When it came to making his sophomore album, FINNEAS knew he needed a jam session. He was craving something that felt fairly organic and live. “I wanted to approach it to see if it would inspire something in me that I felt like I needed for this album,” he recalls during a stroll through New York City. “And it totally did."
And yet, FINNEAS knew it was a gamble to tackle his next project this way. “Sometimes you fill a room with players—and maybe you all get along great, but it’s not cohesive. Maybe you have, like, a guitarist who’s a metal guy, and you have a drummer who’s a jazz drummer, and that doesn’t really gel,” he explains. When it came to this particular jam session, everybody came from different backgrounds. It could’ve been a disaster, but FINNEAS admittedly “lucked out.” “The people that I invited gelled really well together,” he says with a gleeful lilt.
Despite the casual jam-session approach, the making of his second full-length effort, For Cryin’ Out Loud!, was “premeditated.” “I invited a bunch of my friends to the studio under the pretense that we’d be making an album,” he recalls. “Sometimes you make a thing with somebody, and only once it really takes shape do you think, ‘Hey, this might be this kind of a project.’ Maybe it’s an EP, maybe it’s an album. In this case, I was like, ‘I’m gonna make an album’—kind of willing it into existence.” For FINNEAS, the project culminated in a concise, expedited timeline. He and his collaborators began writing the record in March of this year, and it was fully done by the middle of July. The process was “especially very fast” for FINNEAS.
It makes sense that FINNEAS has become even more adept at the album-making process this time around. The LA-born multihyphenate spent part of his teen years in an alt-rock band called The Slightlys, with whom he played the Warped Tour in 2015, and has been co-writing and producing for his sister Billie Eilish since the start of her career around the same time. He’s also racked up songwriting and producing credits for artists like Selena Gomez, Halsey, Tove Lo, and Camila Cabello in addition to releasing two solo albums. In terms of accolades, he’s already taken home 10 GRAMMY Awards and earned 18 nominations. Not too shabby for a 27-year-old.
“A lot of what Billie and I have talked about is reinventing yourself several times over and feeling like who I used to be was authentic, but it might not be authentic to be that person anymore.”
Despite his ongoing collaborations, FINNEAS has been able to shift gears when it comes to his own work. “The albums I make with Billie would obviously never be the same without Billie present, so I don’t feel like I have to work that hard to make my record sound completely different,” he explains. Eilish, in fact, is going to start producing for other artists, which will be a departure from the work the pair do together. “I think the albums we’ve made for her have a lot to do with the chemistry of the two of us in a room together,” he explains. It’s been important for them, as close collaborators and siblings, to make sure they really understand how the other person is feeling. “From the outside, you’re seeing a person do all this stuff, and on the inside, they might be feeling completely at odds with it, whether it’s good or bad. So it’s really about just being as connected as you can be,” he explains of their dynamic.
For FINNEAS, the title of his sophomore album emerged from its title track: “a clean version of, like, ‘for fuck’s sake’ or something,” he explains. “That had a lot of appeal to me as a sentiment, and something I’ve been saying my whole life, and have had said to me my whole life by my parents.” It felt emblematic of the album’s theme—problem-solving in romantic, personal, and familial relationships. To FINNEAS, it was a “fun” way to approach the overarching ethos of the project.
Once he landed on the album title, FINNEAS played that initial recording for his team and day-to-day manager, who pointed out that it should be the first single. “It’s great to hear somebody affirm you, because it was the last song I wrote,” he says. “And oftentimes, the final thing you write becomes your favorite because it’s the newest.” It was helpful for him to know he wasn’t being “super biased” about the track.
When it came to the music video for the song, he recruited his real-life girlfriend, actress and influencer Claudia Sulewski, to star alongside him in the romantic clip. To him, working with someone so “talented” was just fun. “I heard Sabrina [Carpenter] say something about Barry [Keoghan] the other day. She was like, ‘I just wanted a really good actor to be in this video, and I happen to be sitting next to one.’ It’s a real luxury for me to be able to be like, ‘Hey, I have to have a love interest in this video and my partner in real life is a really good actor.’”
Not only did he enlist Isaac Ravishankara to direct the music video for “For Cryin’ Out Loud!,” but for all of the videos for this record. In fact, he prefers working with one particular person on a set of visuals so that they can have a creative rapport and ultimately he can trust their vision. “I really had very little to do with the inception of the video other than saying, ‘Here’s the things I don’t like about music videos,” FINNEAS says. “I don’t like when music videos are over-complicated. I don’t like when there are a million different setups. I like when they’re easy to understand and they make you feel more attached to the song.”
