But I feel that, as I've gotten more experienced as a producer, I know what thing is going to go the extra mile. It’s about being super discerning. I'd get a good kick sound years ago by combining four different kicks. I'd have a kick with a lot of top, a kick with a lot of low, and whatever. As time's gone on, now I’m going to search through until I get a kick drum that hits exactly how I want it to hit, and then I'll let the subs in the bass do the rest of the legwork. So, yeah, I have been “guilty” of doing less and less on the production side. I think we start to notice, as we make music for a longer time – and you've obviously been making records longer than I have – but we start to notice the stuff that dates our records, that are like watermarks. And sometimes those things can be cool. But sometimes those are what I'm trying to avoid. Especially if it's, “Oh, this is the ‘hot new’ synth sound of 2021.” In the moment, that's going to make me feel so good. But six months later, I'll think, “Shoot… I should’ve used a synth that wasn't so trendy.”
Instead, use a vintage synth that used to be trendy. You’ve said in the past, “The less gear you have, the easier it is to make music.”
That sounds like good advice for somebody starting out. Probably me saying that was a defense mechanism for the fact that I had no gear at the time. [laughter] I was just having this conversation with Annie Clark of St. Vincent [Tape Op #134]. She produced the album that she recently put out, All Born Screaming, entirely alone. It’s super good. She was asking the other day, “How do you not go down a rabbit hole while you're writing a song if you're also the producer?” I replied, “Well, I know I don't have the one right answer to this, but I do think that the song comes first.” An example of a bad use of time to me would be: I start writing a little song – say I have two lines – and then I start doing some production. I start figuring out drums for it, because I get inspired. And then I spend seven hours on a kick drum because I'm haunted by it, I want it to be perfect, and I get the kick drum sounding so good. It sounds perfect on those two lines. Then I go back in, and I write a terrible song. Of course I might write some bad songs. I’ve written many. But if I can write a bad song before devoting hours of production time into my bad idea, that is smarter. So, I try to think about it from that perspective. I have producer friends who are so much more technically savvy than I am about any gear – old analog synthesizers, analog plug-ins, or whatever. They’re so much more technically skilled, and they’ll get distracted by something that is so not making the song better. I have spent many hours in studios with producers where they're off on a tangent. I'm saying, “Guys, this chorus is bad.” [laughs] This would be a great time to bail on this idea instead of pumping it through $20,000 worth of outboard gear, and saying, ”Hear how much it shines?” No, the lyric’s still bad, dude. [laughter] I do find it helpful – as an exercise – to be in a room with an acoustic guitar and write as many songs as I can and see how compelling I can make all of them. But the flip side is that when I was first starting to write songs, I had endless inspiration playing an open G-major chord on an acoustic guitar. Once you've written 40 or 50 songs with that big, open G-major, you might start to hear the material you've already written underneath it. It might not inspire as many melodies any longer. Sometimes, as I enter a period of my life where I'm thinking, “Oh, I'm writing the 180th song I've ever written” – or whatever it is – I'll occasionally pick up this weird little synth that I don't know how to play. I'll play a melody or a rhythm that I wouldn't have been inspired by when I was just sitting there at a guitar or piano.
Neil Young has said that he’s amassed so many guitars because he knew every time he bought one, he'd get at least one song out of it.
[laughs] Nice! That's cool.
Do you still write the majority of your songs on physical instruments?
Yeah. Probably most songs I've written in my life are on piano, and second to that on guitar. It still keeps yielding. It's such a great collaborative thing if I'm thinking about my relationship, writing with Billie or any other artist. To be there and be reactive – the human, organic quality of that. If Billie starts to slow down, I slow down right with her. If she wants to change keys, I modulate with her. It's a fast and effective way to accompany another person.
Analog and happening in real time, with immediate, unmediated flexibility. You’ve said that you don't ever Auto-Tune Billie’s vocals for the sake of fixing. If it's a little bit off, you don't correct it?
