FINNEAS Answers The Internet's Best Questions

Hi, my name is Finneas,

and this is the Wired Complete interview.

[upbeat music]

These are questions from Reddit.

Not usually a place I look up myself on.

This is from Yin_Nyang.

Am I the only one who feels as though Finneas,

Billie's brother, does not get enough credit,

or they both should be seen as a duo?

I've seen the comment before,

so you're not the only one, but I disagree with you.

I think that I get more credit

than almost any producer deserves.

I get so much credit, and it's purposefully not a duo.

I think that what you think of as an artist

is more than just the music that is written

and recorded in a studio.

It's the live performances,

and it's the visual representation of that artist,

and it's how they move through the world and their fashion.

And those are all really entirely Billie.

We sit around together making albums,

and then she dreams up these great

album covers and music video ideas.

And even when I used to play every show with her,

she's out there commanding the room.

I'm just trying not to [bleep] up the bassline.

But yeah, I'm very happy with how it's all panned out.

I'm having such a better life

than I thought I would have. [laughs]

It's really great.

WhydYouTrustMe: What genre of music does Billie's

'Chihiro' fit in?

I'm very genre illiterate,

so you'd have to tell me what genre Chihiro is in.

What it felt like to me when we made it

was it felt synthy and cinematic.

And I've seen a lot of videos of people

running through fields in slow motion

on TikTok to that song, and I'm like,

That's exactly what you're supposed to feel like doing

when you listen to that song.

[Interviewer] Do you remember how the bassline came about?

♪ Take my love away ♪

Yeah, I played it, but to explain it,

I'm a better pianist than I am a bassist by a mile.

To use this guitar as a reference,

like the bass is the first four strings of a guitar.

But if you play a bassline,

you're playing these little, [bass playing]

and you might play little octaves to pop it on.

[bass playing]

And you can make it sound pretty fun.

But on a piano, those notes are all laid out right here.

And so I loaded up a synth bass patch,

which sounds very realistic.

It sounds like a person playing bass really well.

And then you play it, hopefully, in a melodic way.

And I played this crazy bassline

that kind of meandered through the whole song,

and I felt really good about it,

and I thought about rerecording it,

but I thought the tone was so cool,

and I'd already recorded Billie's vocals and stuff,

and I was like, Why am I trying to fix

something that isn't broken?

U/AwesomeAus01: Do you think it is okay to use AI programs

or song generators to write and produce music?

I have never talked about this in an interview,

I don't think, and so why not talk about it?

I grew up the beneficiary

of all of this music technology, right?

Like I always say that Logic Pro,

which is what I produce music on, was like 700 or $800.

And right when I was saving up to buy it,

they made it like $200, and so suddenly, I could afford it.

And then you go in Logic,

and there's built-in synth sounds, and there's loops.

And I didn't record a real drummer

for like the first six years of my career

because it's expensive to record real drums.

So I think about AI not through,

candidly, I've never used it.

I've downloaded the apps to see what's up,

and I've been confused, and I've deleted them.

Like that's my current relationship with it.

But if I were broke again and 17 again,

I would be figuring them out, and I'd be figuring out

how to get something juicy out of them, I think,

because it's free, so I don't want to sort of poo-poo

a thing that I think is accessible to everybody.

And if it inspires you, I think that that's cool.

But I think that having ownership over,

like I didn't invent, [piano chords playing]

I didn't invent those chords.

A million times, those chords have been played

by a million different people,

but I'm playing them right now.

Here I am playing them.

And if I make a mistake,

it sounds kind of cool.

And I think that if I was relying too heavily

on thinking up an idea, by the way,

I'm not thinking about what I'm playing.

I'm just on the keys.

I know the shapes.

[piano chords playing]

But I'm not premeditating this.

And I think that the premeditation

being the key ingredient to AI is I'm dubious about,

because I think that always having to think

about what you wanna hear

would not inspire me, to be honest.

So if you find a way for it to inspire you, that's awesome.

But then do you feel like you made it?

[light music]

Radix69: How did Billie Eilish's 'Ocean Eyes'

accelerate her into popularity and fame?

Well, funny you should ask, Reddit.

Billie and I loved listening to music on SoundCloud,

and we started making music,

and then we started uploading it to SoundCloud,

and Ocean Eyes was the third thing

we uploaded to Billie's SoundCloud account.

And then people started texting me the next day

that it was on a blog called Hilly Dilly.

And at the time, it was this very big buzzy music blog,

and Chad Hillard wrote this little thing

about how much he liked Ocean Eyes.

And then that was enough momentum

to like draw more attention to SoundCloud,

and then other people saw it from that,

and then other blogs wrote articles about it,

and people played it on the radio and stuff.

It was amazing.

And I said to Chad,

I finally met him and took him out to dinner to thank him

for kind of giving us a career, and I was like,

like, Nobody even followed us on SoundCloud.

How did you hear Billie's song?

And he was like, Somebody posted it on a Reddit thread.

And I was like, What Reddit thread?

And he was like, I'll never reveal my secrets. [laughs]

And I was like, Lame, [laughs] but whatever.

That's where Chad heard it was from some Reddit thread.

So thank you, Reddit shitposter, for taking a break

from whatever strange thing you were posting to be like,

I like this song.

It's very cool of you.

AnitaRangel is how I'm reading this.

Creative folks of Reddit, what's the weirdest

or most unexpected place you've ever had

a creative idea hit you?

