Rewrite
Production virtuoso, supportive brother, love-sick protagonist — Finneas O’Connell’s timepiece has many faces. Now, the Grammy Award-winner covers Wonderland’s Winter 24 issue, reflecting on the climate at pop culture’s summit.
For Finneas O’Connell, 2024 has been a triadic triumph. He reached new production heights on his sister Billie Eilish’s third studio album—the incandescent and ambitious HIT ME HARD AND SOFT, which has been nominated for Album of the Year at 2025’s Grammy Awards. He spent several months writing the score for Alfonso Cuarón’s Apple TV+ mini-series, Disclaimer, after being personally invited by the multi Oscar-winning director to steer the compositional reins. Oh, and not to forget—the 27-year-old also shared an album of his own, For Cryin’ Out Loud!, in October this year, a rewarding and resonant work that feels like a significant step towards fully establishing his solo sonic ethos. And I thought I’d been busy.
Despite this assembly of achievements—and the giddy elation and towering pressure that they must bring—when the 10-time Grammy and two-time Oscar winning polymath logs onto a morning Zoom call from his LA home studio, he’s a paragon of composure. He multi-tasks profusely throughout our conversation, tapping away at a keyboard out of the camera’s lens, only really moving his hands away to occasionally slick back his floppy head of auburn hair. By now, Finneas is well practiced in the art of being profiled. He has been particularly active in press circles around his new album, exposure he’s “feeling good about,” and has often accompanied his “wildly famous” sister for interviews throughout her rise to Pop’s apotheosis. He’s been “a public person for about seven years now,” but “the spotlight isn’t so much what I’m looking for,” he says. “It’s just an extension of that I’m a musician by trade. To me it’s like a furthering of some sort of self-expression. It’s not so much like, ‘It’s my turn!’ It’s just that I want to express myself and do these things that I enjoy doing, that I’ve always loved doing.”
His own notoriety is put into perspective by that of his sister. Finneas and Billie share a distinctive bond that spans creativity, professionalism, familial love and friendship. The pair grew up in Los Angeles, the epicentre of entertainment, which “on an ergonomic level, the fact that we were here and we didn’t have to move to be in the music industry [was] such an epic win.” Raised by parents who were actors and musicians but “definitely not stage parents,” a prosperous career in the arts for their children, on reflection, may have felt predetermined. “I wonder if they felt that,” Finneas muses. “They definitely supported us every step of the way and made it an easy, achievable dream and I’m very grateful for that. But I wonder how it felt to them. I wonder if they felt like it was some absolute thing that was gonna happen. It’d be interesting to ask ‘em.”
In the back half of the 2010s, Billie Eilish became one of contemporary music’s biggest stars. Her trio of full-length albums—2019’s WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?, 2021’s Happier Than Ever, and this year’s HIT ME HARD AND SOFT—are all peerless, zeitgeist-shifting œuvres respectively; cogs in the construction of Billie’s ceiling-less musical dynasty. Finneas has been at the helm of all three of the LPs, presenting his eclectic skill palette, razor sharp commercial nuance and profundity of song-smithery for the global industry to gawk at in adoration. “We’ve both gotten more practiced,” he says of the pair’s evolving dual process. “I’ve made lots of albums now and she’s written lots of songs and so we’re not as daunted by the task of making an album.
She’s gotten more and more confident as a writer, as a creative, and that’s been a wonderful experience. I feel like she has more and more ownership over these albums—not that she ever didn’t—but I think she really has a lot now. As time has gone on we’ve both felt more creative respect for each other. Now if I have an idea and Billie feels really strongly that it should be a different way, I’m like, ‘Okay, I trust you.’ And vice versa. I think she trusts me 100 percent more than she used to.”
Finneas’ monumental success as his younger sister’s producer is mirrored by the quiet augmentation of his own musical endeavours. Beginning to share solo work on streaming platforms in 2016, the same year as Billie, his sound has always felt unpredictable and unassuming; a slow burning limited series to Billie’s big budget cinematic extravagance. His broad sweeping and kindly conventional 2019 debut EP “Blood Harmony”—that featured his early breakout hit “Let’s Fall in Love for the Night”—was followed in 2021 by a debut full-length, Optimist. “I’d been making music pretty steadily and having a great time doing it,” he reflects on his decision to share an inaugural album under his stylistically capitalised eponymous moniker. “And then during the pandemic I think I was just like, ‘Alright, it might be time to make this piece of music.’ I didn’t overthink it. When you’re a collaborator, and you work on other people’s music all the time, it’s a really good feeling to make something that feels like it’s your own and you have control over. If I was making an album with you and it was you singing every song, you’d be in control. You’d say, ‘I don’t like the way that you’re playing that guitar part’, and I’d have to change it. That’s how it works—you’re like a gun for hire. And so to make something that feels like you have total ownership over it is a really positive experience.”
To read the full interview, pre-order the issue now.