This is true. But I do Auto-Tune my own voice a lot. Oh, well! [laughs] But, yeah, Billie has such great pitch, and she does all this cool glissando, ornamento. Auto-Tune doesn't rock with that super easily. Also, I find it is much harder to judge when it's your own voice. I just finished For Cryin’ Out Loud!, and there's Auto-Tune on some of the songs, but then there's not on other parts. But I was listening to one verse, and I was so tormented by being pitchy on this one note. Then I thought I was pitchy on this other note. Until, “Oh, my god, this is all driving me crazy.” I got up and finished my work for the day. But later I was listening to some Beatles’ songs, and I realized, “This vocal is so pitchy, but the song has made me cry every time I've ever heard it. It probably doesn't matter if it's perfect.” That's the twofold thing with Billie – she’s an amazing singer and has amazing pitch. If there are moments where it's not exactly on the cent, that's probably great. Some of the music that I’m the most disturbed by is the most quantized, tuned, and cut up. There's, obviously, this whole side of electronica and cool club music that is synthetic; that’s sick, dirty, and awesome. But I find that what I’m least moved by is some pop artist singing over drums and keys where everything is quantized. That’s the music that bums me out. I'm not usually bummed out by an emotional vocal performance that gets a little pitchy. That usually delights me!
I’ve heard that you even use real handclaps.
[laughs] Yeah, so true, dude! I'm trying to think of what I use that is not real. I have a piano in my studio, and it sounds great for most piano parts. But there are times where I want a really harsh piano, and I don't have the acoustic one for it. The piano in my studio is the one that's been on [Billie’s] "What Was I Made For?” and other songs. There are songs where I need a jangly piano, and those are fake. But yeah, I like a part that's “less good” because I was the one who played it. I play all of the shakers and tambourines, and sometimes my tambourine playing is pretty bad. But it’s cooler to me to have a whacky tambourine than an amazing loop that I pulled from some library.
You incorporate what could be called Foley in a lot of your recordings. This is interesting, given your background working in film as an actor when you were growing up. You’ve even used recordings of your sister having her teeth drilled at the dentist. Was that a handheld Tascam DR-05 [portable digital recorder]?
Yeah, the origin of recording those sorts of sounds was on the Tascam. To be honest, I found the Tascam prohibitive enough that, over the years, I've graduated to just an iPhone. An iPhone has stereo microphones, but it doesn't record in stereo when you're using the Voice Memos app. So, all you have to do is take a video of it and then strip the audio off, because the iPhone records the audio for video in stereo. That's my hack for getting sounds on an iPhone. But, yeah, sometimes I've gone to look for a specific sound because I think it's so incredible. I want a specialized microphone to be picking that up, which the DR-05 is really more appropriate for. Oftentimes, I'm just looking for something textural – something that is interplaying with five other elements. It doesn't need to be “the best” recording ever of somebody knocking on a door.
You often send songs to the mixing engineers, pre-compressed and pre-panned. Are the reverbs printed and everything pre-mixed?
Yeah. We used Jon Castelli [Tape Op #136] to mix Billie's last album [Hit Me Hard and Soft] and my recent solo album. Rob Kinelski did all of the records before that. They're both great, super-talented mixers. I’m an avid YouTube wormhole person. I watch all those Mix With the Masters, as well as any self-uploaded tutorial video. Anything to always keep learning. I don't want to ever discount work that I know Rob and Jon both have added; they’ve made creative choices, and done cool reverb throws that are on the more inventive side of mixing. Maybe what I feel I desperately need is the balance and the math of it. My relationship to listening to music – the profile of my ears – is I want too much bass and not enough treble; that's the way that listening to a song all day sounds good to me. I listen really loud, and it's high bass, low treble. I often rely on a mixer to amend that, and to even it out for other environments. I always say, “The rough mix I did for my car is the one I want to listen to.” Oftentimes, the mix that’s done by a great mixer is jarring for me in my environment. But then, as we've been lucky enough to experience, if you heard a Billie song in an elevator or in a hotel lobby and it was like my mix, there would be a disaster. [laughter] But Jon's mix is more balanced and sounds great, whether it’s right after a Bon Jovi song or right before a Sabrina Carpenter track. That, to me, is one of the values of mixing. I think a lot of that's been dumped on mastering, but there’s more of that balancing work that should be done in the mix rather than the master.
I read about how on the song “8” from Billie’s debut album [When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?] that the kick is off-center. And they wanted to place it center, but then you wanted it panned back off-center again.
