“I’ll probably be backstage making her third album anyway you know,” he says.He would have been a contender for the support act slot. Not only does he write, record, produce and play with Eilish, he is also the artist known as Finneas, and releases his debut solo record Optimist on Friday. O’Connell’s greatest challenge after crafting the sound of a generation is to not repeat it with his own solo work.If Eilish’s genre-defying pop has defined the sound of now, O’Connell’s solo music is more rooted in the traditions of the 70s singer songwriter. He couldn’t resist the temptation to add a dash of his postmillennial production wizardry to his solo work, incorporating the vocal autotuning everyone loves right now on the single The 90s. “I do have a real strong desire to never make music for myself that sounds like Billie’s music,” he says.“The last thing I want people to think when they hear my music is ‘Oh, he’s just making the same kind of s**t as a sister and Billie already exists, so we’re just going listen to her’ you know what I mean? “I want you to come to two completely different places when you’re listening to what I do. “So even a song like The 90s is still sonically very different than something Billie and I would make together.” The O’Connell siblings have shared the high and lows of chasing dreams and catching them since they uploaded their first bedroom banger Ocean Eyes to SoundCloud in November 2015, when Billie was 13 and he was 18. They were side-by-side as they walked the red carpet at the James Bond premiere in London last week in celebration of their Grammy-winning theme song No Time To Die, right in the centre of that crazy circus which erupts when Hollywood and British royalty collide. “I’m sort of weirdly present when I’m meeting people like the royal family at the Bond thing,” O’Connell says.“I’m in my body being there at the moment, making sure I’m not saying something weird or looking in the wrong direction or something.” O’Connell addresses the realities and contradictions of winning the music lottery on his album with the song Happy Now?The songwriter explains it is less about the downsides of fame as it is about how everyone expects you to feel when you achieve success. But having witnessed the heightened level of his sister’s fame, O’Connell says it is not for him. He acknowledges the privileges afforded by success, the restaurants and meeting your idols. His experience is friendly fans wanting a photo because they like his songs or work on Eilish’s record. His sister is chased by packs of paparazzi and definitely cannot go to the supermarket. “People who don’t listen to her music or like her music at all still want a picture with her just to prove they’ve seen her like sighting Bigfoot in the woods. And that’s dangerous because that’s where you’re not treated like a person, you’re treated like an animal in the zoo or something,” he says. “I’m not as famous as the most famous people, I’m not as famous as my sister or some of our friends and I think there’s a level of fame that I truly would never want to dip my toes into.” The 24-year-old hitmaker is awe-inspiringly prolific. Besides writing and producing dozens of songs with Eilish, in just the past two years he has credits with Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez, Camila Cabello, Halsey, Tove Lo and Kid Cudi. His rules of thumb for which song goes where is simple. If the lyric is personal, it’s his, if Eilish would sound better singing it, it’s hers and if someone else asked for it, its theirs. “The truest answer is I don’t necessarily know it’s mine, but the ones that I end up releasing are very personal generally which means that no one else could have them. They’re about my life and I’m including really personal details,” he says. “Lonely, that I co-wrote with Benny (Blanco) for Justin, that was his life story … so it could never have come out if he didn’t want it. “And When The Party’s Over, which I wrote for Billie, it was pretty ambiguous, it could have been about anyone.“Billie’s voice is so much better than my voice, so I’d always rather she sing everything instead of me. But sometimes I write these like deeply personal songs, and I’m the only one that can do it.” While he already has that tour booked to Australian with his sister next year, there will be a separate visit to perform shows in support of the Optimist album. “This is leaked information but we are working on Australian dates; I can’t wait to get back there.”Optimist is out now.
Source: Sun Herald