Photography by Chris Noltekuhlmann
Styling by Anton Schneider
Words by Ben Tibbits
Fashion Assistant Lily Noelle Rogers
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Production virtuoso, supportive brother, love-sick protagonist — Finneas O’Connell’s timepiece has many faces. Now, the Grammy Award-winner covers Wonderland’s Winter 24 issue, reflecting on the climate at pop culture’s summit.
For Finneas O’Connell, 2024 has been a triadic triumph. He reached new production heights on his sister Billie Eilish’s third studio album—the incandescent and ambitious HIT ME HARD AND SOFT, which has been nominated for Album of the Year at 2025’s Grammy Awards. He spent several months writing the score for Alfonso Cuarón’s Apple TV+ mini-series, Disclaimer, after being personally invited by the multi Oscar-winning director to steer the compositional reins. Oh, and not to forget—the 27-year-old also shared an album of his own, For Cryin’ Out Loud!, in October this year, a rewarding and resonant work that feels like a significant step towards fully establishing his solo sonic ethos. And I thought I’d been busy.
Despite this assembly of achievements—and the giddy elation and towering pressure that they must bring—when the 10-time Grammy and two-time Oscar winning polymath logs onto a morning Zoom call from his LA home studio, he’s a paragon of composure. He multi-tasks profusely throughout our conversation, tapping away at a keyboard out of the camera’s lens, only really moving his hands away to occasionally slick back his floppy head of auburn hair. By now, Finneas is well practiced in the art of being profiled. He has been particularly active in press circles around his new album, exposure he’s “feeling good about,” and has often accompanied his “wildly famous” sister for interviews throughout her rise to Pop’s apotheosis. He’s been “a public person for about seven years now,” but “the spotlight isn’t so much what I’m looking for,” he says. “It’s just an extension of that I’m a musician by trade. To me it’s like a furthering of some sort of self-expression. It’s not so much like, ‘It’s my turn!’ It’s just that I want to express myself and do these things that I enjoy doing, that I’ve always loved doing.”
His own notoriety is put into perspective by that of his sister. Finneas and Billie share a distinctive bond that spans creativity, professionalism, familial love and friendship. The pair grew up in Los Angeles, the epicentre of entertainment, which “on an ergonomic level, the fact that we were here and we didn’t have to move to be in the music industry [was] such an epic win.” Raised by parents who were actors and musicians but “definitely not stage parents,” a prosperous career in the arts for their children, on reflection, may have felt predetermined. “I wonder if they felt that,” Finneas muses. “They definitely supported us every step of the way and made it an easy, achievable dream and I’m very grateful for that. But I wonder how it felt to them. I wonder if they felt like it was some absolute thing that was gonna happen. It’d be interesting to ask ‘em.”
In the back half of the 2010s, Billie Eilish became one of contemporary music’s biggest stars. Her trio of full-length albums—2019’s WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?, 2021’s Happier Than Ever, and this year’s HIT ME HARD AND SOFT—are all peerless, zeitgeist-shifting œuvres respectively; cogs in the construction of Billie’s ceiling-less musical dynasty. Finneas has been at the helm of all three of the LPs, presenting his eclectic skill palette, razor sharp commercial nuance and profundity of song-smithery for the global industry to gawk at in adoration. “We’ve both gotten more practiced,” he says of the pair’s evolving dual process. “I’ve made lots of albums now and she’s written lots of songs and so we’re not as daunted by the task of making an album.
She’s gotten more and more confident as a writer, as a creative, and that’s been a wonderful experience. I feel like she has more and more ownership over these albums—not that she ever didn’t—but I think she really has a lot now. As time has gone on we’ve both felt more creative respect for each other. Now if I have an idea and Billie feels really strongly that it should be a different way, I’m like, ‘Okay, I trust you.’ And vice versa. I think she trusts me 100 percent more than she used to.”
Finneas’ monumental success as his younger sister’s producer is mirrored by the quiet augmentation of his own musical endeavours. Beginning to share solo work on streaming platforms in 2016, the same year as Billie, his sound has always felt unpredictable and unassuming; a slow burning limited series to Billie’s big budget cinematic extravagance. His broad sweeping and kindly conventional 2019 debut EP “Blood Harmony”—that featured his early breakout hit “Let’s Fall in Love for the Night”—was followed in 2021 by a debut full-length, Optimist. “I’d been making music pretty steadily and having a great time doing it,” he reflects on his decision to share an inaugural album under his stylistically capitalised eponymous moniker. “And then during the pandemic I think I was just like, ‘Alright, it might be time to make this piece of music.’ I didn’t overthink it. When you’re a collaborator, and you work on other people’s music all the time, it’s a really good feeling to make something that feels like it’s your own and you have control over. If I was making an album with you and it was you singing every song, you’d be in control. You’d say, ‘I don’t like the way that you’re playing that guitar part’, and I’d have to change it. That’s how it works—you’re like a gun for hire. And so to make something that feels like you have total ownership over it is a really positive experience.”
To read the full interview, pre-order the issue now.
Photography by Chris Noltekuhlmann
Styling by Anton Schneider
Words by Ben Tibbits
Fashion Assistant Lily Noelle Rogers
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