I've woken up with some ideas that have all been terrible.

I have some really embarrassing,

'cause I wake up, and in my dream, the idea was fantastic.

And so then I wake up and I grab my phone

and I record into it, and I go back to sleep,

and I wake up again and I'm like, This sucks.

[Interviewer] Have you heard Paul McCartney's

origins of Let It Be?

I haven't heard Let It Be.

I know about Scrambled Eggs.

[Interviewer] Oh, he dreamed it.

He dreamed Let It Be?

Dreaming maybe [indistinct].

He's a better songwriter than me.

I heard a really good Paul McCartney story,

which is my excuse to do my Paul McCartney impression,

which is that a friend of mine was at a studio in LA,

and Paul was in one of the rooms.

And so they're all taking their lunch break.

There's Paul McCartney.

And somebody was like, Can I ask you a question?

I'm trying to write a song right now,

and I'm feeling uninspired, and I feel like I'm not writing

the best thing I've ever written.

What should I do?

And he said that Paul was like, They're just songs.

And I was like, That's so cool.

FlimsyMango: What makes Frank Ocean music so unique,

and what can I learn from it as a producer?

I feel like very few people

I've been more inspired by than Frank Ocean.

I love his music, and I love his voice.

So many artists are influenced by Frank Ocean,

and I feel like you can tell

that they're influenced by Frank Ocean

because they sound kind of like an imitation of him.

And I heard years ago that his favorite artist

is Dolly Parton, and that's not who I would've guessed

was his favorite artist.

But it's such an example of how gifted a songwriter he is,

that he's absorbing things from Dolly Parton's music

without trying to copy Dolly Parton,

but he's taking those ingredients

and he is making them his own.

I was like, Oh, that's probably one of the reasons

that he sounds so unique is that he's able

to listen to something completely different

and make his own thing out of that.

This is from CharacterLog6775.

I wonder if that's the gate code to his house or something.

What is your favorite song from your newest album,

'For Cryin' Out Loud?'

I wrote a song about my sister on that album.

It's called Family Feud.

And that was important for me to write,

'cause it was like, at this sort of point in our lives

where we were no longer touring together all the time,

I was off on my own tours, and she was on her tours,

and it was really about her kind of going off into the world

without me and sort of saying good luck and being like,

You'll do things you regret and make mistakes,

and that's okay.

[light music]

DrChre. [laughs]

What is the one riff you wish you wrote?

So many great riffs I wish I'd written.

So many of these great riffs.

But Seven Nation Army comes on at a baseball game

or a grocery store, equal opportunity riff,

unbelievable riff.

And also, any riff that a crowd,

especially in a place like England, just sings.

That's sick.

That's really cool.

Singing the instrumental riff and not the vocal part.

Very cool.

[light music]

[laughs] AnxiousArtHoe.

What do you think about the Pitchfork ratings?

How much do you agree?

Pitchfork ratings are funny because I basically

am never thinking about agreeing with them.

I am just looking for the tall poppy.

I am just like, Damn, they gave that album a two?

That's cold.

And I'm kind of enjoying how mean the review is.

Or I'm like, They gave that album a nine?

That's ridiculous.

That album's fine, but it's not a nine.

And then if it's my own album,

I'm like putting my fingers in my ears and closing my eyes,

and I don't wanna know about it.

How about this?

Go look up some of your favorite albums

ever on Pitchfork,

some crazy scathing reviews

of the most important album of your life,

and you're like, Damn, okay, well then, never mind.

Because when you love something like that,

a review is not going to make you disavow it

and hate your favorite album.

Let's see.

/Terrible_Main_3379: Who's your dream collab as a producer,

dead or alive?

Very inspired by Elliott Smith's music as of late,

and I actually think the recording techniques

are pretty sick, even though they're very minimal.

It's very cool, double-tracked vocals

and really spooky guitar tones, and I love the drum tones.

So I think that what would be fun about that

as a producer would be just setting up those mics around him

and experimenting and trying stuff.

I don't think I'd have to do a big lift.

Songs were so cool.

[Interviewer] Can you give me an example?

Say Yes is so amazing.

First of all, I'm obsessed with song titles.

Best title for that song.

Say Yes, there's so many things in that.

That song could be called The Morning After.

There's so many things that that song could be called,

and Say Yes is the coolest title.

But he has that bridge thing.

[piano music playing]

Does a little spooky thing on the bridge.

♪ Turned around sooner or later ♪

So cool.

Very impressed.

This question is from VasoTheSerb.

How is the process of writing TV/film music

different than writing concert music?

Is film music easier?

Easier and also harder is my answer for it, right?

So what is easier about it is maybe the scene

is 45 seconds long.

What's hard about it is just making sure

that it's matching the emotion

of the scene correctly and the timing.

Oftentimes, if you're working to picture,

which I did a lot on the season of Beef that I worked on,

you gotta play everything to line up

right when the character says the thing

or turns to leave the room.

So that could be very challenging too,

but they make you better at the other thing,

which is why I keep doing both.

GirlInAura: What's an album you consider

a 10 out of 10 with no skips?

Honestly, The Black Parade by My Chemical Romance

is a no-skips album for me.

Yeah, I'll leave it at that.

How about this?

If I'm in the mood for that album,

I'm in the mood for the whole thing.

That was all the questions that I was allowed to answer

within the timeframe that I'm here,

and I appreciate Wired for their time.

Have a good one.

[electronic music]