Unshockingly, the visual for “Lotus Eater” is rather straightforward. In it, FINNEAS is at a haunting fête with his friends and Sulewski, where he tends to levitate and fly across the room when he has the mic. Around the time the video was made, the lavish afterparties of the GRAMMYs and Oscars were on FINNEAS’s mind as he considered how they can ultimately elicit sentiments that recall an “identity crisis.” “All these televised awards are so intense, and suddenly you’re at a party and you’re still in your suit that’s usually a rental—you couldn’t even afford that suit, but you’re suddenly relaxed in a way you [weren’t before],” he explains. For FINNEAS, it’s been a strange experience competing against friends and peers at awards shows. “[There] was a period of time where Billie and I both were questioning a lot about who we are. Like, what person am I really?” he recalls.
For the sound of his sophomore album, FINNEAS found comfort in familiarity, clinging to the musicians he’s always listening to like The Beatles, Gorillaz, Feist, and Cake. While he also listened to newer artists his friends would introduce to him, he admittedly didn’t find himself “super inspired” by them “outside of the fact that I love them.” “I wasn’t trying to emulate them,” he claims. To explain how he finds inspiration in other artists, FINNEAS recalls recently performing a cover of Radiohead’s 1995 classic “Fake Plastic Trees” at a festival, where everyone in the room was “jamming” to it in a way he loved. “I think sometimes when you have a song that’s a great reference point, it can be really helpful because you’re making sure not to rip it off,” he explains. “I don't want to copy it, but I want to try to make somebody feel the way that they’re going to feel when they hear that [song].”
That said, For Cryin’ Out Loud! is teeming with FINNEAS’s penchant for the pop craft as he leans into versatility. On the album is a sweet ode to sibling love (“Family Feud”), a jangly, Harry Styles–esque homage to unrequited love (“Cleats”), a sparse meditation on isolation (“Little Window”), and the aforementioned “Lotus Eater,” which takes the shape of a bouncy, ’80s-tinged love song. Like the album, FINNEAS’s career as a solo artist hasn’t had a typical trajectory. As he’s been working with Eilish over the past several years, he’s needed to carve out his own identity that’s felt true to who he is. “I think a lot of what Billie and I have done and talked about in the last couple of years is reinventing yourself several times over and feeling like who I used to be was authentic, but it might not be authentic to be that person anymore. Who I feel I am now is a different person, and coming to terms with that,” he explains.
“Sometimes I’ll be served an old interview of mine, and I’ll be like, ‘Damn, I disagree with this guy on almost everything.’ And it’s me a couple of years ago.”
While FINNEAS sees some of the same facets of himself in For Cryin’ Out Loud! and with his debut, he’s trying to be honest about his own self-growth. “Sometimes I’ll be served an old interview of mine, and I’ll be like, ‘Damn, I disagree with this guy on almost everything.’ And it’s me a couple of years ago.” While some people may be afraid they’ll “look stupid if they change their mind” about something, FINNEAS believes it just “reflects that you got educated” on a topic.
So it makes sense that for him and Eilish, civic engagement has been paramount to them—a way to help encourage fans not only to learn more about hot-button social and political topics like climate change and trans rights, but to vote. In September, FINNEAS and Eilish even endorsed the Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris. “I definitely feel strongly about the differences between candidate and party, and there’s a person running for president who has aligned themselves with things I care about and believe in—namely, climate change, reproductive rights, trans rights, and gun control,” he explains. “Those are all really important issues to me.” Because FINNEAS and Eilish both have such public platforms, it’s “natural” for them to share their political endorsement there.
“I definitely feel strongly about the differences between candidate and party, and there’s a person running for president who has aligned themselves with things I care about and believe in—climate change, reproductive rights, trans rights, and gun control.”
When considering his own future as an artist, FINNEAS sees himself as a multi-hyphenate à la Pharrell—someone who has a “diversified” resume. While he maintains that Eilish is his dream collaborator (“through and through”), he shares a deep admiration for another pop star on top right now: Sabrina Carpenter. “I really think Sabrina is not overhyped,” he explains. “I think she’s correctly ascending right now. Her music is incredible. She’s also a wonderful person. But I think the real mark of what I love about her music so much is how intelligent and witty she is in her songs. She’s proving that you can be really funny and really quick, and also make the biggest song of the year.”
Despite being in the spotlight alongside Eilish, FINNEAS doesn’t “feel particularly famous.” Still, he’s been able to witness the ups and downs of fame being in her orbit. “It’s weird and inappropriate when a stranger shows up at your home. It’s jarring and scary to get chased down a block by somebody. But the fact that I get to travel the world and play shows where people come and sing along to my songs—it’s such an immense luxury that the downside has always seemed pretty fair,” he reasons.
FINNEAS’s new album is a testament to his personal career goals, which he admittedly has “very different expectations” for than what he and Eilish have achieved together. “I felt so lucky that those things all happened,” he begins. “I don’t imagine that that same meteoric thing will happen twice, but I don’t want to stand in the way of my own career.” Truthfully, FINNEAS’s only goal growing up was to open for a band that sold out the Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles. Everything beyond that has been “pretty dreamy” to him.
Ultimately, FINNEAS is grateful for the career he’s “lucky enough to have.” “Maybe it’ll be small, maybe it’ll be medium,” he says. “But I want to really work for it.” FL
