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...