That sounds like me. [laughs] But I do think that the drums on that song are really cool. Part of the thing that's cool about that song was it was vari-speeded. We shifted it up a couple of semitones, and we took everything with it. We took the drums, the subs, and warped it all. That was a fun, fun way to do it. But in some ways, I've tried as of late to dive back into the real mixing side of it. When I have somebody like Jon or Rob doing a mix, it's a little “fix it in post.” To be honest, sometimes that's a real luxury for me. If my job is to produce a lot of songs in a year, doing a great mix of a song – especially for somebody like me who's not a professional mixer – is going to take many hours. If it's the difference between many hours spent mixing a song or sending it to a person I trust a lot – and I get to work on a new song – there are pros and cons to both. But in the last couple of months, I have been trying to hone in on my personal mixing skills, just for the appreciation of it. I’ll hear a great mix by another band, and I’ll think, “This is a great, knocking mix, and I want to get me some of that!” But the whole fun of being a producer is, “How’d you get that sound?” I've been dealing with it a lot this album cycle with our music director for Billie’s tour. He’ll send me a text, “What's the synth for the transition from the first half of ‘Bittersuite’ to the last half of ‘Bittersuite,’ so that I can have the synth guy play it.” I'm thinking, “Oh, dude! You can’t. It's a crazy little toy that I ran through an aux cord and then ran through a plug-in. Then I distorted it and reversed it. It's not playable – it's all fucked-up and crazy.” I’m not doing all of that for the sake of being complicated, but it does bring me satisfaction and pride that I'm not saying, “Press #2 on the thing. It’s a plug-in.”
You’ve done a lot of recording with just one mic, yes?
[laughs] So true. Yeah, mics are really versatile. I've been doing a lot of live recording the last year. I did my latest album almost entirely live, and I did another new album that'll come out next year, basically live. And, oh my god, you need a lot of mics if you're doing live tracking! But if you're two people in a room, you’ll do the guitar and then some vocals. The idea that you would need more than one mic is just untrue. You can have them and experiment to get cool sounds. But one mic is totally all you would need, in many cases.
And the Audio-Technica AT2020 was your original favorite mic.
It was my first microphone. [laughs] This is such an example of the digital age: I bought the microphone – it was 80 bucks. I probably saw it on some forum, “What's a good beginner microphone?” So, I got it, but it has an XLR out. I knew what XLR was, but I had this mic, and I was like, “How the fuck do I plug this into my computer?” I was Googling, “How to plug a mic into a computer?” After an hour of poorly-worded questions, I finally discovered, “What's an audio interface?” I found the cheapest audio interface, which I think was a Focusrite Solo. I saw a demo of it on YouTube, and I bought it for probably 90 bucks. I had my AT2020 running into my Focusrite, and I was off. We did Billie’s song, “Ocean Eyes,” on that mic. But that mic is just cheap enough that with a voice like Billie’s – which again, at the time, was very soft – to gain that mic up enough we’d get all of this high-end hiss. That bummed me out, so that was the first time I thought, “I need to upgrade.” [laughs] That mic probably would still slap on a rock band vocal. That would probably sound awesome, but on a quiet voice it was not powerful enough. So, I got a [Neumann] TLM 103, and we used that for Billie's EP [Don’t Smile at Me] and first album. This is all in the journey of how much you have to fix things. Then we got successful; the album had blown up, and I was having a recording studio built – which I'm still in the process of right now. For all intents and purposes, it’s just a room that sounds good to record instruments in. It's nicely treated, but it's just one room. It doesn't have a vocal booth or anything.
Right. An open room.
I did a mic audition with Billie. The guy that was helping me build the studio, Blake Douglas, is Jack Douglas’ [Tape Op #90] son. I asked Blake, “Can I rent a bunch of these great mics and do a test with Billie?” We did a blind audition; we used Neumanns, Chandler REDD mics, and Telefunkens with no plug-ins. She liked the sound of the Telefunken [ELA M] 251, so we've used that one ever since. It's an awesome mic. I've given Billie a recording setup at her house, because she's gotten better and better at engineering. She asked, “What mic should I get?” I said, “Well, you should get a TLM 103, because the 251 will come with all sorts of learning curves.” But, again, it's a little bit back to the thing we've been talking about – the less you have, the easier it is to make music! She still calls me every couple of days, saying, "It’s not turning on.” I’ll say, “Restart the computer.” [laughter] But a basic setup avoids most of the problems that I've had to troubleshoot over the years with more elaborate gear.
You often do the vocals with little vocal reverb, keeping it intimate and dry.
Yeah. When I do use reverb, it’s usually Valhalla DSP's Room, VintageVerb, or their Delay.
I've heard that you all play very quietly on stage.
[laughs] Well, Billie sings really quietly. With Billie’s thing, we don't have the luxury of any form of [monitor] wedges onstage. And also, she’s running around everywhere so why have something more for her to trip over? She sings really quietly, so everything is all backstage – amps, etc. – and our drummer is behind this big plexiglass shield. It is quite quiet. If you stand side stage, you will hear the audience. We even have an area on the side of the stage where you can wear headphones to hear the band. It’s a quiet, quiet footprint.
What are your favorite headphones?
I use the Audio-Technica ATH-M50x. Those are my headphones of choice, since they are the only ones I’ve found that have enough low end to mix well with.
Do you still use [Apple] Logic to track?
Yes.
And for plug-ins?
The Spectrasonics Omnisphere and Logic’s built-in Quick Sampler are probably what’s used most. Soundtoys EchoBoy gets a lot of use as well.
One of the things about your work that struck me from the beginning is that it's so rare to hear something of such quality in the mainstream. The only thing I could compare it to was when Nirvana’s Nevermind came out. Such rare cases affirm what I've always believed, which is that most people who listen to mainstream music do it passively. But if you give them something of high quality, they recognize it.
Well, first of all, that’s huge praise. Thanks! Nevermind is a very important album to me. Nirvana’s small but spectacular catalog is special to me. I heard something – however apocryphal it may be – that Frank Ocean, an artist who is very important to me, his favorite artist is Dolly Parton. That exemplifies the whole thing. I hear so many young artists sounding like Frank Ocean. They have a voice in that register, and they have their producer make productions that sound like Frank’s productions. They're trying to copy Frank. But I'm thinking, “But Frank Ocean is trying to copy Dolly Parton and isn’t.” That's why what he’s doing is so new and cool. That story is maybe wrong, but that’s what I was told.
I've heard that you have a little recording setup you take everywhere you go.
Yeah. I don't carry it around L.A. But on the road, yes. It's a little green Pelican case, and inside it's got a TLM 103 and a pop screen. I’m a big pop screen guy! There’s a Universal Audio Apollo Arrow interface – which are now called Solos. I like those because they're bus-powered interfaces. Oftentimes I’d plug my laptop into a power outlet in a Best Western and then plug the audio interface in and it sounds terrible. But if I have a bus-powered interface, I’m avoiding all of the buzz. I’ll have my laptop and audio interface, and I can record anywhere – as has been evidenced many times over. When we did the James Bond theme song ["No Time to Die"], we recorded the lead vocal in the backstage green room in Dallas or Houston while Billie was on tour. There was too much electrical buzz, and there were too many people walking by and workers vacuuming. We went down into the garage of the arena and sat in the bunk on the tour bus. It was just the bus-powered interface, the laptop, and Billie holding the mic. I put the mic on a stick [laughs] – like the short piece on the top of a boom stand – so she'd have something to hold on to.
That went on to become a worldwide smash, as well as winning an Oscar and a Grammy.
Yeah, I just tried to do the recording as accessibly as possible.
You work largely visually and cinematically, and writing for each artist in what you’ve said is their own “vernacular,” a way of almost creating characters to tell stories. It’s apparent how you can do that with a family member, but how do you do that with somebody you don't know or have just met?
It's a little bit on them, because they have to be super forthcoming with me. That's how I feel. Billie and I are so close and have been for many years. We know the tapestry of each other’s lives so well that on a day where she doesn't feel like saying much, I know the backstory and I can ask an appropriate question, and we can get somewhere. If it's an artist that I am unfamiliar with, or I've only spent one day with, yeah, the onus is kind of on them to come in and give me a bunch of gasoline. Especially in the pop space, I find that sometimes with a pop star – in addition to the fact that they’re a great singer and a great performer – oftentimes their superpower is that they can walk into a room with a stranger, like me, and they can articulate their heartbreak in such a clear, powerful way. Then we sit and we craft it. In terms of having everybody have their own signature, one of the ways that I do that as a producer is to sit and wait for them to point the needle on the compass in the direction to go. And then I am of service to that. I can't compare it to other producers, but when I first started to be a producer in rooms with artists, I wanted to be useful so bad. I wanted to feel like I was doing my job. I wanted to feel I was helpful to the artist. And I would, accidentally, be overbearing. I'd give too many suggestions. I'd say my line idea too quickly. I still will say a line idea quickly if I feel confident in it, or if I want the artist to have a response to it. You know, the classic songwriting technique: “Well, not this, but maybe something kind of like this?” But as I've gotten a little deeper into it, what I try to do is watch the other person start to run, and then I try to keep pace. That sometimes means that writing a song takes a little longer. Sometimes it can even mean that it goes faster, and I had less to do with it. All of that is fine if it feels more like the authentic work of the artist that I'm just the guest of. 
